The Cache Valley Civic Ballet will soon launched its 40th season.
LOGAN – The Cache Valley Civic Ballet (CVCB) will soon launch its 40th season.
“We look forward to the next 40 years of partnering and growing together,” said Sandra Emile, the CVCB’s founding director.
The company will close out its 2021-22 season on Saturday, May 14 with its traditional Year-End performances. Those shows will be performed at Ridgeline High School in Millville, with curtains at 11:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m.
Those performances will be followed by a fund-raiser at 6 p.m.
The CVCB’s 40th anniversary season will begin on June 13 with a summer intensive semester at its school at the Whittier Center.
Auditions for the CVCB company will be held in August.
As usual, the company will perform The Nutcracker during the weekend after Thanksgiving and an as yet-to-be-announced story ballet in March.
The CVCB school offers quality classical ballet training to more than 400 students annually, Emile explained. Auditions are open to serious ballet students of all ages and from any school.
“We look back at what we have done and what our dancers have accomplished with pride and satisfaction (over the past four decades),” Emile added. “Then we look forward with anticipation for what we can achieve in the future.”
When Emile arrived in northern Utah in 1981, her young family lived near the Whittier Community Center. She was struck by the building’s beauty and wandered in one day.
She discovered that the city had a newly renovated dance studio sitting empty and a grant to produce Peter and the Wolf with no one qualified to direct the show.
Prior to moving to Logan, Emile had graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts and then apprenticed at the American Ballet Theatre. She was accredited in the Cecchetti and Vaganova schools of ballet and in the Paris Opera Ballet syllabus.
“We held an open audition (for Peter and the Wolf) and found 16 young, talented and interested ballerinas,” Emile recalled. “So we established the Cache Valley Civic Ballet in 1982.”
After the successful production of Peter and the Wolf, Emile committed herself to producing The Nutcracker.
“That first year,” Emile explained, “we only had the budget to perform Act Two. We did it on the Whittier stage and I did all the costume design and tech.
“It was really Sandy making a ballet,” she laughed.
The next year, the Cache Valley Civic Ballet was able to do a full production of The Nutcracker and, by the fourth year, they earned a grant to purchase original sets for The Nutcracker from Ballet West.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Nowadays, the CVCB company consists of about 45 auditioned dancers from throughout the region and the CVCB school (founded in 1986) provides training to more than 400 students annually.
Emile has directed The Nutcracker for 40 years, along with a tradition of full-length story ballets every spring.
The company now performs in the Ellen Eccles Theatre and works with the Northern Utah Symphony’s full 43-piece orchestra for The Nutcracker each year.
“The Cache Valley Civic Ballet extends our deepest appreciation and thanks to all of our Cache Valley community who have supported and encouraged us over the last 40 years,” Emile said.
The Whittier Community Center is located at 290 North, 400 East in Logan.