News
Bold moves fill 'Don Quixote' with a passion
Diane Hubbard Burns | Special to the SentinelOctober 5, 2008
Audiences love Don Quixote, the 19th-century ballet with which Orlando Ballet launches its 35th season next weekend. They love its old-world romanticism, its sweet humor, its hummable Leon Minkus score.
Most of all, they love its bravura dancing: the principal couple's daring lifts, the aerial acrobatics for the leading man, the teasing balances and dizzying turns for the ballerina.
That "wow" factor makes it easy to overlook the softer side of this ballet's popular equation: its nonstop acting. For powerhouse dancers such as opening-night leads Katia Garza and Brooklyn Mack -- who have, in artistic director Bruce Marks' words, "technique to burn" -- getting the characters just right can be a greater challenge than the toughest steps.
"When she opens her fan, it's like you're being dissed," he tells Mack at a coaching session for the couple. "How do you solve a problem like Kitri?" Marks asks, echoing The Sound of Music's Maria lament over Garza's character. "There's no understanding her."
Garza and Mack repeat the sequence; this time Mack achieves a look of bemused dejection. "That's it, yes!" Marks calls out.
The ballet's story centers on the comic romance of Basilio, a common barber, and Kitri, a young woman whose father has promised her to a wealthy nobleman, the foppish Gamache. This subplot from the second volume of Cervante's Don Quixote relegates the don and his sidekick Sancho Panza mostly to the sidelines.
When Kitri flirts with Basilio, "that's the soft side of this Spanish spitfire," Marks tells the couple, one of three duos who will alternate in the lead roles. (The others are Chaiki Yasukawa with Eddy Tovar and Zoica Tovar with Andres Estevez.)
"What I have to say about this ballet is, when you're angry, it's not like you'd see in a drama -- it's play angry," Marks continues. "It's the game; the game of man and woman."
