A flock in the park New-to-city dancer excited to debut with RWB on Lyric Theatre stage in popular, decades-old summer tradition By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Tuesday, Jul. 23, 2019

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This article was published 22/07/2019 (1886 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sarah Joan Smith says she’s been “fully warned” about Winnipeg’s winters. For now, though, the new Royal Winnipeg Ballet corps de ballet member is trying to soak up her first Winnipeg summer.

Smith, 25, joins the RWB from the Kansas City Ballet. Her upcoming performance in Ballet in the Park, which runs 7:30 p.m. nightly July 24-26 at Assiniboine Park’s Lyric Theatre, will be her first with the company.

“The summer really is beautiful here,” she says over the phone before her morning rehearsal. “I’m trying to enjoy going outside and farmer’s markets and the Ballet in the Park thing is very cool because you don’t think of Winnipeg as being outdoor-ballet friendly.”

After learning Winnipeggers do everything outside, including eating multi-course meals on the frozen river in the middle of winter, it elicits an “oh my gosh.”

“It seems like the community really rallies around things here, including the company,” she says.

Ballet in the Park is no exception. The free, family friendly event has become a big draw, featuring food trucks, plenty of pre-show kids’ activities and, of course, dancing.

This year’s 93-minute program will be headlined by an excerpt from Septime Webre’s The Wizard of Oz, which was a smash hit for the RWB when it made its Canadian première in May. As Oz was a co-production between the Colorado Ballet, the RWB and Smith’s previous company, Kansas City Ballet, she’s stepping into familiar slippers.

“It’s fun because it’s a ballet I’ve already done before so it’s been fun to come to a new company and have everything be new, but have the repertoire be something that’s familiar,” she says. “I’m actually doing the exact same part — same spacing, same role.” (That’s Munchkin and Poser Lady, for the record.)

The Oz connection is actually what attracted her to the RWB, “so to have it be the first ballet we’re doing while I’m a company member has been full circle.”

Like Smith, RWB artistic director Andre Lewis also arrived in Winnipeg in summertime — June 1975. He’d just been accepted to the RWB School’s Professional Division, and Ballet in the Park — or Dancing in the Park, as it was known back then — was only three years old.

“I had been taking class and, ‘Oh, the company is doing ballet in the park, you should go see this,’ and I thought, ‘Where the hell is the park?’” he recalls with a laugh. “In those days, they used to have to build the stage. It was a very small crowd in those days, very quiet. Today, it’s such a tradition. You can easily get 5,000 people coming to see the show.”

The idea of performing ballet outdoors captured Lewis’s imagination very early on.

“It presents different challenges for artists,” he says. “You have the sun shining in your eyes, there are bugs flying about. Mother Nature provides most of the lighting. I’ve always loved doing ballet in the park. When I was a dancer, I thought it was such a cool, different, neat idea.”

The event serves as a showcase for the entire company, including the Professional and Recreational divisions of the school, and it makes ballet completely accessible to diehard balletomanes and curious neophytes alike.

“I’ve never done a study of this, but there are lots of people who come throughout the season who also come to Ballet in the Park because they just love ballet,” Lewis says. “They appreciate how it enriches their lives. But you also have families that don’t necessarily come during the season but they come to Ballet in the Park or maybe Nutcracker. And then you have people who are biking around who say, ‘Oh, there’s a big crowd here,’ and they stop and watch the show.”

Lewis says the RWB tries to do something different every year at Ballet in the Park.

“We usually do very accessible work, but we’ve also done (2014’s) Going Home Star — Truth and Reconciliation, which is a fairly weighty work, but it also represents what the RWB’s about, what the community’s about,” he says. “Lots of people came, and lots of people appreciated it.”

This week’s trio of park performances will kick off the RWB’s 80th season. Smith is most looking forward to dancing in the Canadian premiere of Greg Horsman’s La Bayadère in October — indoors — when the season begins in earnest.

Like Oz, La Bayadère represents another full-circle moment for the dancer.

“It’s actually the first ballet I performed, ever, when I was 10,” she says. “It has a special place in my heart, and to have it be the first full-length ballet the company is doing this season is really neat.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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