songs of heaven
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Title: Songs of Heaven
Choreography: Cristiano Principato
Music: Bruno Coulais
Duration: 19minutes
Dancers: 10 (6 ladies, 4 gents)
Premiere: 2023
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Full piece with Elisabetta Formento, Cristiano Principato, Audra Cockrell, Andrew Shields, Raven Loan, Yura Hanasaka, Emery Meroni, Paul McKinney, Katie Drozd and Livia Ferrati
(2023 Summer Nights Ballet Gala at Rahvusooper Estonia in Tallinn)
2023 Summer Nights Ballet Gala at Rahvusooper Estonia in Tallinn
Performance photos by Rünno Lahesoo
Dancers: Elisabetta Formento, Cristiano Principato, Emery Meroni, Kyra Olson, Benjamin Pierce, Paul McKinney, Jacqueline Sugianto, Julianane Arduino, Vanessa Childress, Mia Katrina Lill
SONGS OF HEAVEN is a twenty minutes neoclassical piece for ten dancers.
It premiered in Tallinn on the stage of the Estonian National Opera at the Summer Nights Galas, the two closing shows of Ballet Summer Estonia (annual three weeks workshop attended by pre-professional and professional ballet dancers). It was performed twice, with two almost entirely different casts.
"I’ve been taking so many flights over the course of my career and each and everytime I am so fascinated by the beauty of the sky and its colours.
Sometimes I wonder how funny it would be to look out the airplane window and see little angels jumping up and down over the clouds: I wonder if that’s what Heaven would be like, if there was to be one.
The composition that I chose for this piece is the soundtrack of Les Choristes, a beautiful French movie that talks about an orphanage's kids choir and about how music heals the souls of its members.
I found that the purity of children’s voice, together with the beauty of French language, would be the perfect match for this ballet.
Songs of Heaven is just simply a series of sketches of life in paradise over the course of a day, in the hope that some day we will be reunited with our loved ones, freed from our human flaws and only left with the purest, kindest and happiest parts of ourselves.
I wanted to portray different kind of souls - such as lovers, kids, families, friends -, as well as different emotions like freedom, joy, and, most of all, hope".