FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jessica Meldrum
May 26, 2021
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., May 26, 2021 — Grand Rapids Ballet, Michigan’s only professional ballet company, today announces its 2021-22 Season, Moving Forward, featuring a return to live, in-person performances at DeVos Performance Hall and Peter Martin Wege Theater, among others.
The Moving Forward season offers something for everyone, featuring classical ballet favorites and contemporary creations. The complete season includes Grand Rapids Ballet’s outdoor “Summer Series,” “Off the Canvas,” “The Nutcracker,” “Cinderella,” “Jumpstart 2022,” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with “Serenade.”
“My vision for the 21-22 Season aims to showcase a wide variety of ballets that appeal to any number of people, even if you’ve never seen ballet before,” said James Sofranko, artistic director at Grand Rapids Ballet. “We have definitely missed the live connection with the audience and are looking forward to being back in a live performance space. It’s what we do best, and it’s what we’ve trained to do.”
The season begins with two outdoor performances taking place in August. The first program will take place downtown at Studio Park, on Aug. 14, and the second features a return to Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park on Aug. 31.
Grand Rapids’ favorite holiday seasonal tradition, “The Nutcracker,” returns to DeVos Performance Hall with dancers performing before beautiful sets imagined by Chris Van Allsburg, designed by Eugene Lee. Dancers adorn the stage to Val Caniparoli’s choreography for the beloved annual tradition with live accompaniment from the Grand Rapids Symphony to Tchaikovsky’s magical score.
2022 also marks an important milestone as Grand Rapids Ballet celebrates 50 years of lifting the human spirit through the art of dance. Our 50th Anniversary spans two seasons, kicking off in February 2022 with family-favorite “Cinderella,” choreographed by Ben Stevensen, accompanied by the Grand Rapids Symphony. The classic fairytale journeys alongside Cinderella as her dreams are turned to reality by her Fairy Godmother before she dances the night away with her Prince at a dazzling ball.
Company dancers also are accompanied by Grand Rapids Ballet School’s students transforming into fairies, butterflies, and mystical characters in Shakespeare’s comedic tale, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” During this performance, Grand Rapids Ballet will pay homage to George Balanchine, performing the timeless, classical work, “Serenade,” with music by Tchaikovsky, known as his first ballet made in America.
Grand Rapids Ballet’s Junior Company, under the direction of Attila Mosolygo, will perform “Aladdin,” as our talented young dancers share the story of an impoverished boy, living in Agrabah, who falls in love with the beautiful Princess Jasmine.
Tickets and Season subscriptions will be available to the public later this summer. 2021-22 Season Subscription renewals will open to current subscribers on June 7. Additional program details and performance dates and times can be found at grballet.com/2122season.
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About Grand Rapids Ballet:
Grand Rapids Ballet, Michigan’s only professional ballet company, celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2022, is committed to lifting the human spirit through the art of dance under the leadership of James Sofranko as artistic director, Glenn Del Vecchio as executive director, and Attila Mosolygo as director of Grand Rapids Ballet School and its Junior Company. Grand Rapids Ballet continues a rich history marked by steady growth, a commitment to excellence, and strong community support.
Author: Jessica Meldrum
Point of You, World Premiere Work by Artistic Director, James Sofranko in Collective Force
By James Sofranko, March 23, 2021
I first met cellist Jordan Hamilton at an ArtPrize event in 2019, where he was playing on a rooftop, of all places! I could tell he was a classically trained musician, but he was also using a loop pedal and other electronic sound enhancements. It reminded me of an idea I had years ago, about looping dancers’ movements, and this year our all virtual season seemed like the right opportunity to explore this concept. Jordan was quickly on board, and I spoke to Sloan Inns of SALT Creative Studios, our video partner for the season, and he started investigating ways to design the video setup.
I decided to project an image onto a screen located on the stage, so that the dancers could interact with the images, whether they be live or looped. Jordan would set up downstage left. It took some experimentation, and before I started making up any steps, Sloan, John Ferraro (company and facilities manager), and Mellissa Slack (production stage manager) tried an initial setup in the theater so I could wrap my head around what I would have to work with. The image projected to the screen on stage left could either be from a live feed from a camera focused on stage right, a looped recording, or another live feed from a second camera, located offstage right in the wing. My biggest concern with the looped feed was that it could remain musical, a delay of a second or two after pressing the button would cause the musicality to be off. I ended up using the help of another dancer not cast in the piece, Steven Houser, who ran the buttons and the loops. It really helped that he was able to learn the choreography and press the buttons at exactly the right moments. So after some trial and error, we figured out that what I was hoping for was indeed possible, and I set to work making the choreography.
Jordan’s first song, called “Circuits,” is actually in a time signature of 7, so I made up numerous phrases in 7. Because I knew some of these phrases would be “looped” I told Julia and Yuko to enter the frame of the camera after 1, and they had to leave before 7. That way when the video looped, you wouldn’t see the dancers ‘jump’, it would just appear as if they ran off camera and immediately back on again. Or alternatively, I made sure the dancers started and began the phrase of 7 (or a multiple of 7) in exactly the same position, so the loop looked as seamless as possible. It was a task, but sometimes restrictions like that actually make creating steps easier. Much like this season, with limitations come creativity.
