Last weekend, the Yale Undergraduate Ballet Company put on their Fall performance Once Upon a Dream: Contemporary and Classical Excerpts. The first part of the show was filled with excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty and the second part with original pieces choreographed by members of the company.
While the show itself was really amazing, what made my trip to the ballet exceptionally cool was that I was actually going to see two friends perform. A close friend from Spanish class, who had invited me to the show, was going to be dancing; the other, my friend Leah, was part of the group of volunteer Yale musicians that the company had assembled just so they could dance to a live orchestra. I thought it was so cool that all these musicians had volunteered to help out with this one event, even though it wasn’t with any specific performance group. Leah, also a member of YSO, was telling me that the orchestra assembled basically by word of mouth and that Yale has a very active volunteer orchestral scene.
And that is the story of how I found myself in the middle of a pick-up game of Tchaikovsky.
