Story & Multimedia by McKenna Johnson
Hannah Bontrager was enjoying a glass of wine over dinner when Ballet Fantastique resident composer Jeremy DeKyle Schropp came to her with an idea. The idea was that the company, which Bontrager co-founded with her mother ten years ago, would have a performance based solely on one concept: strings. Bontrager loved the idea of dancing to the company’s favorite string music, from classical to Metallica’s “Orion”, and so practice for the show began.
For this performance Ballet Fantastique had five core principal company dancers, all of whom are women: Hannah Bontrager, her sister Ashley Bontrager, Leanne Mizzoni, Krislyn Wessel, and Amelia Unsicker.
As co-founder, director, and choreographer, Hannah Bontrager has been said in reviews to “burn up the stage”. Hannah has danced all over the country from Washington, D.C., to Colorado, while her sister, Ashley, recently performed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Mizzoni danced for Virginia’s Manassas Ballet Theatre before joining Ballet Fantastique in 2009. Wessel, who joined the company this year, has been all over the world performing in works including Dracula, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid. Lastly, Unsicker, a senior at the University of Oregon majoring in biology and dance, has performed with Ballet Fantastique since 2008.
On November 20th and 21st, the ballerinas of Ballet Fantastique set the stage to perform their version of String Theory. A range of string pieces accompanied the ballerinas. In all of the music chosen, Hannah Bontrager didn’t want the audience to expect anything. This wish was definitely pulled off in the last piece where all ballerinas on stage danced to Metallica’s “Orion” in gold against a black stage to mimic stars.
“One of the things that’s cool about this piece is that it’s five women,” Hannah Bontrager says. “Of course you might traditionally think of Orion as being a very male dominated piece. We really wanted to challenge and show that this piece is about the strong women of Ballet Fantastique.”