Enjoy Family Day at the Portland Art Museum Nov 4th with OBT

Here’s all the details on this fantastic interactive art experience around The Body Beautiful in Ancient Greece Exhibition that will feature opportunities for kids to “kinesthetically explore” the exhibition’s artworks with the assistance of OBT’s teaching artists.

Behind the Scenes with Christopher Stowell

If you have already attended Body Beautiful, you had the opportunity to watch a brief pre-show video with some behind the scenes glimpses of what it takes to perform the 4 extremely diverse works on the program. We thought you might enjoy an encore look at the video, the first of 5 videos we will […]

Univision Interviews Candace Bouchard

We were delighted to have Portland’s Univision, the spanish language channel for the metro area, in to the studios recently to interview soloist Candace Bouchard about Body Beautiful. Check it out: Body Beautiful performs October 13 – 20 at the Keller Auditorium. Tickets start at $23, with Pay Your Age rates available. More about Body […]

A Dancer’s Final Pre-Show Weekend

Xuan Cheng and Lucas Threefoot pas de chat in rehearsal for Ekho, one of 4 works on the Body Beautiful program that opens Saturday. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert. Shows are coming up, and fast. It’s hard for me to believe that we have been rehearsing for five weeks already, but considering how last week […]

The Myths and Muses of Body Beautiful

This Jean Raoux painting from the 1700s depicts Orpheus and Eurydice leaving the underworld. In the back left you can see Hades (god of the underworld) and his wife Persephone, who have been charmed into granting Orpheus’ plea by the beauty of his music. A hero. A muse. A god. A nymph. A beautiful youth. […]

Becoming a God: Balanchine’s Advice to His Apollos

Ib Anderson as Apollo. From Balanchine: Celebrating a Life in Dance. Photo by Costas. What does it take to don the mantle of a newborn god? The role of Apollo has been coveted by dancers, in part because it was a role that Balanchine liked to rehearse himself, customizing the interpretation to suit each Apollo […]

Diving into the Details of Second Detail: A Dancer’s Perspective

This picture is of Lucas Threefoot and Xuan Cheng rehearsing for the Body Beautiful program. Photo is by Blaine Truitt Covert. The Second Detail is the kind of ballet that dancers love to dance. It’s a challenging, body-twisting, mind-bending, powerful ballet that requires constant attention to what is going on around us; I can’t think of […]

Learning Apollo from the Master: A Conversation with Francia Russell

Some ballets take time to develop their full character and others change the face of the art form the minute they premiere. Balanchine’s Apollo did both- evolving significantly over the first 20 years of its production history while consistently being hailed as the event that launched neoclassical ballet. It was the beginning of a deep […]

Building Ekho

Yesterday marked the first full day of construction on the John Grade designed “trees” that will become the forest for Christopher Stowell’s re-imagining of the Narcissus and Echo myth that will be the centerpiece of our season opening Body Beautiful program in October. These trees are constructed out of Tyvek (a material more commonly used […]

Daily Dance Break: Sneak Preview of The Second Detail

By far the most unusual and contemporary work on our October Body Beautiful program is the contemporary ballet work by William Forsythe entitled The Second Detail. Forsythe is known for the intricate patterns, symmetries, syncopated rhythms and complex spacial relationships in his work. Soloist (and recent contributor to the OBT blog) Lucas Threefoot described Forsythe’s […]