So if you follow me on Twitter (@FrontCenterECR) you may have seen previous pictures I’ve posted from my years backstage at both the Providence Performing Arts Center and the Veterans Memorial Auditorium from back when I was part of a ballet company in the mid-90s.
Today’s pic is one of the last in the series. Without further ado, allow me to present:
Yes, a chair. But not just any chair – this was my warm-up chair, most likely during Sleeping Beauty in 1996.
I’m sure you’re used to seeing on-stage warm-up pictures like this:
Yes, that IS what a theatre warm-up class looks like. However, since my ballet company was not performing on huge stages like the Royal Ballet pictured above, there was simply not enough room on-stage for all of us to fit at the barres. Senior company members got top priority; as a Junior company member, you were lucky if you could even get a spot on-stage. More often you’d be stuck in the wings or even backstage somewhere, and since you’d need to use *something* as a barre, a good, solid chair was a hot commodity. I used to hide this one in the sketchy storage space downstairs so that no one else would take it.
(BTW, not attending the warm-up class was NOT an option. Oh my God did the few of us who skipped out once learn THAT lesson!)
Sleeping Beauty was one of the few times I actually made it to warming-up ON the stage. Maybe I just lucked out, or maybe it was because I was one of the few Junior company members cast as a Dryad, considered the most difficult of the corps roles in that show.
Dryads, man. The story behind my getting this role could be its own blog entry. . .
So, there you have it. A regular chair to the untrained eye, a lifesaver for ballet company members not cool enough to stand at the real on-stage barres for warm-up class.
‘Til next time!
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