Alive and Kicking

By Will Steigerwald

Brett Raphael is excited, driven — and frustrated. The Connecticut Ballet is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this season, and for that he is thankful and more than a little bit energized. Dance is his passion, and it is that passion that drives the numerous community outreach programs of this venerable ballet company. Yet, his constant struggle for financial resources make his Sisyphusian efforts a daily challenge.
At the age of ten, Brett Raphael was chosen by George Balanchine to receive a Ford Foundation scholarship to the School of American Ballet. He subsequently studied with such masters as Stanley Williams, Hector Zaraspe, Valentina Pereyaslavec and Errol Addison in London and performed with the touring ensemble, Stars of the American Ballet, before settling in Connecticut.
The Connecticut Ballet was founded by Raphael and Luk de Layress as a non-profit organization incorporated in 1980. Resident performing company at Stamford Center for the Arts, the Connecticut Ballet maintains a classical and neo-classical repertory, while its offshoot, Zig Zag Ballet, performs solely contemporary works. The company repertory includes fifty-five ballets, including twenty-two commissioned works and five full-length ballets. The company has performed at festivals and concerts series in such far away places as Quebec, Toronto and Atlanta, and regionally in Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.
Under the artistic leadership of Raphael, who also serves as CEO, the organization is comprised of the performing company, year-round community outreach programs, and the Connecticut Ballet Center, its affiliated school. Connecticut Ballet is a member of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and a founding member of the Connecticut Dance Alliance. This three-pronged approach to balletic expression and education has become a national model for similar organizations throughout the United States.
As the official school of the Connecticut Ballet, the Connecticut Ballet Center offers an entire curriculum of recreational and pre-professional training for children, teenagers and adults.  Their programs include a complete ballet training syllabus for children and adults, contemporary jazz, hip hop and ballroom, plus exciting ethnic dance forms such as African Dance and African Percussion. Graduating students have gone on to dance conservatories and colleges, musical theater productions, and many regional, national and international dance companies. Special activities include the annual Education of the Dancer showcase performance and intensive Summerdance course.
Connecticut Ballet’s Dance Exposure Project reaches the far corners of the state with the aim of youth development and empowerment. This project provides satellite dance instruction and accelerated training scholarships. The company’s educational assembly programs have been performed in over three hundred public, private and parochial schools statewide. Bringing dance to the communities, these school assemblies have provided elementary level training to over 250,000 Connecticut school children, as well as tuition free training for selected youth at the headquarters in Stamford and a new branch program at the Norwalk YMCA. One of Connecticut Ballet’s principal missions is the education of young people in the many aspects of dance, exposing students and teachers to the entire gamut of traditional and contemporary dance forms.
The school program should be fully subsidized, but it isn’t. “There is the need and the will,” says Raphael. “We have the contacts but not the support. It is truly troublesome.” Year after year the Connecticut Ballet is asked back to various school districts, and superintendents throughout the state work with the company to make these assemblies happen, yet the funding is always in question. The uncertainty arises because there is no blanket arts education program currently in place in our state. Each district must fund their programs individually. Raphael is currently looking at a long range plan to build an infrastructure throughout the state for this type of programming.
Under the banner of the Dance Exposure Project, the Juvenile Justice Outreach Program brings classes to juvenile detention facilities in Hamden, New Haven, Danbury, Norwalk and Bridgeport. Classes in African drumming, martial arts, hip-hop and Latin dance are all taught by facilitators from the Connecticut Ballet. Funding for this program is piece meal as well. “We’re their number one program,” Raphael relates, “but we are working with private funding at the centers, not state funding.” For such important programs to continue, something must change in the way the people of our state look at the arts. Organizations like the Connecticut Ballet provide an invaluable resource to disenfranchised persons, a resource that could turn their lives around forever. “Their small lives can be opened,” says Raphael. “They are coming from such restrictive backgrounds, they’re damaged, but we can help put them back into the community in better condition than when they came into these detention centers.” To date, the program has received less than $100,000 annually to serve most every center in the state.
