Kansas City Ballet Opens 51st Season With Two American Classics
and Kansas City Premiere
Trey McIntyre’s The Naughty Boy, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and Jerome Robbins’
The Concert complete Fall Program October 9-12 at Lyric Theatre

KANSAS CITY, MO (September 15, 2008) – The 51st season will kick off October 9 through 12, 2008, at the Lyric Theatre with the Kansas City Ballet premiere of Trey McIntyre’s The Naughty Boy and two rarely seen American masterpieces: Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and Jerome Robbins’ The Concert. The Kansas City Symphony, conducted by Music Director Ramona Pansegrau, will accompany these ballets. Music from the 2008-2009 season is available at iMix Tunes link on www.kcballet.org.

The Concert
Featuring the orchestrated and solo piano works of Frédéric Chopin, Jerome Robbins’ The Concert will open the Fall Performance. The Concert was last performed by Kansas City Ballet in the fall of 2004. The Concert features an ensemble of dancers.

The Concert, as described by Anna Kisselgoff of The New York Times, “is surely the most comic ballet of all time.” But even as The Concert gives audiences a laugh-out-loud dance experience, its true and deeper subjects are human dreams and yearnings, and the daydream fantasies music creates from the joys and miseries of their own lives. Dressed alike but distinguished by various hats, socks, vests, ties, and even by a cigar, people straggle into what might be a piano recital and set up folding chairs. The characters reveal themselves as the shy boy, the tough girl, two gossipy ladies who rummage in their handbags at inappropriate moments, a serious music lover, and a henpecked husband and his wife. Just getting the seating arrangements straightened out becomes a sidesplitting moment.

The Naughty Boy
The Kansas City premiere of Trey McIntyre’s The Naughty Boy is set to Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G and focuses on the romantic antics of four couples and a Cupid.

The dance showcases McIntyre’s confident, sassy, and breezy use of classical ballet. McIntyre is “one of ballet’s most surprising talents” (The New York Times). The Naughty Boy begins with a curtain drawn across two-thirds of the stage and Cupid wearing a whimsical orange coonskin hat and a fitted plaid jacket. Colorful paper streamers fly through the air, paving the way for Cupid to flee the stage, darting mischievously with a teasing smile. The movement expands as the couples entangle and engage under Cupid’s influence. The sprightly Cupid reappears throughout the ballet and cajoles the couples as he sees fit.

Rodeo
The Fall Performance will close with the lively Rodeo (Ro-DAY-oh), choreographed by the American master Agnes de Mille and set to the music of another American genius, Aaron Copland. Rodeo was last performed by Kansas City Ballet in the fall of 1996 and features the full company of dancers.

This love story of the American Southwest led to Ms. de Mille’s assignment to choreograph Rodgers and Hammerstein’s popular musical Oklahoma! De Mille herself played the lead in Rodeo at the Metropolitan Opera House premiere in October 1942. She received 22 curtain calls. This piece of pure Americana consists of five sections: Buckaroo Holiday, Ranch House Party, Corral Nocturne, Saturday Night Waltz and Hoe-Down. The story it tells is perennial: how a girl, with the odds seemingly against her, sets out to get herself a man. The girl in this case is a cowgirl whose comically desperate efforts to be accepted as one of the ranch’s cowhands create a dilemma for the cowboys and make her the laughingstock of womenfolk.

Sponsors
The Fall Performances have been generously underwritten in part by Midwest Airlines. Kansas City’s 2008-2009 season has been supported by the Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation, Hallmark Corporate Foundation, the Missouri Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the ArtsKC Fund, the Kansas City Ballet Guild, The Kansas City Star, 98.1 KUDL, and KSHB TV Action News.

About Kansas City Ballet
Founded in 1957, Kansas City Ballet is a 26-member professional ballet company under the direction of Artistic Director William Whitener and Executive Director Jeffrey J. Bentley. The company’s mission is to offer dance experiences of the highest quality to our community, region and profession. The Kansas City Ballet also is home to the Kansas City Ballet School for nearly 600 children and adults, offering professional training for the career-minded student as well as for those seeking a healthy lifestyle. Through our professional company, school and community outreach programs such as ROAD, Project X, and Dance INFORMances, we seek to nurture and develop our artists, audiences and students in the creativity, diversity and joy of dance.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

One Day Celebration Sale
Sale Date:  Friday, September 19 ONLY

October 9-12, 2008
Lyric Theatre
1029 Central
Kansas City, Missouri

The Concert                          
Jerome Robbins
Frédéric Chopin

The Naughty Boy
Trey McIntyre
Wolfgang A. Mozart

Rodeo
Agnes de Mille
Aaron Copland

Thursday, October 9             7:30 p.m.
Friday, October 10                7:30 p.m.
Saturday, October 11            2:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, October 12               2:00 p.m.

Footnotes (Pre-Show Talk)
Artistic Director William Whitener will give a pre-show talk one hour prior to each performance. Opening night he will be accompanied by Bart Cook, a stager representing the Robbins’ Estate, and Paul Sutherland, a representative of the de Mille Estate.

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