Imagination Made Real

As a 6-year-old, Margie Bordovsky fell in love with Leonard Bernstein's recording of Camille Saint-Saëns' "The Carnival of the Animals." She didn't know any stories to go with it, but she listened to the music every night as she drifted off to sleep, and her imagination provided all the magic she needed.

And when she saw a dancer perform "The Dying Swan," a ballet set to Saint-Saëns' "The Swan" movement, she spent hours trying to mimic what she'd seen, Bordovsky adds.

This weekend, all that imagination and passion will take the stage when the Northwest Arkansas Ballet Theatre performs "The Carnival of the Animals" with the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra. Bordovsky, the company's director, has written the storyline and created the costumes, and six dancers -- Lindsey Strok, Mariah Bordovsky, Anna Fendley, Nicolette Kolesnikova, Kristie Phillips and Joseph van Harn -- will bring to life the choreography of Emalie Coen presented to the music as Bernstein performed it.

Written in 1886 in a small Austrian village, "The Carnival of Animals" was intended just for fun by French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns. Its private performances were well received, but he was adamant that the work not be published in his lifetime, fearing it would detract from his serious compositions.

After his death in 1921, "The Carnival of the Animals" was introduced in Paris and has become one of the composer's most popular works. Its 14 movements begin with "Hens and Roosters" -- "Poules et coqs" -- and continue through tortoises, elephants, the aquarium and the aviary. Only "The Swan" was ever performed in Saint-Saëns' lifetime.

The collaboration between the Northwest Arkansas Ballet Theatre, founded in 2011, and the Arkansas Philharmonic has been a joy, Bordovsky says, thanks to APO music director Steven Byess and his focus on the dancers.

"It's a little scary because our first time rehearsing together will be the day before the show," she says. "But I have every faith in him."

And, she adds with delight, "it all goes back to what I pictured in my head when I was a little girl."

-- Becca Martin-Brown

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NAN What's Up on 04/14/2017