“I’m really trying to demystify ballet in a sense,” said Simone Orlando, artistic director and CEO of Ballet Kelowna. “We use ballet for a foundation for our training and all the work that we do, but ballet has really evolved into something quite different — I really want to show in the pieces that we’re bringing to Merritt and other communities across B.C. I want to ensure that what we’re doing is relevant to today.”

To that end, there are several different types of dances to be performed at the studio’s Boundless show, taking place at the Merritt Civic Centre on Feb. 9, and some are geared specifically towards youth.

Orlando’s own piece, Studies of Cash, is set to the music of the iconic musician, and “explores the ideas of confinement, both prison walls that are man-made, and ones that we construct ourselves,” explained the director.

“When I heard his interpretation of Ring of Fire, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to interpret some of these songs through movement?’” —Simone Orlando, artistic director and CEO of Ballet Kelowna

“The style is more contemporary ballet, so the dancers are not in their point shoes, the movement is more physical, it’s got gestural movements in it — there’s a brawl in one of the songs,” she said. “It’s a bit humorous.”

CLOSE TO HOME

There is a Merritt connection.

When Orlando and her mother were travelling from Vancouver to Edmonton in the middle of winter some years ago, white out conditions forced them off the freeway and into Merritt. Hungry and looking for food, they wandered into the pub at the hotel they were staying at, where it happened to be karaoke night.

“We ordered our food and we were listening to various songs and then this First Nations man, a patron, was sort of being urged to come up by a bunch of other patrons in the pub. He got up, sat down, and sang this amazing rendition of Ring of Fire. I had always been interested in Johnny Cash’s music, but when I heard his interpretation of Ring of Fire, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to try to interpret some of these songs through movement?’”

“I just felt that it was really, really important that we have someone there in the community that’s saying, look it would be so important for young people to see this.” —Simone Orlando

Orlando said she’s aware of the dance scene in Merritt.

“I was really excited when Lizette Nel, the owner of the local dance school, Love to Dance Academy, called me last summer and said, ‘I’d really, really love to see Ballet Kelowna come to Merritt. We have so many dance students in the community, it would be so great for them to see a performance by a professional dance company so that these kids can understand that they can have a career in dance, and get a little insight into the life of a professional dancer and the kind of performances that you do,’” she said.

That pushed her to get Merritt on the tour. They applied for and received a grant from the city to cover the cost of the Civic Centre rental, which Orlando said helped keep ticket prices low.

“I just felt that it was really, really important that we have someone there in the community that’s saying, look it would be so important for young people to see this.”

YOUTH-FOCUSED

Another of the pieces, commissioned by the studio from choreographer Matjash Mrozewski and composer Owen Belton, is geared specifically towards youth. Mrozewski spoke with Okanagan youth about the issues they felt were important, and Belton wove that audio into the music.

“The work that Mat’s created is very much about speaking to today’s youth, but you actually hear their voices in the piece, and then the Ballet Kelowna dancers are articulating these emotions and issues through movement,” said Orlando. “It’s incredibly powerful, and I’m really pleased to have something on our program that is very much for the young people.”

Those are the two anchors of the show, but there’s also a re-imagining of the classical Romeo and Juliet balcony scene set to the music of Prokofiev, as well as a piece called Glas, a study in the flow of a river.

She added that having so many vocal pieces in the programme would add to the performance.

“When you’re able to hear those words in conjunction with dance, I think it provides a way into the movement and the movement is often reflective of what you’re hearing in either the lyrics of the song, or in the case of the dialogue between the young people in Mat’s piece.”