News & Events

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)

WTNH News 8

Don’t miss the feature story by WTNH News 8’s Anne Craig about NHB’s The Nutcracker! Click Here to View

New Haven Tree Lighting

New Haven Ballet is thrilled to perform at the City of New Haven’s Tree Lighting Ceremony on Thursday, November 30, at 5:00 p.m. We hope you will join us on the New Haven Green to help celebrate this holiday tradition. Look for the performance to be featured on the 6:00 News on Chanel 30 NHB Connecticut. Additional festivities include an appearance by Santa, a petting zoo, and carnival rides. 

NHB on WTNH News 8

WTNH’s news 8’s Anne Craig visited with New Haven Ballet students to learn about all that goes into preparing for The Nutcracker. Ms. Craig’s story about New Haven Ballet’s Nutcracker will appear on Chanel 8’s News at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 30. Make sure to tune in! Click here for WTNH’s website.

Alejandro Ulloa Joins NHB Faculty

NHB is thrilled to welcome Alejandro Ulloa to our faculty.

Mr. Ulloa began his professional career in Managua, Nicaragua. Under the direction of Maestro William Herrera, Mr. Ulloa became principal dancer of Gran Ballet Quetzaltnahuatl, trained at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet, and then joined the Compañía Ballet de Nicaragua where he became a principal dancer. In 2010, he was invited to be part of the contemporary company Danza Contemporánea Universitaria UNAN-Managua. In 2012, Mr. Ulloa joined the Mystic Ballet located in Mystic Connecticut, where he danced principal roles choreographed by Sergei Vanaev, Brian Enos, Gabrielle Lamb and Lauren Edson, performed in venues such as: MGM Foxwoods Casino located in Connecticut, Jacob’s Pillow Festival in Lenox Massachusetts, APAP Festival in New York City, Bitef Theather and Terazije Theater in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2015, Mr. Ulloa and Maestro Herrera launched the first ballet and neoclassical ensemble in a Nicaraguan University and he became the Cultural Promoter for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua, as well as Director for the “Taller de Líneas Clásicas”. In this year he also became co-producer, teacher and choreographer for Compañía Ballet de Nicaragua and Gran Ballet Quetzaltnahuatl, as well as ballet and contemporary professor at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet de Nicaragua. Mr. Ulloa was principal dancer for the 40th and 45th anniversary of Teatro Nacional Ruben Dario- Nicaragua, as well as guest artist for the 50th anniversary of Universidad de Campeche-Mexico, the 20th anniversary of Fundacion Ballet de El Salvador, Gainesville Ballet’s “Carmen” in 2016 (Virginia- USA), Danse Etoile’s “Le Bayadere” (Costa Rica). He has performed with Connecticut Ballet, New England Ballet and Island Moving Company, taught for the Connecticut Ballet Center, Connecticut Theater Dance, Nutmeg Performing Dance Center, ballet master for New England Ballet and the New England Dance Arts, guest choreographer for the Connecticut Lyrical Opera. Mr. Ulloa was part of the” Art and science unite as psychological treatment in adults and youth workshop” developed by the Yale Hispanic Mental Health Clinic and was award in 2016 “Artist of International Projection of the Year” by the Nicaraguan Artist Association. Mr. Ulloa joined NHB’s faculty in 2017.

I-95 Billboard

Heading North on I-95 towards New Haven, look for New Haven Ballet’s Nutcracker digital billboard near the Kimberly Avenue exit! New Haven Ballet performs The Nutcracker at the Shubert Theater in New Haven on December 16-17.

Click here to purchase tickets!