Events

Messmer and Hanna Return to Star in Nutcracker

Simone Messmer and Stephen Hanna star in NHB’s The Nutracker. Photo: Thomas Giroir Photography (c) 2018

NHB is thrilled to announce that Simone Messmer and Stephen Hanna will return to star as the Sugar Plum Fairy and Cavalier in NHB’s 2018 Nutcracker!

Simone Messmer:

Born in Minneapolis, Minn., Simone Messmer began studying dance at the age of nine at Ballet Arts Minnesota. At 14, she continued her training at The HARID Conservatory in Boca Raton, Fla., and was awarded the Jeannot B. Cerrone Award for Excellence in Dance. At 16, she resumed her training at Ballet Arts Minnesota under the direction of Bonnie Mathis. Messmer participated in American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Intensive Program in 2001 and joined ABT Studio Company in that same year.

Messmer danced with ABT for over a decade, rising to the rank of soloist in 2010. While in the company, Messmer originated major roles in new works by Alexei Ratmansky such as Firebird, Symphony #9, On the Dnieper, as well as by Christopher Wheeldon and Benjamin Millepied. Her extraordinary range extends from Twyla Tharp’s Baker’s Dozen to Giselle’s Myrtha. Messmer was awarded the Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship in 2010.

Messmer joined San Francisco Ballet in 2013 performing principal roles in Balanchine’s Agon and Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, and Ratmansky’s From Foreign Lands and Chamber Symphony. Other major roles included “The Man I Love” in Balanchine’s Who Cares?, The Firebird in Passokov’s The Firebird, and appearances in works by Mark Morris and Liam Scarlett.

She joined Miami City Ballet as a principal in 2015.

Stephen Hanna:

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he trained under Roberto Munoz, Mr. Hanna entered the School of American Ballet (SAB) and studied with esteemed teachers Stanley Williams, Andre Kamervsky, and Richard Rapp. At SAB Mr. Hanna was awarded the Mae L. Wein Award for outstanding promise. Mr. Hanna became an apprentice with New York City Ballet in 1997, and later that year hey joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet. Mr. Hanna was promoted to the rank of soloist in February 2004 and in January 2005 he was promoted to principal dancer. He has performed principal roles in ballet by Peter Martins, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Richard Tanner, and Albert Evans.

Mr. Hanna has appeared in the movies Center Stage (2000), Disney Royals (2017), and Forever (2014), in addition to several Broadway productions, including Billy Elliot (2008), Silence the Musical (off Broadway 2011), On the Town (2014), An American in Paris (2015), and Hello Dolly (2017).

Henry Seth Master Class

NHB is thrilled to announce that Level 6/7/8 Students are invited to participate in a Master Class taught by former NYCB dancer, Henry Seth, on Thursday, October 11, 4:30-6:00 p.m. in Danspace, 70 Audubon Street, New Haven.

Thank You Daniel Ulbricht

New Haven Ballet wishes to extend a warm thank you to New York City Ballet Principal Dancer, Daniel Ulbricht, for teaching an amazing ballet technique class to Level 6, 7 & 8 students on Monday, September 24, 2018. We hope Mr. Ulbricbht returns to New Haven Ballet very soon!

NHB Kicks Off Annual Appeal

Yours sincerely,

Lisa Sanborn

Artistic Director

New Haven Ballet

Free Trial Class

You’re Invited… Come on Over!

FREE TRIAL CLASS for NEW STUDENTS through September 30, 2018

Call 203-782-9038 to reserve your spot. Space is limited.

AGES: All students ages 3+ are welcome in our dance classes!

DATES: New students may schedule a FREE TRIAL class any day that we offer classes for your age and class level

HOURS: Classes are offered through the week at our Branford and New Haven studios.

Click here for schedule

LOCATIONS: Click here for class locations

Click here for class descriptions ages 3 to 8 years

Click here for class descriptions ages 9 to 19 years

Click here for Teen/Adult Drop-in Classes (ages 12+)

$10K Matching Pool by Bank of America

Bank of America Charitable Foundation has committed $10,000 to a matching fund pool for performing arts organizations over the 36-hours of The Great Give®.  NHB is one of 46 that qualifies for the match! Unlike other matches from The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and the Valley Community Foundation, the Bank of America Performing Arts Challenge will pro-rate its funds by the number of donors, not on the dollars raised. Please help NHB win some of these funds by encouraging as many as possible to make a gift during the Great Give on May 1-2. 

NHB to see NYCB

NYC Ballet performs Coppelia. Photo by Paul Kolnik (c) 2018.

Level 6/7/8 students are invited to see New York City Ballet’s production of the beloved classical ballet Coppelia on June 2, 2018!

