Sleeping Beauty 2007
Conejo Civic Ballet Company's Sleeping Beauty 2007 production was performed Friday, May 25, 2007 at 7:00pm and Saturday, May 26, 2007 at 2:30pm in the Scherr Forum Theatre, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza. The music for the ballet is by Peter Tchaikovsky and is considered his most mature ballet score. This production was choreographed by Brett Weidlich who worked tirelessly to bring to Tchaikovsky's music dancing that kept audience members enthralled from the opening bars to the finale measure of the curtain call. One ballet attendee remarked that the performance had "no dead time". And considering that this was not a 5 minute music video but an hour and a half long ballet in four acts, that is all the more remarkable.
Many people contributed to make this performance special. Besides our choreographer, Brett Weidlich, and the dancers of CCBC, special thanks goes to our artist director, Eva Pokorny, and Helena Pokorny, our talented Ballet Mistress and Performer. A special thanks to several of our instructors who participated: Lauren Smith as the Queen, Robert Loftin as Cattalabutte, Anzhela Martynova as Carabosse, Helen Pokorny as the Lilac Fairy, and Linda Lewis and Melisa Sutherland as Court Ladies. The talented teaching staff of Ballet Arts was essential to ensuring that the dancers were well prepared for this performance. Cindy Borbas spent many hours at local fabric stores gathering materials for props and headpieces and also provided invaluable help behind the scenes at both performances. Cindy and Marc Borbas also hosted a wonderful cast party that was enjoyed by many CCBC members and volunteers. Lastly, thanks goes to Robin Twarowski, Executive Director of CCBC, who garnered resources and had a hand in every aspect of the production.
A list of the program credits is extensive and highlights the number of people that worked on props, costumes, staging and rehearsals, so essential to creating a performance that comes alive. A full list of credits can be found on the electronic copy of the Program for the show.
We have tried to capture some measure of the excitement of this performance in the Storybook slideshow playing below, using photos from the Saturday performance. No amount of multi-media material can take the place of actually experiencing a live performance such as this one, but for those who were in the audience, I hope the photos will remind you of that exciting performance. And for those that did not attend, we hope to give a small glimpse of this magical ballet and the dedicated and talented members of CCBC who create that magic.
The photos were taken for CCBC by Ann Mathias and Harry Mathias and they did a superb job of capturing for us some of the exciting moments from this ballet. In fact from the hundreds of photos to select from, it was hard to pick just 24 or so to place in the slideshow.
Melanie Murphy took some backstage photos that we want to share with you. Melanie did a good job of capturing some of our dancers at moments that reflect the joy and tension of the performance. The slideshow will display either performance slides or backstage slides depending on the link selected in the sidebar under Slideshow. The arrow buttons change the pictures forward or back.
Video Clips
The video clips are displayed in a "flash" multimedia embedded viewer so you have to have "flash" installed on your computer. It is free and plays on almost all computers. The controls below the video image are play/pause on the left, the progress bar in the middle, the full screen control on the right of the progress bar, and the volume control on the right. Below the controls is the playlist with the scroll bar to the right. Run the scrollbar up or down and when you find the selection you want click on the title with your mouse. The title should play. On the far right of the title in the playlist is a control to let you download the clip if you wish.