The looping was one challenge, but my other camera idea also proved to be another hurdle. We decided to use a GoPro camera, you may know them as the cameras used by skateboarders and mountain bikers, because it is small, durable, and has a good lens range and focus. I wanted the dancers to be able to grab the GoPro and move in and around each other so we could get an “inside” view of the choreography. The result is that you can choose to watch the choreography “live” on the stage, or you can watch the live feed from the GoPro on the projection screen. The dancers had to take care to not jerk the camera, and we also had to “choreograph” the angles and the cord coming from the camera so they wouldn’t get tangled or trip on it; my first time having to choreograph a cord. There were many things to navigate, but again, the challenge is what made it fun and exciting.
In this new world where we are experiencing so much on screens, and at times obsessed with our own images, “Point of You” examines this phenomenon and hopefully offers some new possibilities about what is possible when dance and technology collide.
I hope that you enjoy “Point of You,” it was a lot of fun to create, and I’d like to thank all of the collaborators who helped bring my crazy idea to life. Jordan Hamilton, Sloan Inns, John Ferraro, Mellissa Slack, Steven Houser, and the three dancers: Yuko Horisawa, Julia Turner, and Isaac Aoki.
I am so proud of this organization for pulling together quite a feat in “Collective Force”, nine works new to Grand Rapids Ballet, four of them world premieres, all rehearsed and created with the choreographers via zoom. (Except for “Point of You,” although there was one day when I did rehearse them via zoom too!) The variety of choreographic styles and voices is a testament to the talents of the dancers of Grand Rapids Ballet, and I hope that these works showcase our ballet company as something truly remarkable.
Learning how to budget on a ballet income—especially during a pandemic
Alexandra Meister-Upleger photo by Ray Nard Imagemaker
By Linnea Swarting for Pointe Magazine February 2, 2021
When our Nutcracker performances got canceled at Los Angeles Ballet, I, of course, had to deal with the emotional reaction. But I also had to worry: How was I going to pay my rent?
The pandemic has opened my eyes to financial wellness—it took a crisis for me to understand that I wasn’t prepared for one. With the pandemic, I realized that I had not been saving and spending in a way that was thoughtful. I was paying bills and whatever else came up in the moment, but I had no eye on saving for the future or in case of emergency.
Knowing that many dancers live paycheck to paycheck, I wondered how artists I know have sustained long-term careers, or how they’ve made big financial moves, like buying a house. It seemed impossible to me! Considering everyone, especially now, has different situations with expenses and income, I wanted to find out how some dancers have made their budgets work for them in order to save, even amid long layoffs or while working gig to gig.
Getting Started
Many dancers start working at a young age, and often haven’t lived on their own before or accounted for their own expenses. Chelsea Paige Johnston, a freelance dancer in Los Angeles and a former soloist at Los Angeles Ballet, began learning how to budget when she became a trainee at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. “I was paid only in pointe shoes and performance stipends,” Johnston says. Her parents, who had to help her cover living expenses at the time, taught her how to organize her finances into categories, including rent, utilities, health care, gas, groceries and savings. She’s maintained this practice throughout her career, even as her income and expenses have fluctuated.
Rebecca Eve Selkowe, financial wellness counselor at The Actors Fund and author of Dominate Your Debt: A Work & Play Book, recommends starting as Johnston did to collect as much information as possible about your income and spending habits—while staying judgment-free and patient with yourself. “I keep artists who work with me in the gathering-information phase for as long as possible,” she says. “We create a profit-and-loss sheet by looking at our spending history for the last six months, assigning a category for every transaction, and then finding the average for every category. Then you would do the same for your income sources.”
Grand Rapids Ballet dancer Alexandra Meister-Upleger uses an Excel spreadsheet to create an expected budget and to log her expenses each month. This allows her and her husband (also a dancer) to see exactly how much money they’re spending and where it’s going. They sought additional budget guidance from money-management expert Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University course. “It takes a lot of time to get good at creating an accurate budget,” says Meister-Upleger. “At first, we were often underestimating how much everything costs. Now I have a much better idea.”
After tallying your expenses and income comes the harder work of balancing the two: Do you have enough money to cover your expenses and meet a personal-savings goal? Balancing your profit and loss can help you prevent missing bill payments and accumulating debt. Of course, the pandemic makes doing so more challenging, with many dancers facing furloughs and pay cuts.
Some have addressed this is by cutting costs, such as moving in with roommates or their parents. Meister-Upleger says that while she was collecting unemployment over a stretch of the pandemic, “we made a very conscious effort to save anything we didn’t use on expenses. We tightened the budget up and weren’t buying anything we didn’t need.”
Others have pivoted to find other sources of income while keeping expenses low—for example, I started freelance writing and performing in virtual gigs. Johnston has booked online performances while also working as a demonstrator for virtual classes. This is where Selkowe’s advice about being patient with yourself becomes key, since we all know it is frustrating to work hard and still struggle to close the gap.

