A ballet to make you laugh

This weekend and next, legions of sparkling fairies and winged bugs as well as a tiny boy cupid will dance children’s roles in Oregon Ballet Theatre’s debut production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Shakespeare’s light-hearted and humorous tale of romantic misadventure is choreographed by Christopher Stowell, Oregon Ballet Theatre’s (OBT) artistic director, and is set to the whimsical music of Felix Mendelssohn.

Stowell is attempting to create a brand-new show that is especially accessible to even a novice ballet fan, said Linda Besant, the company’s dance historian. This ballet, which opens the 2007-08 season, should, Besant said, provide plenty of laughs for the audience.

“The story is a hoot–it is one of the greatest comedies in the English language,” Besant said.

Stowell has pared the performance down to just one hour, and starts the tale in a timeless setting: a garden wedding. The classic story of misguided love unfolds, and while partners are swapped back and forth between the slapstick action sequences, one man is transformed into a donkey.

Some of the more cumbersome elements of a traditional ballet have been removed, Besant said, to make the plot easy to follow. Stowell chose to use simple gestures to communicate the dancers’ feelings, Besant said, instead of the more classic–and sometimes confusing–pantomime seen in other famous ballets, such as Swan Lake.

Sandra Woodall, a well-known ballet costume designer, has worked with Stowell since mid-June to create scenes inspired by the old-growth forests of Oregon. A hike at Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center inspired many of the plants used as scenery. Giant renderings of maidenhair fern and wild rose will frame a dusky nighttime forest sky, and smaller trees on wheels will be spun around the stage by the youngest of the dancers.

Stowell grew up in the ballet world. He’s the son of Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, who ran Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet for 27 years. This ballet, he said, is one he is particularly fond of, and he recalls staging the ballet at home while playing as a young kid.

Two other brief ballets, titled The Germanic Lands, use the music of Mozart and Schubert. They will begin the program at The Keller Auditorium.

The first piece, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, by acclaimed choreographer William Forsythe, is set to Schubert’s Symphony No. 9. The music is fast, and the dancers will be pushed to the limit of their abilities, Besant said. Five men and women will be dressed minimally, with the women in tutus resembling three-foot wide flying saucers.

Besant said that many dancers call a role in Vertiginous “the most difficult chore they have ever undertaken” due to the relentless intensity of the choreography. Younger, rising-star dancers have been chosen for many of these roles, she said, to showcase their abilities.

“This is really their chance to shine,” Besant said. These dancers, she said, “are ready for the next big thing.”

The second opening piece will be Almost Mozart, created for OBT by James Kudelka in 2006. Much of the piece is danced in silence, punctuated with snippets of Mauerische Traurermusik (Masonic funeral music) and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major. Dancers move throughout the whole performance with hands clasped to one another, executing lifts and jumps as a unit, and restricting many of the usual spinning movements of ballet.

If you go…

Oct. 13, 19 and 20 at 7:30 p.m.Oct. 14 at 2 p.m.

Tickets start at $14, with discounts for students

Buy tickets at www.ticketmaster.com, www.obt.org or call 503-2-BALLET

Tickets are also available at the Smith Memorial Student Union box office