A professional ballet company will soon stage its first outdoor show at Centennial Park. But the Dance Theatre of Tennessee has to solve a problem first: the bandshell’s concrete floor.
DTT’s goal is to, as they put it, take ballet “to the people.” Its version of the Nutcracker tours around the midstate, and the company already performs several times a year in theaters around Nashville and Murfreesboro.
Artistic director Christopher Mohnani says the logical next step is dancing where audiences are used to attending outdoor performances of Shakespeare and the symphony. He wants to stage ballets in Centennial Park’s bandshell on an annual basis, but leaping and landing on its hard, unyielding floors could be a recipe for injury. Mohnani says the company is using crowdsourcing website Indiegogo to raise funds for a portable wooden floor made just for dance.
“It’s an investment so every year it’s not something that we have to worry about. Or maybe when we go to Smithville, in DeKalb County, where their performing arts center is a gym we have now a floor that we can do which allows us to bring our art even more out there.”
Mohnani started the Dance Theatre of Tennessee’s professional company after retiring as a member of the Nashville Ballet. There are currently 22 dancers on the DTT payroll.
Outdoor performances of Carmen are set to begin at the end of this month.
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