Tulsa Ballet used to have as its slogan, "Everything is beautiful at the ballet."
From a distance, maybe – as one sits in a theater seat watching a finished performance unfold on the stage. Then, yes, the ballet is all about beauty.
But beauty is only skin deep. And the beauty of dance hides weeks and months of intensive, often punishing physical effort of the sort that would reduce many athletes to tears.
Or profound embarrassment. That I've seen that happen, when Tulsa Ballet founder Moscelyne Larkin, then in her mid-60s, had a gymful of high school football players try to follow her every move. In 15 minutes, the football players were looking as if they were going to need oxygen and electrolytes force-fed to them. Miss Larkin hardly had a hair out of place, much less drew so much as a labored breath.
I've often sat in Tulsa Ballet's rehearsal studios, watching the dancers hone their performances of everything from "Swan Lake" to "The Four Temperaments," from Nacho Duato's highly charged abstract ballets to Amadeo Amidio's deconstructed version of "Carmen."
It's a unique way to watch people dance, with them moving so close to you that you wonder if someone is, at the end of a particular combination of steps, going to end up in your lap.
That experience – that closeness, that immediacy, that sense of being able to see both the veneer of beauty and see through it to the strength and toil needed to create that veneer – is what Tulsa Ballet artistic director Marcello Angelini wanted to recreate in the company's new performance space, Studio K/Kivisto Hall.
"That is one reason why I limited (the seating to) 300," he said. "We could have easily made this a 500-seat, or even 600-seat, theater. But you would lose that closeness to the dancers."
Tonight, the first audiences will get the chance to see what it is like to watch dance this closely, when Tulsa Ballet debuts its "About Tango" program. Three brand-new ballets, performed in a brand-new space, that allows the audience to have dancers almost literally in their faces.
It's a way of watching dance that never grows old.
