MASTERS OF DANCE Next Generation Ballet 62 TAMPA BAY MAGAZINE | MARCH APRIL 2017 DAA NR CTE T he Patel Conservatory at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa enriches the lives of more than 70,000 dance, music and theater students a year in schools, onstage and in the community. The Next Generation Ballet, housed within the Conservatory, is led by its artistic director Philip Neal, an acclaimed choreographer and dancer. Neal has taught at the famed School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center in New York and for companies such as the Miami City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet. The Next Generation Ballet, the official resident dance company of the Straz, is a pre-professional trainee program that helps outstanding young dancers develop their classical ballet skills in order to pursue a career in the art. Graduates of this program have gone on to acclaimed academies of dance throughout the world. On May 13th and 14th, Next Generation Ballet will perform a ballet program called Masters of Dance: Balanchine and Robbins plus Petipa’s Don Quixote Suite. Neal is one of the select few who has been invited to stage these iconic works by the Robbins and Balanchine Rights Trusts. Neal, who has not been onstage for seven years since retiring as principal dancer with the New York City Ballet in 2010, will perform the Ringmaster role in Jerome Robbins’ Circus Polka as Robbins once did. The piece features 48 girls dancing to Igor Stravinsky’s orchestration that was commissioned by the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. For George Balanchine’s Donizetti Variations, Ballanchine is said to have taken three hours of ballet and compacted it into a brief 25 minutes of extraordinary movement. The program will conclude with a production of the final act of Petipa’s Don Quixote Suite with sets and costumes that were created through a joint effort between the Alabama and Louisville Ballets. This show will be fun for the whole family. 9 EDITOR’S NOTE: Tickets for Masters of Dance at the Straz Center are available at the ticket office in Tampa, online at strazcenter.org or by calling 813-229-STAR (7827). Philip Neal
19701TB
To see the actual publication please follow the link above