2 Contemporary Ballets Premiere in Danbury This Weekend

DANBURY, CT —Three contemporary ballets, including two world premieres, will be folded into "The Fifth Temperament," to be performed at the Visual & Performing Arts Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury this weekend, Aug. 9-10.

The production is the work of Dansereye, a non-profit, professional summer ballet company described by the New York Times as "Sheer fun and deliciously silly." The two performances will comprise the whole of the troupe's 2024 season, their last before moving into their own theater in Warren next year.

Even for a troupe that prides itself on its embrace of the peculiar, the story behind how the music for one of the show's premieres came together is bizarre and unlikely.

While trying to sleep with an episode of the old sitcom "Cheers" playing on a nearby TV, the troupe's founder and artistic director, Scott Thyberg, said he was struck by the quality of the show's background music.

"I kept waking up out of my nap thinking, this music is so amazing. It's so danceable," he said.

Within 24 hours, he and Cheers' Hollywood-based composer Craig Safan had begun corresponding online. Thyberg soon commissioned a score from Safan for the new ballet, "Second Salt," a modern parable about Sodom and Gomorrah.

The collaboration was "pretty random," Thyberg said, especially since Safan had never written music specifically for a dance troupe before. The composer plans to be in Danbury the week of the performances and will be rehearsing the musicians, and attending the shows, Thyberg told Patch.

The show's second world premiere will be Thyberg's "La Bici" (or, "The Bike"), a comedy set in the world of professional bicycle riding, with a score pulled from the work of Rossini, Verdi, Mendelssohn and Friedrich von Flotow.

"A lot of people just think it's an individual race, and just the fastest person wins. But it's based on a whole team, and they all have different roles to play," Thyberg said. "The whole thing just appealed to me from a theatrical point of view, and trying to convey all of that movement without actually using bicycles is the fun part."

The only non-world premiere will be an encore of last season's "The Seven Deadly Songs," performed by the original cast.

With music by Junior Brown, Emerson Lake and Palmer, The Weepies, The Buggles, DJ Chipman and Yummy Yummy, Claudio Monteverdi and Wendy Carlos, Nickleback, Christina Aguilera, and Everlast, the genre-bending and boundary-broadening ballet was the breakout hit of the troupe's 2023 season.

"It's not what people typically expect at a ballet at all," Thyberg said. "People who love dance really loved it, and people who thought it was going to be tutus and tiaras and Swan Lake… it just completely blew their minds as far as what dance can do."