Last year, Evergreen City Ballet’s performances of Fancy Nancy, Bonjour Butterfly sold out. It’s not so hard to see why. How many little girls do you know who love Fancy Nancy, would be thrilled to get dressed up in all their fanciest clothes, and would enjoy seeing pretty ballerinas dancing around like butterflies on stage? Lots? Yep. Me, too.
Fancy Nancy, the ballet, is a narrated performance that begins with the first Fancy Nancy book, and then follows the story of Fancy Nancy: Bonjour, Butterfly, culminating in a dance of the butterflies from the final scene where Nancy visits a butterfly garden.
This is the third year of “family performances” for Evergreen City Ballet, a dance company and school based in Renton.
“I know how incredible the whole book series is amongst little girls, so I felt good about putting it on stage,” said Evergreen City Ballet’s artistic director, Kevin Kaiser. “I never thought we would have gone into the Bellevue Meydenbauer and have sold out every single show … I was pleasantly surprised.”
This year, Evergreen City Ballet has scheduled additional performances in Bellevue, Renton and Auburn. If you make one of the shows at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, you and your little fancy one will get to meet the illustrator of the books, Robin Preiss Glasser, a former ballerina who took up the illustrator’s pen and brush after a recurring back injury forced her to retire.
The program also includes Dancing to Disney, a ballet set to such Disney classics as “Give a Little Whistle,” “Bibbity Bobbity Boo” and “Heigh-Ho” as well as variations from The Sleeping Beauty, which features more sophisticated pointe work. Altogether, the performances run a little over an hour.
The production of Fancy Nancy was a natural for Evergreen City Ballet. Kaiser, Glasser and the choreographer of the ballet, Mary LeGere, who also selected the music, all danced together professionally at Pennsylvania Ballet in the 1980s.
“We go way back,” Glasser said. “It’s really, really fun to see where we’ve all landed now that we’re … well, I won’t say we’re grown up yet, but we’re getting there.”
While Glasser went to New York to study art, Kaiser came back to his home state of Washington to dance with Pacific Northwest Ballet for 15 years.
Glasser, who was not involved in choreographing or staging the ballet, says, “All I did was show up, cry, and sign books afterwards.”
That’s pretty much what she’ll be doing again on Feb. 18 and 19 at the Meydenbauer Center.
“My favorite thing is that all the little girls that come to the show, come in their very fancy, Fancy Nancy best,” Glasser said. “Every possible accessory they have in their house – they’re wearing it all.”
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Source: http://www.seattleschild.com/article/fancy-nancy-back-on-stage
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