Basketball will share the stage with a different type of dance and a real Cinderella story this month when the Indiana University Ballet Theater delivers a world premiere performance of Cinderella. The production, boasting all-new choreography, sets, and costumes, is a monumental undertaking for the department, which has risen over the past two decades from underdog status to become one of the world's leading dance programs.

Cinderella, to be performed March 25 and 26 at the Musical Arts Center, is the department's most challenging work to date and the culmination of efforts by the husband-and-wife team of Jacques and Virginia Cesbron, who came to Bloomington 19 years ago to develop a top training ground for talented young dancers. Jacques, a former dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet and soloist with the Harkness Ballet, has spent the past year in New York and Paris studying other versions of Cinderella. He recently finished choreographing what he says will be a very classic and traditional Cinderella, "not the vaudevillian version that so many companies choose to perform." Along with Virginia Cesbron, designer David Higgins, orchestra conductor Imre Palló, and the department's entire roster of 52 student dancers, Cesbron has crafted a "colossal" production that remains faithful to Sergei Prokofiev's beautiful score and expresses Cinderella's basic themes of exploitation, purity, and poetic love.

"This is two hours that you're not going to see anywhere else," Jacques Cesbron says. "I wanted this to be very classical. Prokofiev himself wanted to do something traditional. So many companies make this such a vaudeville ballet, and audiences do laugh and laugh, but it's just so beautiful."
As the classic fairy tale goes, Cinderella, with the help of her fairy godmother, blossoms from a young girl shunned by her wicked stepsisters into a beautiful woman who finds true love and happiness. Like Cinderella, the IU Ballet Department has gone through a dramatic transformation with a lot of hard work and a few lucky stars. Those stars include the Cesbrons, internationally-known ballerina Violette Verdy, distinguished guest artists such as American Ballet Theater principal dancer Julie Kent, and a constellation of virtuoso student dancers who have gone on to make important contributions in the world of dance. Ninety percent of the department's ballet majors have become professional dancers and many perform for the world's leading ballet companies. Other alumni have succeeded in becoming choreographers, teachers, critics, administrators, and advocates for the arts.

"It's been an extremely dramatic change to where we're now considered the best ballet program in the country," says Virginia Cesbron. She says professional dance companies view IU dancers as mature, healthy, technically strong, and equipped to handle the mental and physical rigors of competing with the world's top dancers. "Our work was a struggle," Cesbron says, "but we accomplished the goal of creating a place where dancers could be for four years, achieve a professional level, and have time to grown and learn in a nurturing environment."

As the department prepares for this month's major performance, it's a shining example of what Cinderella is all about: Anything is possible.