Q&A: Professional ballet dancer talks about upcoming show at Royce Hall
(Courtesy of Don Lee)
By Shreya Aiyar
Jan. 23, 2015 9:23 a.m.
Professional ballet dancer Christopher Kaiser went through years of Boy Scouts before realizing his passion for dance. It was only natural that the maturation story followed in “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” resonated with and affirmed Kaiser’s personal journey.
On Saturday, the Alberta Ballet from Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta will perform “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” under the artistic direction of internationally acclaimed choreographer Jean Grand-Maître. Influenced by Sarah McLachlan’s 1993 album of the same name, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” features a troupe of dancers that showcases the process of growing up and becoming wiser through experience.
In anticipation of the ballet’s Royce Hall show, the Daily Bruin’s Shreya Aiyar spoke with company dancer Christopher Kaiser about “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” and finding his family in the Alberta Ballet.
Daily Bruin: What is “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” the play you and the Alberta Ballet will perform at Royce Hall, about?
Christopher Kaiser: It’s about a girl going through life and her trials, like relationships with boys and friends who have overdosed on drugs. It’s very abstract and contemporary, but it’s basically about a girl’s journey to becoming a woman.
DB: How did you get your start as a dancer?
CK: My parents experimented by putting me in sports and Boy Scouts. Finally, they put me in dance, and I fell in love right away. Once I decided to take it seriously, they told me it’s not a good idea – my mom’s a superintendent and my dad’s a professor – so they tried to convince me that I had to get an education and that I couldn’t be a professional dancer. That made me rebel, in a way, and definitely made me more passionate about dancing.
DB: What is the atmosphere like, working with the Alberta Ballet and being in a professional dance troupe?
CK: It’s a lot more inviting than I expected it to be. I came from The Juilliard School, which is very contemporary and modern, and it’s a very different scene than working in the professional world. When I got the job here, I was a little nervous about working with a bunch of ballerinas who might be cutthroat, but I came here and everyone had open arms. We’re a team – you’re only as good as your worst players – so nobody’s fighting for roles, everybody’s trying to help each other out and trying to be the best they and the entire company can be.
DB: Telling stories through dance is complicated because you have to make sure your audience gets the point. What’s your process like for delivering a message through dance?
CK: I had a teacher in school who said, “If you don’t believe that you look good, how do you expect to make the audience believe that you look good?” I would say (you have) to lose yourself in the character. Just as any great actor believes in his or her character, so do dancers. You have to make the audience believe what you’re presenting, so you should believe in what you’re presenting too.
DB: What would you like your audience at UCLA to take away from this performance?
CK: I would want them to take away exactly what we feel as artists in this production – a distant memory that they may have had, whether that may be happy, sad, involving past relationships, past struggles, with great times that they’ve had. I want them to reminisce, to feel emotions that they’ve felt before but maybe have forgotten about.
