“I wish you could see this,” said Christopher Moses, associate artistic director of the Alliance Theatre, during a recent phone interview with ArtsATL. He was looking out his office window at the piazza below, where the Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre dancers were rehearsing their new children’s ballet production of Peter and the Wolf. “I love any opportunity to pull back the curtain and demystify the process,” he said. “The campus looks alive with those artists out there.” Children attending the High Museum of Art’s Toddler Thursdays are also drawn to the sight as they walk through the outdoor space, he explained.
By this measure, even before the first performance of Peter and the Wolf on April 30, this collaboration between Terminus and the Alliance, scored by musicians from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, is already a success.
The new contemporary ballet is part of the Alliance’s Toddler Takeover Festival, which returns to the Woodruff Arts Center after a two-year Covid hiatus. Moses described the event as a “complete arts festival, with visual and performing art and opportunities for art-making, designed for the youngest audience members.”
Not to be dismissed because it has been created expressly for children 5 and under, Moses said, Toddler Takeover comprises “unequivocally some of the most experimental and daring programming that the Alliance puts on in any given season.”
Toddler Takeover will run Saturday and Sunday, April 30 and May 1, from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. Peter and the Wolf will run multiple times each day.
The Terminus-Alliance collaboration has been in the works since 2019. Terminus artistic director John Welker approached Moses with the idea of creating a dance work for outdoor performance for the 2020 Toddler Takeover, but that was canceled because of the pandemic.
When live performance began to pick back up last year and Terminus co-founder Rachel Van Buskirk pitched her idea for a new production set to Prokofiev’s timeless orchestral fairy tale, Welker recognized it as a perfect fit for launching Terminus’ Family Series initiative and reviving the Alliance partnership.
Peter and the Wolf and the Family Series, says Van Buskirk, are designed to reach new audiences, especially kids, by going into schools and other non-traditional and outdoor performing spaces like the Woodruff Arts Center. “My biggest goal was to make Peter and the Wolf mobile,” she said.
Van Buskirk was drawn to Prokofiev’s score because of its canonical status as an introduction to classical music and the theatrical arts: “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. I want to get students to think about what hearing this music evokes in them, what movement it inspires.” Through the process, she has explored “how to make ballet engaging for young folk, not just the form of it, but the emotion, the way it can bring joy and laughter.”
For Van Buskirk, choreographing with her target audience in mind has involved moving in closer to the dancers and watching the movement from child’s eye level. She has crafted a contemporary vocabulary that connects dance with everyday movement, where strictly classical ballet occasionally makes an appearance as a visual joke, one that might register with baby ballerinas or the adults in the audience.
Using the conceit of a troop leader taking a group of young scouts on an adventure, this Peter and the Wolf attempts to break down the theater’s fourth wall, immersing and engaging the audience in the narrative.
Van Buskirk said the work also provides Terminus dancers with an opportunity to showcase the full range of their artistic talents. “They are great dancers technically, of course, but seeing their ability to express a wide range of emotion and their comedic timing has been really fun and wonderful.”
Van Buskirk is grateful for the opportunity to collaborate “with industry titans such as the Alliance and ASO” in her first solo choreographic foray. “I’m gaining insight into how they ideate and process, which is illuminating. Every day I’m learning something new which helps guide how I approach a co-presentation and work collaboratively across mediums.”
Alliance actor Jasmine Thomas will perform the role of the narrator/scout master. The Alliance also provided the script, costuming and set design. Terminus veteran and co-founder Heath Gill is Peter, with company members Laura La Russa (formerly Laura Morton) and Jackie Nash Gill as Bird and Duck, respectively.
Terminus protégés Anna Owen, Summer McNeill and Claire Lee will join the cast as Park Rangers, with Katelyn Sager as Cat. Van Buskirk will make an appearance as Grandmama, and guest artist Bret Coppa (formerly with Atlanta Ballet) will lend his talents as the Wolf.
As Moses noted, creating work for very young audiences is a challenge, requiring artists to “bring in little ones to be almost co-creators and part of the process early on, making work with them as well as for them.”
The goal is a production where children experience everything live theater has to offer, Moses said, while at the same time being open to spontaneity. “If a 2-year-old wanders onto the stage during the performance, that is absolutely okay.”
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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.