Students will also have the opportunity to participate in a technique class with one of the dancers from New York City Ballet in their studios at Lincoln Center. The fee is $215 per student. This includes: round-trip train fare, performance ticket to Coppelia, ballet technique class taught by a member of the New York City Ballet Company, and lunch.

NHB is thrilled to sponsor this once in a lifetime opportunity for Level 6/7/8 students. Space is limited. For more information and to reserve your spot contact: administrator@newhavenballet.org

Costume Fundraiser

Baby NHB ballerinas try on butterfly and firefly costumes for Beauty and the Beast

Dear New Haven Ballet Families and Friends,

If you’ve been around New Haven Ballet (NHB) recently, you’ll notice that the halls and studios are buzzing with excitement about NHB’s newest production: a full-scale Beauty and the Beast, to showcase the school performance on Saturday, May 19, at the Shubert Theater.

For this year’s school performance, NHB is breaking with tradition—and starting a grand new tradition—by putting all students, from Creative Ballet 1 to advanced level 8, into a gorgeous new production of a real ballet. For the inaugural year, Artistic Director Lisa Sanborn has chosen the beloved fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, with brand-new choreography, staging, and costumes.

A production that includes parts for piglets, butterflies, fireflies, sugar cubes, “chips,” roses, bluebells, napkins, and townsfolk—in addition to New Haven Ballet Company performing the roles of Belle and her court, Madame Armoire, Feather Duster, and Lumiere, and featuring former Miami City Ballet Principal Dancer, Jeremy Cox as the Beast —needs a lot of costumes, and busy hands at NHB are hard at work creating them. Unlike The Nutcracker, in which costume makers can build on the previous year’s costumes, our costume department has little on hand to work with for all the costumes we need—almost 100 piglet costumes alone! Our designers have a lot of imagination, though, and NHB families are eagerly helping with the work. But even hard-working volunteer costumers need materials to work with, and NHB will have to purchase cloth, tulle, bodices, masks, headpieces, and other components.

This year we are asking for your help to stock our costume wardrobe. Once we have built up our costume stock, we’ll have the versatility to re-use costumes in future productions—we won’t have to start all over again for each new production.

Please consider helping to deck out our fireflies and flowers and napkins and townspeople and sugar cubes—not to mention all those piglets!—and make Beauty and the Beast dazzling. The smiles on our dancers’ faces as they perform in a real ballet with real ballet costumes will light up the theater. And isn’t that what going to ballet school is all about? Thank you.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE

New Haven Ballet is a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization.

Lacina Coulibaly Master Class

Lacina Coulibaly will offer a Master West African/Contemporary Class on Wednesday, April 11, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m. for NHB level 6-8 students at the Whitney Arts Center, 591 Whitney Avenue, New Haven. Level 6-8 students are invited and encouraged to attend even if not enrolled in Contemporary class. Students are required to wear their class uniform. This is an incredible opportunity and honor for NHB students and we look forward to seeing you there!

Lacina Coulibaly –

Lacina Coulibaly was born in Burkina Faso. His professional dance career, deeply rooted in African traditional dances, later merged with European contemporary influences to create a uniquely African choreographic expression.

In 1995, Mr. Coulibaly created the Cie Kongo Bâ Teria with Souleymane Badolo and Ousseni Sako. Their creations, Frères sans stèles(1999), Vin Nem (2001) et Hydou Bye (2004) toured the world and won international awards, including the award of 3rd place at SANGA, les Rencontres Choréographiques for Vin Nem (2001) which toured more than 30 cities in Europe in 2002 and throughout the United States in 2004 on the Movement (R)Evolution tour.

The company Kongo Bâ Teria was recently featured in the documentary film Movement (R)Evolution Africa (2007), available from Documentary Educational Resources (der.org).

Mr. Coulibaly has danced and choreographed with other international dance companies, such as Salia ni Seydou, Faso Danse Theatre, and TchéTché and assisted Nora Chipaumire (Dark Swan) Urban Bush Woman. He has collaborated with individual artists, such as Emily Coates, Amy Sullivan, Wendy Jehlen, Kota Yamakazi and Seydou Coulibaly. He has also acted as a guest lecturer and artist in residence for Brown University, Yale University, New School, University of Florida, Cornell University, UCLA, Ohio State University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Barnard College, in addition to ECA in New Haven, EDIT, the Choreographic Development Center, and CDC la Termitière in Burkina Faso.

He is currently the artistic director of the Compagnie Artistique Hakili Sigi, associate choreographer to the project Engagement Feminine and guest lecturer at Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College.