Brett Hondow/Pixabay
Financial Wellness
The Actors Fund’s Financial Wellness programs incorporate education on budgeting, investing basics and taxes, as well as exploring the mental side of financial security. “The ‘wellness’ piece has to do with your relationship with money,” Selkowe says. “Are you engaging with your money? When it comes to your finances, are you practicing all the things it takes to be in a good relationship, like kindness, patience and honesty with yourself?” Because of the pandemic, all The Actors Fund’s programming, which is specifically tailored to artists, is now offered online and is free for performing arts professionals. Dancers nationwide can sign up for single-session workshops and six-week programs, including the Psychology of Money and Managing Cash Flow.
Having a realistic gauge of your finances can help lower anxiety related to it. “I can’t express how much less stressed I am from keeping our budget,” says Meister-Upleger. After a serious concussion, she was able to stay afloat and pay medical bills thanks to an emergency fund she had built up. “It was very sad to see the savings account emptied, but it was such a relief we didn’t have to worry about how to pay the bills. I was able to focus on getting better.”
Johnston reevaluated her budget after leaving company life to become a freelance dancer. “Before, I used to add up and portion out by month my total anticipated earnings for each season to set up my budget for the year,” she says. “Now, I have to plan ahead more and be open to a cycle of saving and seeking financial support.” She uses a mobile app provided by her bank to stay in touch with her spending—most major banks allow you to view your monthly statements and set budget alerts.
Other Resources and Savings
The pandemic has made a lot of dancers think about other financial resources. “[As a freelancer,] I’m paid inconsistently and unpredictably,” Johnston says. “Now, with jobs canceled or indefinitely postponed and the changing availability of government assistance, I’ve had to take things week by week instead of planning further out into the future.”
Some steps towards finding assistance include filing for unemployment insurance, if eligible, and applying for emergency-relief-fund grants from private organizations like Artist Relief and Artist Relief Tree. The American Guild of Musical Artists is offering COVID-19-related assistance to its members. The Actors Fund also offers emergency relief for dancers, in addition to its educational programs.
As a dancer, your budget most likely will be cyclical, but in the thick times, make sure to put some money in savings. Even putting aside $5 a week is a step in the right direction—it sets the intention of saving, and you can adjust the amount as you get used to the practice. A well-maintained savings account could work in tandem with aforementioned assistance during a crisis, and hopefully lead to stability in the future. “You can take hold of your own financial destiny,” says Meister-Upleger, “if you start to save what you can and try to keep your expenses low.”
Made in Frame: How SALT Productions Saved A Christmas Classic With VFX Magic
While a global pandemic may have changed the way we celebrate the holidays this year, some traditions remain sacrosanct, even essential, to the Christmas season.
So when the Grand Rapids Ballet was determined to produce a virtual staging of The Nutcracker, they turned to local creative production studio, SALT, to help them create a uniquely intimate experience that would delight viewers from ballet aficionados to newcomers.
In this special installment of Made in Frame, we’ll peek behind the curtain to see how SALT used Blackmagic cameras, the beta version of Resolve 17, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Frame.io to deliver some much-needed holiday magic to the ballet company—and to a community challenged by the events of 2020.
A shared creative vision
SALT, the production company founded by director Sloan Inns and his wife, producer Jenna Inns, are neither strangers to dance films nor to rallying around their community.
In 2017, they created a new style of dance movie with Dust. Their lead dancer performed tirelessly throughout the 18-hour shoot, and in the following year of post-production, Sloan carefully retimed the performance to a new musical score. The result? A mind-bending viewing experience as the dancer appears to dance in both real time and slow-motion while staying on beat.
The artistic vision for the film was intended to inspire those struggling through life. That’s why it’s no surprise that when the pandemic hit Grand Rapids hard, SALT, along with Cre8gency, jumped in to document the community’s heroic response in a film they called GR Strong. Brewers went from making beer to hand sanitizer. West Michigan companies like Whirlpool manufactured ventilators instead of kitchen appliances. Restaurant owners fed the many people who were out of work while church volunteers delivered food to the elderly. And Sloan and Jenna armed themselves with masks and hand sanitizer to capture the historic effort.
The Grand Rapids Ballet website succinctly states a similar mission: Michigan’s only professional ballet company is committed to lifting the human spirit through the art of dance. That’s why it’s also no surprise that GR Strong contains clips of the dancers demonstrating their appreciation for the many frontline workers by creating uplifting performances delivered via Zoom.
The Ballet had already committed to keeping the season going in some form, and Jenna and Sloan had previously worked with them on one performance. “Then, in May or June, they contacted us to discuss how we could do The Nutcracker,” Sloan says. “We had to figure out not just how to create a show that would be fresh and new for at-home viewers, but also how to stay true to the essence of the ballet without being able to have all the dancers together on stage.”

