We followed up on our preview by sending Vic to PlayhouseSquare Wed 7/1 to watch Michele Wiles and Jay Donn lead a workshop performance, the result of several days’ work with a group of dancers of various ages.
We saw what we had expected, the collaboration between a ballet dancer and a Flex dancer, but learned that more was afoot.
By starting time the huge Gund Dance Studio is full of people. Dance students young and old. Kids wearing their Boys and Girls Clubs T-shirts. A dozen adults sitting by the windows that look out on Euclid Avenue turn out to be Boys and Girls Clubs teachers and administrators. Another cohort of mostly older teens and young adults apparently signed up through their dance studios.
Jay puts on hip-hop music and the opening bars of each cut send an excited surge of recognition through the room. Michele leads a warm-up barre on one side of the studio. Jay leads another group through hip-hop pieces they’ve already learned. Group dances in unison. Chants. Call and response. Improvisational constructs in which Jay gives cues. “Go crazy!” “Electricity!” Then a line dance.
Meanwhile Michele and many of the ballet dancers have put on pointe shoes and dance along on pointe.
Then the students all sit in a tight audience formation and Michele and Jay perform a dance to baroque music. They meet and bow to each other. She bourrées. He bourrées. There is mimed conflict with Michele beating up on Jay. They take turns being amazing, Michele with some notoriously difficult fouettes; Jay with street-style acrobatics. There’s a mime section where Jay asks Michele to marry him but she politely refuses. A false finish; a coda; bows and applause.
As a one-off workshop performance, it was very nice, but we soon learned that it was part of an ongoing ballet program. We caught up later by phone with Matt Bott, arts director for Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland, and learned that there’s a grant from Forest City and a partnership between Ballet in Cleveland and Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland. This summer there’s an hour and a half ballet class twice a week at the East Cleveland club. They’ll be adding a second location in the fall and bringing in kids from around the city.
It all sounds admirably democratic and inclusive and it’s only one part of the extensive arts program at Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland, a program we hope to tell our readers more about soon. More about Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland here. More about Ballet in Cleveland here.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]Cleveland, OH 44115