Uber-festival DancerPalooza is gearing up to take Long Beach, CA by storm July 21-26. Presented by Break the Floor, the week-long event features intensives--including the all new Aria ballet intensive--classes, tons of performances, and Beat Street (where vendors and dancers, both professional and aspiring, can meet and mingle.) The World Dances spoke with DancerPalooza co-producer Nikole Vallins for tips on getting the most from the festival, breaking into commercial dance, successful auditioning, and more.

What makes DancerPalooza special?

We're kind of setting a whole new bar for the idea of a dance festival. This is all about the next generation of dancers
--all kinds of dancers. Shows like So You Think You Can Dance have really changed the world of commercial dance. Commercial-contemporary dancers now have opportunities to do things they've never had the chance to do before. Even recently, your options were basically to either dance behind a recording artist or in a classical or contemporary company. We're proving that you can have other aspirations and helping dancers achieve those goals. It's the same with Shaping Sound. They give opportunities to dancers who may have grown up in the convention world to perform in a world-class professional company doing what they love to do.

How can dancers prepare to maximize their experience at DancerPalooza?

Get as much rest as possible because it's non-stop, all day every day, for that entire week. Taking care of your body is the main thing, definitely. That goes for dance teachers, too. We offer the option for teachers to observe as many different classes as they want. We have all these amazing teachers under one roof for the week. It's an incredible opportunity to learn from some of the best faculty in the world. If you come in with an open mind, there's so much to take in.

My biggest advice is to just to do it! It's a rather aggressive approach, but you have to take the shot. I think a lot of people postpone--they say they'll do it, then before you know it, it's ten years later and they haven't. Make the move! There's so much happening and there are always opportunities out here. You'll never know if you'll be successful until you show up and try.

Read more about how to make it in commercial dance here. 

    

This year, American Ballet Theatre premiered a new, historic (intentional oxymoron there) The Sleeping Beauty. The company's Artist in Residence, Alexei Ratmansky, poured himself into research of Marius Petipa's 1890 Beauty, created for the Maryinsky. As detailed in this New Yorker  article, Ratmansky discovered the original choreography was more complicated than most contemporary versions, with "more subtlety, more gradation, more in-between things, more of what visual-arts people call modelling." For costumes and set design to complement his revival's lush aesthetic, Ratmansky selected Richard Hudson, of Lion King fame, to capture the ballet's sense of opulence. "Scenic extravagance has always been a part of the allure of  "Sleeping Beauty," writes Marina Hass in this New York Times article. "Layered drop curtains denote fanciful Neoclassical interiors, airy rotundas, a formal garden, and an autumnal mountain vista. The drops were made in workshops in Milan, Turin, and outside of Venice, where the canvases were laid on the floor to be painted with giant brushes." What does it take to bring something like that to life on stage? The World Dances spoke with ABT Director of Production James Whitehill about the behind-the-scenes magic (and intense work!) that goes into mounting a ballet.

Is it challenging to learn to work with a new set like Beauty's?

There's nothing really hard that goes into learning how to deal with the materials. The materials from which the scenery is made are usually very similar to what we use all the time. It's the design and the complexity of the scene changes that dictate how easy or difficult the production is. We have to work very closely with the designers from Day One to help them understand what limitations our company has.

What are these limitations?

The limitations are set by things like how many trucks we have to be able to pack the set into, or what size its parts must break up into to fit in containers to be shipped internationally. We have to be able to put any ballet we've created into any of the variously sized opera houses around the world so that we're able to offer the ballet to different presenters in different cities. We have other restrictions based on schedule. Generally, we're given access to a theater Monday morning at 8 a.m. We usually open a full-length ballet no later than Wednesday that same week. That means we get Monday and Tuesday, starting with a blank slate in the theater. In that time we have to be able to move in: to lay the Harlequin Liberty panels and Harlequin Cascade on top of that, to install all the electrics, the booms, the lights, the dimmer racks, and the lighting console; and to hang all the parts of the show and build all of the scenery that lives on the stage deck. By Wednesday afternoon we need to be able to do a full dress rehearsal, which should--if we're lucky--run just like the show. Then we open Wednesday night.

What's your favorite part of your job?

Oh, when the curtain goes up--every single time. I love it when the audience applauds just for the simple fact that the curtain's gone up and they're looking at whatever it is that we just worked so hard to get up on stage. It never gets old. And at the end of the night, when the curtain goes down and everyone's applauding the entire experience, that's really special.

By Tamara Johnson