Another amazing evening with Boston Ballet’s Kathleen Breen Combes and Yuri Yanowsky.  It is one thing to see a ballet on video, another to see it live in a large performance hall, and yet another to, like this, see the dancers perform a mere 15 feet from you and then speak to the audience and explain what they did and how it is done.  When the intensity of the dance is ended and they speak as people, with wonderful senses of humor and the most incredible stories of friends and family of remarkable talent, it unveils a whole new dimension of understanding and appreciation of their art.  It is also only as they stand in front of you sweating profusely and having difficulty completing sentences because they are panting that you realize how hard they have just worked to create the movements of grace and weightlessness just witnessed.

Kate and I , and one of Kate's friends, got there just in the nick of time.  Strider theater was packed.  They were handing out tickets at the door and apparently tracking capacity.  As the girls opened the door and stood in front of me, the lady at the door announced she was almost out of tickets.  Then she asked us how many in our group.  Three I said.  She had four tickets.  Three were ours and in we went.  Thank God I had some intuition we should leave for Colby ten minutes earlier than I had originally planned.

I went to this last year.  It was amazing.  The performers are some of the best in the world, and in between dances they spoke to the audience, fielded questions, and explained what they were doing.  It revealed the true difficulty and complexity of appearing as graceful as they do.
Pas de Deux and Solo Variations 2:  
Boston Ballet’s Kathleen Breen Combes
and Yuri Yanowsky
October 1 at 7:30 p.m.
Strider Theater
They’re back! Boston Ballet Principal Dancers Kathleen Breen Combes and Yuri Yanowsky, two of today’s most exciting ballet artists, return to Strider with another bravura program of pas de deux and solo work. Combes, hailed by the New York Times as “a ballerina of colossal scale and boldness,” is among the country’s foremost Balanchine interpreters, and Yanowsky was recently called “brilliantly versatile” by the UK’s What’sOnStage.com.