To commemorate its twenty-fifth year, Raphael has designed a remarkable season of dance. With an innovative mix of classical and original dance pieces, the Connecticut Ballet will entertain, thrill and teach all who view one of their incredible performances. The season began with Pigs and Pachyderms, the company’s double-bill family program. Babar the Elephant and Gloria: A Pig Tale awed children and parents alike. The famous children’s story, Babar the Elephant, came to life with Jessica Lang’s 2003 work put to Francis Poulenc’s piano score. Using H.K. Gruber’s contemporary chamber opera and libretto, Raphael fashioned an original tale about a pig who thinks she is the most beautiful pig in the world in the comic and touching Gloria: A Pig Tale. The ballet toured through Wallingford, West Hartford and New London, and the shows were no easy task to mount.
“It is very difficult trying to juggle the whole economic side of producing with the commercial theater sector,” says Raphael. “They’re looking for vehicles that have ‘legs’ — something that will play for weeks on end. Something like this could and would with the right backing and publicity, but they just don’t believe in it, so we have to find ways to finance it ourselves. We are doing it all alone.” Ironically, due to the acclaim this program received, the company has been invited to take Pigs and Pachyderms to the Children’s Theatre Festival, but within our state funding is a constant struggle.
Also this season, the Zig Zag Ballet will present the world premiere of DanceAfrica.
The Zig Zag Ballet seeks to “take the art of ballet into the 21st century,” challenging audiences and dancers alike. Also under Raphael’s direction, the company is composed of ten exciting soloists dancing cutting-edge works by today’s most promising and established choreographers. The January performance of DanceAfrica may be their most startling performance to date. The performance, entitled Destinee/Pu Longo, is a collaboration between Zig Zag Ballet and Compagnie Ta of Burkina Faso, West Africa. Choreographers Raphael and Olivier Pawagnimdi Tarpaga join forces for a multi-cultural journey bridging two cultures and two dance traditions. It will be a largely unscripted and improvisational piece allowing the dancers a liberty of expression that is rarely seen on stage.
Burkina Faso is known to have a long tradition of artistic talent, and having their dancers visit is an honor for Raphael. The performance will include live music and a Kora player who is considered to be one of Burkina Faso’s national treasures. The buzz generated by this unique collaboration has already garnered the companies an invitation to Long Beach, California. “Olivier is a provocative choreographer, very politically motivated, and I imagine he will address such critical African issues as the AIDS crisis and civil unrest, as well as make statements regarding our government’s pre-occupation with war. Whatever happens on stage, it promises to be a shockingly beautiful piece.”
Needless to say, the massive artistic undertaking that is the Connecticut Ballet requires a great deal of money. Raphael’s strong conviction regarding the importance of the art of dance is only rivaled by his passion for community involvement and funding. “There is a double standard,” he says. “The commercial sector will book a New York performance and pay a huge fee for it, but when they have it in their own back yard, suddenly our $5,000 dollar production is unbankable. We are doing New York quality work right here in Connecticut, and yet it has been twenty years since a large on-going production has been mounted in Hartford. Something is terribly wrong with that.”
“Ours is a pioneering effort,” Raphael continues, “to show people it is possible, that it can be something other than Nutcracker — that’s no longer the measure. There are so many Nutcrackers, but where does the sophisticated ballet person look? It is an apple pie kind of thing you do with your family and it’s great, but where on the landscape is that the latest great theatrical event? This is a very difficult time. A time when we are at our most mature, and it is hard to have that disconnect. One would like to see bigger dollars come in to support the bigger vision. Why not now? Why not at twenty-five? We are ready, and we would like to bring this to every corner of Connecticut. Well, to do that, there is $250,000 missing. From whom and where is that money going to come? We are perpetually under-funded.”
There just isn’t money — yet we are apparently the wealthiest state in the nation. Raphael is often asked why, in a corporate center like Stamford, he can’t receive the funding. Fifteen years ago that would have happened. Today, companies have retrenched tremendously, and those who have provided funding in the past gave millions this year to support the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Tsunami in Indonesia.
“One of our objectives is a cash reserve,” Raphael concludes. “We need a safety net. I am convinced there is someone out there who can make it so, individuals or a corporation able to underwrite it. That is the good old-fashioned way of philanthropy.”
The Connecticut Ballet, however, remains undaunted by this Herculean task, Brett Raphael will continue his battle searching for those among us who still believe in the arts. He and his dance company will endure. After twenty-five years of exceptional dance and successful outreach, the Connecticut Ballet will continue to provide the school children, dancers and audiences of our state with pe formances that educate and inspire.