Sloan and Jenna, both dance lovers, were familiar with the way shows like So You Think You Can Dance and The World of Dance take the approach of showing not just the performances but also going behind the scenes to document the dancers’ lives, their practices, their challenges. “You get to know the dancers as people,” Jenna says, “and you form a connection with them that goes beyond dance.” “It makes you feel like you’re rooting for them,” Sloan adds.
Partnering with Artistic Director James Sofranko, the like-minded creatives settled on a similar performance/documentary approach for this production, going backstage with everyone from the dancers to the choreographers and stagehands and wardrobe people. But the biggest challenge was creating the illusion that all the dancers were on stage together, performing a large-scale ballet while remaining safely distanced.
Intricate choreography
As a director-editor who actively seeks out new creative challenges, Sloan worked with Sofranko to devise an ingenious approach. There was no real way to prepare for this extraordinary production, but the Ballet had a recording of a 2019 rehearsal that they shared with SALT to help them work through the methodology.

The stage was divided into distinct zones, and the dancers were grouped into “pods” of four or five dancers each, with each pod bubbled separately throughout the rehearsal period and the shoot. Each pod performed their portion of the dance in their delineated zone, never interacting with others. After all the pods performed their parts, they would be composited together to create the illusion that they were all dancing together on stage.
Using Blackmagic Design 4K cameras, Sloan and Jenna captured five different views and angles. One camera was mounted directly over the stage to capture the bird’s eye view; one was locked down in the auditorium to capture the wide master shot; one captured a medium shot; one was attached to a slider; and one was set up for the close angles.

“We had five cameras rolling over the course of seven days,” Sloan says. “It took a long time, because when each pod was done we had to take a 15-minute break to ventilate the air before the next pod could come in. The Nutcracker is all about having a lot of people on stage for the big numbers, and we were only able to do small groups at a time.”

Because of the need to keep the pods separate, there are whole dance numbers that had to be broken up across several days of shooting, meaning that post-production would require meticulous choreography, as well. And then there was the behind-the-scenes component, directed by Jenna, which they shot with a Blackmagic Pocket 4K and a GoPro 7. “There are moments when the dancers are coming off the stage, breathing heavily, and we wanted to be able to capture that immediacy and get a snippet of how they’re feeling,” Sloan says. Jenna also felt it was important to capture the love and respect the dancers share with one another, and how it imbues their artistry with magic. “Those bits really added some gold in the edit,” Sloan says.

