From Screen To Stage: Ballet Co.laboratory's THE SNOW QUEEN Dazzles With Heart-Melting Magic

During the pandemic, arts organizations did the difficult pivot from their usual staged, in-person productions to online offerings innumerable times - but how many times have they spun the opposite way? Ballet Co.Laboratory, whose mission pushes the envelope of the classical art form, takes their original sparkling holiday production The Snow Queen from screen to stage this winter.

A ballet initially made for film and viewed online in 2020, The Snow Queen will take The Cowles Center for Dance & the Performing Arts stage December 2-4, 2022, with expanded scenes and new choreography to transition the production from film to theatre.

"I was incredibly proud of our artists' embrace of the film medium during the pandemic, but we are thrilled to present this work live this season to celebrate Ballet Co.Laboratory's 5th Anniversary," says Artistic Director and Choreographer Zoé Emilie Henrot. "I am looking forward to bringing some of our "movie magic" to the stage, gifting audiences a live performance with a twist."

Ballet Co.Laboratory's ethos is in redefining traditional ballet narratives with characters and stories that relate to our world today. While based on a Danish fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, Henrot's version of The Snow Queen plays on themes of community and self-empowerment, helping characters feeling isolated grow to become the best versions of themselves. Beyond the standard good-versus-evil battle, Ballet Co.Laboratory's The Snow Queen gives characters layers, showing audiences that things are not always as they seem.

Even the music for The Snow Queen is perhaps not quite what it seems. At first listen, audiences unfamiliar with the late 1800s composer Ethel Smyth may think her compositions to be that of the well-known musician Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, composer of The Nutcracker and other classical ballets.

While from the same era as Tchaikovsky, Smyth's work unfortunately never reached mainstream audiences. Not only was she a female composer in a male-dominated art form, she also identified as a queer woman. Choreographer Zoé Henrot shares: "As a fellow queer woman, I can imagine how it felt for Ethel when her music was pushed aside. Even though we are performing this ballet more than 125 years after Ethel lived and worked, I think it is important to share a piece of her work that was undervalued at the time."

In a world often sown with pessimism, Ballet Co.Laboratory aims to surprise audiences with this heart-melting story. Along with beautiful music, costumes, and a cast of over 100 dancers, The Snow Queen reveals to audiences that there is good in everyone, even when you cannot see it right away. Ballet Co.Laboratory urges audiences to look a little closer. Like the first snowflake of the season, it might be right under your nose.

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