Youngsters may register for classes between 5 and 8 p.m. 31, at Studio Move at 213 Northwood Way in Ketchum’s light industrial district.Ĭlasses are offered for children 4 years of age through high school.Īdult ballet will be offered Monday mornings at the Hailey center.įootlight Dance has been offering classes under the direction of Hilarie Neely since 1984.Ĭlasses include ballet, pointe, creative movement, jazz, hip hop, modern/contemporary and tap dance.Ĭlasses run through May with several performance and workshop opportunities. Teachers include Christina Arpp, Julie Ott, Melodie Taylor-Mauldin, Michele Minailo, Hilary Neely, Jen Simpson, Leah Taylor and Anne Winton.Īuditions for “Nutcracker” with Eugene Ballet will be held on Saturday, Sept. Parts are available for children ages 5 through high school.įor more information, call 20 or go to Beauty’ will be revived by Footlight Dance Centreīy Dana DuGan Bryn Downey, a senior at Wood River High School, will play Princess Aurora in Footlight Dance Centre’s “Sleeping Beauty.” Photo credit: Aubrey Stephens and Manon Gaudreau / Footlight Dance Centreįor 36 years, Footlight Dance Centre has brought dance to the youth of the Wood River Valley, culminating in one massive spectacular production every spring. Under the artistic direction of Hilarie Neely, “Sleeping Beauty” will be presented with 190 student dancers, at 7 p.m., Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, with a third show at 2 p.m. Sunday, May 12, at the Wood River High School Performing Arts Theater at the Community Campus, in Hailey.įootlight Dance Centre also presented Sleeping Beauty in 2004, with the lead part of Aurora danced by Christina Arpp Price, now part of Footlight’s ballet faculty. Bryn Downey, a graduating Wood River High School senior, will play Aurora in this production. She joined Footlight when she was about 8 years old. “Sleeping Beauty” is considered one of the most treasured of the 19th-century ballets. “The dances are so beautiful,” Neely said. “It’s a difficult ballet, with integrated dances for the seniors. I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring it back.

It’s very ambitious to do with young kids, exciting to see them step up and get there.” I needed strong leads, and the five or six grades beneath that. The New York Times wrote in 2016, “No other dance classic has a score so endlessly fragrant and varied. No other work has so rich an idea of what ballet theater can be.”īased on the Grimm Brothers’ version of Charles Perrault’s 18th-century tale “The Sleeping Beauty,” Tchaikovsky wrote his second balled in a whirl of intensity.

Its first performance was at the Mariinsky Theatre, in St. The classic fairy tale concerns a princess who is cursed to sleep for 100 years by an evil fairy. She can only be awakened by a handsome prince.

In this production, the prince will be played by Lem Reagan, an alumni of Footlight and now a theatre dance student at Boise State University. “He’s returning to dance the pas de deux with Bryn,” Neely said.

“It’s one of the grand ballet classics, a culmination of the entire story. Though a ballet, Footlight’s instructors created new pieces for this version of “Sleeping Beauty” to showcase an integrated performance of modern, jazz, tap and hip-hop. While Princess Aurora sleeps, 100 years goes by. To show that passage of time, the scenes will go from a swing dance and a 1960s’ jazz piece to 1990s’ early hip-hop, and ending with pop music from the early 2000s.

Footlight dance centre