You can’t have a ballet without music, so the team also needed to film the Grand Rapids Symphony. “The only way we could do it safely was without the dancers so that the orchestra could spread out onto the stage [rather than in the close quarters of the pit] and we filmed them for two days and captured two takes of the entire score. In the final program, we cut back and forth between the dancers and the orchestra, so that they’re a part of the performance, as well.”

An athletic process
The first challenge was to organize the nearly 9 TB of footage. Sloan had editor Chad Kramer working remotely on Adobe Premiere Pro to focus on the BTS footage, while he concentrated on building the performance. Because they’d shot in 4K RAW 5:1 (to give themselves the ability to reframe or zoom in) and the files were so massive, Sloan decided to work with the beta version of Resolve 17 for its new support of proxy workflows during the offline, and then graded and mastered HD deliverables for the 60-minute show.

As Sloan assembled the performance segments, he’d upload them to Frame.io for Chad so that he could then build the narrative around the performance. “It’s not just a continuous block of dancing. For example, we have one section where the men are warming up for the Russian dance,” Sloan says. “They’re pushing their bodies and jumping and lying on the floor and we really get a sense of the amount of effort and training it takes—because when you just see them performing it, you can’t fully appreciate how incredibly athletic it is.”
“Essentially, we built the whole show in Frame.io”
Which, in a way, describes the painstaking process of editing this program. Sloan shared all the performance footage with Sofranko and the Ballet through Frame.io so they could pick the best bits. “Frame.io has been incredibly helpful with this,” he says. “I’m not able to be there with the Ballet, but I can share every single take with them. They’re able to leave very specific comments on the actual performance. Things like, ‘This doesn’t quite work because her arm isn’t in the proper position.’ Working on the snowflake dance, for example, we had 110 notes on just that sequence. They’re very particular about the way the dancers are edited, so it’s been a really good system for us.”

That sequence also required a lot of compositing, which Sloan was able to easily achieve in Resolve without having to do any frame-by-frame rotoscoping. “We used Power Windows and feathering to isolate and track, say, a foot that may have crossed over into another pod’s, and just by moving the window around it worked out really well.”
Sloan never actually sat in the room with Chad, and only had one in-person edit with Sofranko during the post-production process, so they relied heavily on the Resolve and Premiere integrations in Frame.io to exchange everything from assets to cuts. “Essentially, we built the whole show in Frame.io,” he says.
A storybook ending
It almost, but not quite, goes without saying that staging one of the most elaborate ballets in a company’s repertoire during COVID is a monumental undertaking. But what Sloan and Jenna also wanted to convey was just how high the stakes were for the Ballet as a company and for the dancers as individuals.
“There are bigger companies than the Grand Rapids Ballet who shut down the whole season,” he says. “A lot of people don’t know this, but The Nutcracker is the biggest single source of ticket sales for most ballet companies, so it’s essential to funding the rest of the season.”
Another reason why the Grand Rapids ballet wanted to be able to keep their dancers fit and working is that the career of a dancer is short, and losing out on a full season (or potentially more) could be devastating to them professionally. “These are elite athletes who had to find ways to stay in peak form during quarantine,” Sloan explains. “Without having the ability to go to the studio for classes or to gyms they had to stay in shape by having classes over Zoom, basically, in their living rooms.”

On a personal level, the lives of dancers can be somewhat isolating to begin with—the long hours of classes, rehearsals, and performances are far from the standard 9-5 job—so the company often functions as a kind of family or community, especially for dancers who come from other countries. “These dancers aren’t from Michigan,” Sloan says. “They’re from Cuba and Japan and the Dominican Republic and San Francisco. To be further isolated by being quarantined or bubbled makes it even harder for them.” And yet, the joy they experienced by being able to participate in this production came through in this piece. “There was one dancer who didn’t know if this would be her final season as a result of COVID, so she was so happy to have this opportunity to perform again,” Sloan says.

In the end, The Nutcracker video production serves as a metaphor for what every ballet company experiences on a daily basis. The dancers look so perfect, the productions so lush. Non-dancers who attend ballets have little idea of how hard the dancers train, the discipline and focus the profession demands, the sacrifices they make for their art.
Watching this Nutcracker, you would have no idea how carefully this was planned, how challenging the performance was to execute, how much material Sloan and the team had to cull down, how he was only once in the same room with his client after shooting concluded, and how seamlessly it all came together.
If there’s anything that 2020 has demonstrated, it’s that creatives will find ways to create—and that innovators will find ways to use technology to create new experiences and establish new traditions.
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