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Yellowknife loses out on national ballet Katherine Hudson Northern News Services Published Friday, January 6, 2012
However, the excitement has been quashed and replaced by disappointment as 2012 is not the year that the national ballet troupe will visit the city after all.It was unable to raise the $40,000 needed to make the four-day trek to and from Yellowknife with equipment, dancers and staff.
"Most of the students that are at our studio have never seen an actual ballet. It is disappointing," said Ball.
Instructor Kristin Vician said in the 22 years she has lived in the city, she doesn't remember a ballet company coming to perform.
"I was excited to go see it," she said.
Ball said NACC organizes outreach programs with its performers, allowing Yellowknife artists the opportunity to garner experience with the visitors as they travel.
"The beauty of living in such a small community is that you get one-on-one exposure to the company instead of just seeing them on stage," she said. "Most likely our students would have been involved."
Ballet Jorgen Canada - Canada's fifth largest ballet company was the one dance performing group scheduled for the 2011-2012 season from outside of the NWT.
Bengt Jorgen, artistic director and chief executive officer of the dance group, said the trip - scheduled for Feb. 25 - would have been the group's first visit to the NWT.
"We were really looking forward to start building the relationships there. We're pretty disappointed that we couldn't make this work," he said.
Jorgen said it came down to "dollars and cents."
The group was scheduled to come North about a year and a half ago, but it hinged a $20,000 funding request to the Canada Council for the Arts, which was rejected last October.
"Unfortunately, the cost of delivering programming in the Northwest Territories is substantially more than in other communities. We were not able to convince the federal government and the corporate sector up in Yellowknife and other parts to increase their support to allow us to deliver programming," he said.
Jorgen said the dance group was prepared to take a substantial loss - up to $20,000 - but could not acquire the additional $20,000.
He said the ballet was to be a major production: Anastasia, a full-scale classical ballet about the daughter of the last Russian tsar.
He said there would have been 16 professional dancers on stage and an additional eight or 10 dancers from the community.
"Wherever we go we try to ensure that we connect and have a broader impact so we try to work with local dance students, give them opportunities to appear in children parts in productions."
He said some dancers in Ballet Jorgen Canada have relatives in Yellowknife which would have made the trip extra special.
"We will find another way, but it was certainly a bit of a blow to us because we were really excited about going there. I guess it's a sign of the times that the resources are just much tighter. There's going to be a whole different level of effort required to bring the kind of large-scale productions up to the community that we hoped to be able to do."
Ball said her dancers will take away a different type of learning experience from the cancellation.
"It's not just mom and dad pay the bill and you travel around. It's a different learning experience for the students to see they were depending on this funding and they didn't get it and these are the consequences," said Ball.
NACC will be presenting Shack Tales by Pat Braden - a one-person show about a new generation of Old Town residents - instead.
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