PORT ANGELES — Stepping onto the stage means entering another world, dancers Ashley Coupal and Eric Snyder agree.
“We can just let go and be one with the music,” said Snyder, one of 11 guest performers in the Port Angeles City Ballet’s Winter Gala on Sunday afternoon.
He and Coupal have come from London, where they dance with the English National Ballet, to join a cast of local and guest artists and the Port Angeles Symphony Chamber Orchestra, playing live at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.
Tickets to the 2 p.m. Winter Gala, a fundraiser for the nonprofit Port Angeles City Ballet, are available at PACityballet.org.
This has been a long time coming. City Ballet director Kate Robbins and Port Angeles Symphony Artistic Director Jonathan Pasternack began collaborating months before the original event date: March 20, 2020.
Four days before it was to happen, the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the whole thing.
In the ensuing months, the ballet dancers and symphony musicians kept meeting — on Zoom and FaceTime and such. After many more months, they returned to local stages.
“It would not be until the summer of 2024 that [we] would formally reconvene, with a renewed hope of finally bringing the debut joint venture to fruition,” Robbins said.
Five years hence, she and Pasternack, along with James Garlick, cofounder of Port Angeles’ Music on the Strait festival, have created a new Winter Gala. The 27-member Port Angeles Symphony ensemble will lift the dancers with its music.
And Garlick, an internationally known violinist who grew up in Port Angeles, also will perform, along with Music on the Strait pianist Paige Roberts Molloy. They will range from Chopin to Arvo Pärt to Beethoven for three dance pieces: “The Lucid Dream,” “Otras” and “Appassionata Pas de Deux.”
With its nine short works, the gala program is like “a sampler plate,” Snyder quipped: It has ballets classical and contemporary, by choreographers including Joshua Beamish, Benjamin Millipied, Danielle Rowe — and Robbins herself.
Coupal and Snyder dance in the closing piece, “Musagète Sans Fin,” a reimagined telling of George Balanchine’s “Apollo Musagète.” The orchestra will play Igor Stravinsky’s music, written nearly a century ago for “Apollo.”
“We just had our first real run-through with the girls,” said Snyder, referring to the Port Angeles City Ballet dancers who are the “angels” in the piece.
Snyder and Coupal portray Apollo’s son Ascelpius, Greek god of medicine, and his wife, Epione, goddess of medical arts. They have danced together at the English National Ballet since 2021, and are “really good friends in real life,” Snyder said.
Theirs is a touring company, and they’ve performed on stages from Liverpool to Barcelona to Yerevan, Armenia.
Robbins was Coupal’s teacher back when she was a 6-year-old ballet student in Vancouver, British Columbia. Since then, Coupal has built her international career — and said she’s delighted to rejoin Robbins in the Pacific Northwest.
Port Angeles is “a great art community,” Coupal said, adding Robbins has brought her signature passion in full force.
After taking ballet class this week with Robbins’ City Ballet dancers, Snyder was likewise impressed.
“They’re a bunch of little professionals,” he said; Robbins “has made such a great standard for her students.”
Along with the younger students, City Ballet graduates and current trainees will dance in the Winter Gala: 17-year-olds Amelia Brown and Daphne Oakes, 15-year-old Maxwell Winn and 12-year-olds Lily Grubbs and Nola Prchal will appear along with alumni Isabella Knott, now with Ballet Idaho, and Courtney Smith, a dance major at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
The gala also brings together guest artists Dylan Wald and Elle Macy, who are principal dancers at the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, and Sophia Guasco, Madelyn Kleven, Elliana Kluherz, Adrienne Klimchak, Frances Mandeville and Vera-An Nguyen of Oregon Ballet Theatre.
Waverly Fredericks, a recent Juilliard School graduate and a freelance ballet artist in New York City, will dance with Oakes in “The Lucid Dream.” This piece is choreographed by Alexander Anderson, a former dancer with the Nederlands Dans Theater and a colleague of Robbins.
“I asked him if we could stage a piece he did for Juilliard in 2013 on one of our [Port Angeles] dancers and a Juilliard grad,” Robbins said.
“Daphne Oakes flew to New York City in December to have the duet staged on her and Waverly over a four-day period under Alex’s direction. The duet is set to Chopin’s Prelude in F-sharp minor,” with Roberts Molloy on piano.
Ballet dancers and choreographers travel for the love of their art — and they build families of their fellow dancers, Snyder said.
He remembered when he first saw Coupal when she joined the English National Ballet.
“She was fresh out of school, so hungry and so eager,” Snyder said of his friend.
Now, “I call her a girl boss. She loves what she does, and that resonates.”
“We’ve grown together as artists,” Coupal added.
When you see a performer come out on stage, you can instantly tell they are in love with their art, she said: “Their eyes light up.”
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Diane Urbani de la Paz is a freelance writer and photographer who lives in Port Townsend.