Emily Coates Master Class

Emily Coates will offer a Master Classical Ballet Class on Thursday, March 29, from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m. for NHB level 6-8 students in Danspace, 70 Audubon St., New Haven. Level 6-8 students are invited and encouraged to attend even if not enrolled in Thursday classes. Students are required to wear their class uniform.

Ms. Coates is a former member of New York City Ballet and currently acts as the Director of Dance Studies Curriculum, Assistant Professor Adjunct of Theater Studies, Assistant Professor Adjunct of Directing at Yale University/Yale School of Drama. Please see Ms. Coates’ biography below. This is an incredible opportunity and honor for NHB students and we look forward to seeing you there!

Emily Coates –

Emily Coates received the School of American Ballet Mae L. Wein Award for Outstanding Promise in 1992 and joined New York City Ballet that same year. After six years with NYCB, she transitioned into contemporary dance. At the invitation of Mikhail Baryshnikov, she joined White Oak Dance Project (1998 – 2002), and subsequently performed with Twyla Tharp Dance (2001 – 2003), and Yvonne Rainer (2005 – present). Performing career highlights include three duets with Baryshnikov: Mark Morris’ The Argument, in Karole Armitage’s The Last Lap, and Erick Hawkins’ Early Floating, principal roles in works by George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp, Lucinda Childs’ canonical solo Carnation, Yvonne Rainer’s 21st century creations, and Christopher Janney’s solo HeartBeat, originally performed by Sara Rudner and later Baryshnikov. In her own creations, she tries to integrate whenever possible movement research, choreography, and writing. Her research interests include the aesthetics and evolution of postmodern dance and intercultural collaboration, focusing on two distinct areas: contemporary American and African dance collaborations, and interdisciplinary arts and science research. Between 2005 – 2009 she co-directed MIND (Motion in Dialogue) with Bronwen MacArthur, with whom she created four original dance theater works while in residence at Yale. Other past projects include Empty Is Also, created with Israeli sculptor and Yale School of Art graduate Tamar Ettun and commissioned by Performa 09 to critical praise. Since 2011, she has collaborated with violinist Charlie Burnham on a series of improvisations presented in the Vision Festival and at Jalopy in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and with French horn player and composer Will Orzo, most recently on a performance for the Take Your Time Series in New Haven, CT. She has been a resident artist at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where she was a Martha Duffy Memorial Fellow, Duo Multicultural Arts Center, and Jacob’s Pillow through its Creative Development Residency. Her recent projects include a multi-sited research project on intercultural collaboration undertaken with Lacina Coulibaly, an artist based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Their jointcreations include the development of a duet titled Ici Ou Ailleurs, performed in full or excerpted at Cornell, Harvard, Brown, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and in the Movement Research Fall Festival. Their second piece for a group of eight dancers, commissioned and performed by Ballet Memphis and titled Où Que Nous Soyons, premiered in Memphis , TN in February 2011. They are currently working on a third choreographic creation and a book project, developed in collaboration with scholar Brent Hayes Edwards. In the area of integrated arts and science research, she has collaborated with particle physicist Sarah Demers since 2011, first on a co-taught course at Yale titled The Physics of Dance, and now through co-authoring an interdisciplinary book on physics and dance based on the course, forthcoming from Yale University Press. Their project “Discovering the Higgs” was selected for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven’s Reintegrate initiative in 2012-2013. Their related science-art video “Three Views of the Higgs and Dance” premiered online in December 2013. Her essays have appeared in Theater, PAJ, Huffington Post, and Transformations. With Joseph Roach, she is co-editor of Theater’s 2010 issue on postglobal dance. Between 2006 and 2012, she served as the artistic director of Professor Roach’s World Performance Project at Yale. She graduated magna cum laude with a BA in English from Yale ’06 and holds an MA in American Studies from Yale ’11. Currently, she is an assistant professor (adjunct) in Theater Studies and director of dance studies at Yale University, where she has directed the dance curriculum since its inception in 2006.

Tickets on Sale to Beauty and the Beast

Tickets to Beauty and The Beast are on sale now at www.shubert.com.

Click Here for Tickets

Reserve your seats today for New Haven Ballet’s presentation of Beauty and the Beast at the historic Shubert Theater in downtown New Haven on May 19 at 1:30 p.m. Excerpts from Paquita and NHB’s outreach program, Shared Ability, will also perform.

Shared Ability 2018

WHAT: Weekly movement workshops for differently abled students

WHEN: Saturdays, February 24 through May 19, 2018

TIME: 4:30 to 6:00 p.m.

WHERE: The Community Foundation Building, Lower Level (LL), 70 Audubon Street, New Haven, CT

WHO: Differently abled students aged 10 to 26 years

FEE: $215 (Financial assistance available. No student denied based on inability to pay)