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.
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. 
