 No, the Portland Ballet's next production is Gallery. Tell us about it. Gallery is a full evening of dance brought together by different choreographers. So Portland Ballet puts out a call for choreographers looking to present their work and we go through an audition process. Certain choreographers are chosen and then they come in from away and set on our dancers. And the culmination is an evening of different works from different voices. Do you give them any guidelines as to what they can do or do they come up with the ideas completely on their own? Right now, this is the second year of Gallery and there is talk about maybe kind of putting it under an umbrella or a theme. But it's really exciting in the beginning stages of Gallery to have the choreographers bring their own visions and their own work. The interesting thing is that when we do get the different submissions from people, sometimes unknowingly a theme develops on its own. Sometimes it can seem like we did put together a theme at the beginning but in actuality it's just these were the pieces that came through and they all fit together in a really interesting way. These are original works for the dancers. How is it different doing a brand new original work as opposed to doing a standard classic work? Well, the really great thing for the dancers is that in order to build your artistry I think it's really important to have different people seeing you and different people saying sometimes the same things to you but in a different way or sometimes saying something brand new to you. There's something out in you that maybe you didn't know was there before. That same thing can be discovered in classical work but I think there's just a different energy when it is contemporary or brand new coming from someone else's mind completely onto you. You don't have a reference point so you have to dig within yourself to find the whole picture of what it is that you're trying to say. Is it the same for a choreographer looking at something with a blank slate and just sort of saying okay where do I begin? Yeah, blank slates are pretty difficult but with these pieces these are works that have already been created either in entirety or in some pieces. So I don't know exactly the creation process for each choreographer at the inception of this piece but when they bring it here and they see it on these new bodies and these new perspectives and these new minds I think it begins to take on a new life. And for the parts of the show that are being created after or being added onto the existing pieces I think that feeling of kind of wiping things clean and having new bodies there in front of you gives it a really neat life and a really neat time in the studio together. Fernando, you're a choreographer from Puerto Rico. How did you come to Portland? It's a very fun situation. A friend of mine who's a dancer who was actually in the original version of From the Craigsth saw the post on Facebook for it because she is a friend of one of the dancers here and shared it with me and told me I think this would be great for you. It sounds like something you would love to do. So I emailed Nell Shipman, the artistic director, asking her if I could submit my work and she said yes please and then I heard back I think like a month later saying that they had accepted me and then after that it was just me sailing and now I'm here working with a dancer so it's really great. Tell me about the work. The work is settled from the Craigsth and it was created both with a personal perspective and a national perspective because there's a current debt going on in Puerto Rico that's very bad and in Spanish, Kievitas, which is in the title, it also can mean being in debt. So it's about being indebted but also how you personally can be in the Craigsth of your life feel like you're a little broken, feel like you're a little not fulfilled and how do you restart yourself? Because sometimes you have help from your family, your friends but sometimes you might find yourself in a situation where those people might not understand even if they wanted to help. So you have to restart yourself and push yourself to do more and at the time it also resonated with the dancers, it resonated with me a lot and when I got the opportunity to do this choreography originally I was in that moment personally and it was a good moment to explore that and then also explore the current crisis happening in Puerto Rico and how do you recreate and restart and renew yourself. And those are political themes, they're economic themes. What's your process in terms of translating that into movement on the dance floor? Well, I started with doing a lot of broken images with the body so there's a lot of bed legs, a lot of broken arms, not literally in the work and finding that with the dancers and how they would interpret it as well and then how you could come because I'm an optimist so how do you from the broken imagery find fullness in the collective because there's five dancers so how do they work together and how are they also individuals because we can be broken individually but be whole as a community or vice versa, we can be broken as a community and be whole individually so how do you find both and how do you deal with your struggles but also come in to find it personally and I try to do that through the bodies but I'm also very abstract in my work, I don't even if it has these political statement or this economic statement or inspiration I still try to leave room so people can take it, interpret it to what might be their crisis, their struggle so not like oh, this is about Puerto Rico or this is about the economic crisis but if someone sees that, great, if they don't, that's okay too. What do you hope the audiences in Portland will come away from your work when they leave the theater? I just hope that in some way they're a little bit on the edge of their seat it doesn't have to be excitement but I want them to just want to see it and want to be inside of the situation even if it seems negative I want it to be a breath of fresh air and I want them to just be able to see a different perspective and my perspective is not better or worse than someone else's but I think it's different enough, it's from a young Latino coming in and just sharing what he thinks so far in his life and other people can maybe be like oh, that's beautiful what he created or not so beautiful but what they may take, I hopefully just think that they are at least a little bit attracted to it and think wow, they can take something from it personally or just at least find beauty and be enlightened for a night What does a production like Gallery bring to the audiences in Portland? Well, I think the best part about Gallery is that Portland Ballet is bringing these choreographers here We have Fernando who's here right now in residence, he's coming to us from Puerto Rico I don't know how much other touring he does at the United States but the audiences of Portland don't have to go to Puerto Rico to see his work they can come to the studio theater and see this vision come to life and the same with our other choreographers, Savannah Lee and Annie Kloppenberg is here in Maine but I don't know how often her work has been seen with the audiences of Portland Ballet so I think it's great that our audiences can see voices that they haven't seen before but also that they can see if they are familiar with the work on different dancers and how that comes to life And when will the audiences be able to see that? Gallery opens March 3rd, it's March 3rd and March 4th and then the following weekend as well, March 10th and March 11th