My name is Paul Vasterling. I'm the artistic director of Nashville Ballet.
And I am the choreographer,
director and adapter of this production.
I'm Caroline Randall Williams.
I am a poet who gets to be a part of the cast of performing my poetry amongst
the dancers, alongside the brilliant Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi.
My name is Rhiannon Giddens and I am one of the musicians and one of the
composers of ballet that has been written based on
the book of poems by Caroline Randall Williams,
a beautiful Nashville based poet.
Which in itself is based on the idea that the Dark Lady
sonnets that Shakespeare wrote may have possibly been about a
lady of African descent.
It was just such a relief and it sort of sent me down this rabbit hole journey
of getting obsessed with this notion and thinking about my own sense of my body
and the world and, um, my own relationship to like the cannon and to
the beauty in my darkness.
Well, the show is relevant today because we don't really have a full society,
a whole society, unless all of our viewpoints are represented.
Until we tell everyone's story,
we're not telling anyone's story because America is about all the different
viewpoints that we have.
And that is the foundation that this country is based on.
I think that dance is a universal language and it says
something that we can't say with words.
You know, in poetry, you can explore these themes,
but you don't have to carry like exactly a linearity, right?
And I think in dance, stories get told similarly,
separate from say just a play, right,
where the story gets told all of the movement. Again,
it captures that sort of kaleidoscopic lyric effect that poetry has, I think.
The emotions that I'm trying to portray run the gamut really. I mean,
because it's a real story and there's conflict in the story and there's,
there's hardship in the story. And then there's also, um,
heavy duty community and togetherness and love.
I wrote the score with my partner, Francesco Turrisi.
There's this feeling of emotional fluidity that I think we really
tried to capture in the score to match up with what Caroline had written on the
page.
I'm so excited that Great Performances is capturing this because it's so,
so unique. So it's like a lot of art forms all coming together at once.
And so it's pretty exciting.
Being part of Great Performances and being part of their 50th anniversary season
is such an amazing honor.
It's the first time that Nashville Ballet is being filmed for such a release
and, and just really excited that this is the work that Great Performances is,
is going to feature.
I think it's really cool to be able to show Nashville Ballet to -
not just the Nashville audiences,
but for the world to see us to also kind of see what we've been doing here.
Trying to bring art in all different categories together.
And I think it's very ingenious, I guess,
you know, to have a ballet created about a black woman.
And I think that's very original and very important in the ballet world.
When I was little, my parents would
record all of the like dance, Great Performances broadcasts,
and like we would watch those as a family together. That's cool.
And now we're all, going to be on one of these modern broadcasts.
I think that having ballet and then the spoken word poetry,
and then Rhiannon - Caroline and Rhiannon all coming together is a cool way to
have this filmed and shown on PBS.
This is - it's a dream come true to have my little book get lifted
into the form of dance and then to have, you know,
Rhiannon Giddens giving my words music - that's extraordinary.
And for that collaborative intersection of Rhiannon's work, Paul's work.
The brilliant work of Doug Fitch immortalized is so precious.
Great Performances, congratulations on your 50th season.
Congratulations on 50 seasons, Great Performances.
Thanks for everything that you've done to get art to everyone.
Happy 50th season, Great Performances.