Mid-Columbia Ballet: Increasing community exposure to ballet

The Mid-Columbia Ballet (MCB) continues to grow and prosper as can be evidenced by our sold-out performances of The Nutcracker. This past December, we celebrated our 40th year of bringing this holiday tradition to the Tri-Cities community. During those 40 years, the production has grown from a cast of dozens to one of more than 160 with an additional 300 volunteers working behind the scenes to make this production a magical event.

For more than 20 years, we have been presenting two special performances of The Nutcracker for local fifth-graders on the Monday following our public performances. More than 60,000 students have seen this production and we will continue to provide this educational experience to local students. And we have additional elementary education outreach programs through the local schools that introduce dance to children who may not have ever had the opportunity to experience a live performing arts event.

We travel to elementary schools to perform The Ugly Duckling in support of the school’s anti-bullying programs, and we offer The Science of Dance, an interactive program to teach the relationship between physical science and art.

We have had generous donors provide support for these educational efforts, and we are hopeful that our local schools will continue to invite us to share our art form and its educational value with their students.

We are best known as the organization that presents The Nutcracker, but our biggest challenge is finding ways to show the community that we are really so much more.

One of our main goals for this year and future years is to increase this community’s exposure to other aspects of the ballet art form — beyond the traditional Christmas story ballet that is so popular. One of the biggest obstacles to being able to reach this goal is the limitation put on us by the lack of an adequate performance venue.

While the Richland High School Auditorium seems to many to be adequate for our Nutcracker performances, the dressing room space is inadequate for our large cast, and we had to have our set specially designed to be able to accommodate the backstage limitations of the facility.

But even more importantly, in order to showcase classical and contemporary repertory dance works, we require a large stage area and a “fly system,” which is a system of ropes, counterweights and pulleys designed to allow a technical crew to quickly move set pieces, backdrops, and lights on and off stage quickly by “flying” them in from a large opening above the stage.

Unlike for some of the other performing arts, the technical elements to support a dance performance often consist only of backdrops and lighting design, neither of which is feasible at a professional level in our performance facilities.

Each year, MCB dancers perform at a regional dance festival, and in the past several years we have performed a number of works created by award-winning choreographers — works that we are unable to perform locally. We would love to be able to provide you the opportunity to experience our art in the same way that patrons of other communities have enjoyed.

Mid-Columbia Ballet has shown great progress in its ability to train young dancers and produce professional quality dance performances. We are striving to find ways that we can bring more frequent and more varied dance performances to the Tri-Cities community. But in order to do so, we need to have access to affordable and available performance venues for large family oriented productions such as The Nutcracker and our Storybook Series, as well as for productions of classical and contemporary works by outstanding and award-winning choreographers.

Having a performing arts center that would allow MCB to bring even more high quality dance performances to the Tri-Cities would be a huge benefit for all.

This story was originally published March 22, 2016 at 10:33 PM with the headline "Mid-Columbia Ballet: Increasing community exposure to ballet."