PRESS RELEASE:  June 2008:    
 Rebecca Kelly Ballet SUMMER TOUR
NYC based Troupe Tours upstate New York
with July performances in North Creek and Lake Placid
Contact:  Craig Brashear, NYC 212-431-8489,   Upstate:  518-293-7608
High resolution  j-pegs available upon request   RKBallet@ix.netcom.com

RKB TWO PUBLIC PERFORMANCES:  
Friday, July 25, 7:30pm, at Tannery Pond Community Center, 228 Main St, North Creek.  Box Office:  518-251-3751.  

Thursday, July 31, 8pm, at Lake Placid Center for the Arts, 17 Algonquin Drive, Lake Placid.  Tickets are $12, $17, and $20, Reservations: LPCA Box Office:  518-523-2512

Choreographer Rebecca Kelly has long been using dance to celebrate the sheer beauty of the moving form while observing and exploring human challenges and social issues.  In the summer tour program brimming with contrasts and vitality, Rebecca Kelly Ballet’s (RKB)’s performances will reveal the buoyancy of the human spirit in love and loss, and in sheer fun.

Adding zest to the program will be this year’s collection of Summer Spice.  Begun in 1995 inspired by and to celebrate the unique qualities and multi-cultural heritage of RKB dancers, it demonstrates “a wealth of inventiveness.  Hysterically comic, some of the most frantically eccentric jazz ever conceived, a combustible performance…” wrote Back Stage,…“left us beaming all the way home with its original dabs of ethnicity as well as bravura.”  The 2008 collection includes the limberjack inspired Chili Peppers (Uthman Ebrahim and Emily Adams) and the sultry duet Tsali (Mona Afable, Royce Zackery), the whirling and spinning solos of Cinnamon (Therese Wendler) and Paprika (Raul Peinado), the hilarious Achiote Latin-flavored quartet, culminating in the rousing athletic ensemble piece Masala.

Writing in Water (2008) uses the ephemeral nature of dance as a metaphor.  With a cast of 3 women, the ballet is set to the final movement of Beethoven’s impassioned last string quartet, the Grosse Fugue, written when Beethoven was completely deaf.

Long Time Passing (2007) was inspired by searingly honest letters to family and friends from a mine sweeper stationed in Iraq during 2007.  The ballet flows across three points in time depicting the agitation before the Iraq War began, when the soldiers were shipping out, and now, when they should be coming home. 

New York City journalist, Ranardo Domeico Gray writes, “Long Time Passing is a horrible realization of the aftermath and conditions of war.  Making a political statement in dance while maintaining the beauty of ballet is not an easy task. Rebecca Kelly does this effortlessly in how she captured that heartfelt sting of the realities of war while maintaining an upward spiral throughout the piece visually as well as mentally. Long Time Passing kept my curiosity greedy for more, then, left me breathless.”

www.RebeccaKellyBallet.com

Rebecca Kelly Ballet
579 Broadway, 4B,
New York, NY  10012

Company photographer:  Todd Bissonette, Appleby.  
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