Snow White 2008
History
A ballet libretto for the well-known story of Snow White was written by Witold Borkowski and Stanislav Piotrowski following the Grimm's fairy tale. Bogdan Pawlowski composed a delightful musical score for the ballet which had its premiere performance at the Janacek Theatre in Czech Republic on May 30, 1973 with the choreography by Witold Borkowski. The ballet continues to be performed in Eastern Europe but remains relatively unknown to U.S. audiences.
Conejo Civic Ballet Company introduced the Southern California community to this charming ballet with choreography adapted from that of Witold Borkowski by Eva Pokorny, Artist Director of CCBC, and Brett Weidlich, CCBC choreographer. Snow White was performed in recital at Moorpark College Auditorium on May 29 and 30 of 1999. The first full performance was at the Scherr Forum Theatre, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on January 21, 2000 with a repeat performance on January 22, 2000. Snow White is now established in the repertoire of the CCBC and has been performed many times. Before our 2008 production, our last performance of this ballet was in 2003.
Conejo Civic Ballet Company's Snow White 2008 production was performed Friday, May 23, 2008 at 7:00pm and Saturday, May 24, 2008 at 2:30pm and at 7:00pm in the Scherr Forum Theatre, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.
Contributions
Many people contributed to make this performance special. Brett Weidlich, our gifted choreographer, revisited the choreography for Snow White and created a ballet for our current dancers. A special thanks to Ballet Arts instructors who participated in these performance, Linda Lewis and Melisa Sutherland as Court Ladies and Helena Pokorny as the Evil Queen. Allison Ramiller, a former student of Ballet Arts, traveled from U.C. Davis to join us in these performances as the Witch and we are grateful she could share her talents with us again. Ryan Hanson, no stranger to CCBC, traveled from Lancaster to rehearse and dance the role of Prince. A special thanks to Bianca Tartaglia, a student at Moorpark College and Ballet Arts, who originally was to dance only two of the three performances but ended up dancing all three and, by the looks of it, probably could have danced a 10:00 pm showing if we had one. Do not underestimate her endurance! 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 photo galleries accessed in the right hand column. The Performance photos were taken for CCBC by Harry Mathias and it was hard to narrow the couple thousand photos to a manageable number. The Backstage photos were contributed by Kathi Koenig who made them available to us for the webpage. We have changed the format of the slideshow presentation to a set of webpages that open in a separate window. Permitting javascript to run on your web browser is necessary to view these pages. The pages make take a moment or two to load so please be patient.
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.