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Manassas Ballet: Growing audience
from Community Guide 2021
by InsideNoVa
En Pointe
Online shows helped ballet grow its audience
BY JARED FORETEK
jforetek@insidenova.com
If you ask Artistic Director Amy Wolfe, the Manassas Ballet is coming out of the worst of the pandemic better than before.
That isn’t to say anyone would have wanted to relive the last year and a half, but the company has taken some of the changes forced by COVID-19 and made them permanent.
For example, after dancers had to cancel in-person shows for more than a year and stream performances such as “The Nutcracker” for online audiences in front of a mostly empty Hylton Performing Arts Center, the ballet is planning to make the virtual viewing option permanent.
“We now have audience members … all over the world,” Wolfe said. “Australia, Italy, Brazil, I could go on. So why not?” Similarly, for students who can’t attend a dance class in person, they’ll remain available online, as became the custom during much of 2020. But Wolfe says the company takes pride in keeping all employees on payroll through even the worst and most uncertain of times of 2020.
With the Hylton Center allowing bigger and bigger crowds in, things are returning to normal for the ballet company, which at one point was facing losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars due to the postponement of shows and the need to move online. It will open its 2021-22 season in October with performances of “Dracula,” which will be followed by “The Nutcracker,” “Gaîté Parisienne” and then “Cinderella” next year.
“We really want to stay healthy and it’s very scary as a performer,” Wolfe said. “We are one of the fields at high risk of infection because of what we do. We are performing and therefore breathing hard and a lot of face-to-face. We tried to adjust choreography last year, but generally
‘DRACULA’ DETAILS See details about the ballet’s performance of “Dracula” in the main newspaper.
» Lifestyles, Page 19 ballet has a lot of [close interaction] in it.”
For the first time since the pandemic began, the Hylton Center is allowing full capacity crowds this fall with proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID test. However, Wolfe and her fully-vaccinated company say they’re determined not to let what they learned during the pre-vaccine period go to waste.
That doesn’t mean the company wants to cheapen the in-person experience. After becoming creative to survive 2020 and 2021, Wolfe says the ballet’s in-person patrons are excited to be able to return in droves in person.
“I think everyone across the board … has realized just how much human interaction means live and in-person, that it’s not the same on a computer and that also is a huge silver lining,” Wolfe said. “And guess what? We all realized, yeah, we like doing a lot of things on the internet, but in addition to, not instead of.”
Amy Wolfe is artistic director of the Manassas Ballet.
— AMY WOLFE, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, MANASSAS BALLET
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