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This weekend brings a three-year dream to fruition for Ballet Tech Cincinnati’s director Marvel Gentry Davis.

“It was very difficult to assemble all the elements for this,” Davis said of the premiere of “The Jazzy Sleeping Beauty,” a contemporary take of the classic Tchaikovsky ballet.

“We have to put things on the stage that people want to see,” she said. “We don’t want to take anything away from the traditions of ballet, but we have to make it relevant to people who can watch movies on their phones.”

But combining contemporary and classical is not as breezy as she thought it would be.

“I thought I could just get a jazz band to play the Tchaikovsky, but they told me it wasn’t hat easy, that you had to have the music re-scored,” she said.

So she contacted Columbus-based jazz drummer and composer Mark Lomax who has a great deal of experience translating music from contemporary to classical and back in his work re-scoring Negro Spirituals for the Nashville Symphony and his own jazz trio.

“I then needed a choreographer who could do both classical and contemporary, who could get his head around a ballet from the 1700s and jazz it up for today’s audience,” she said.

She found that in  Waverly Lucas II, co-founder and artistic director of Atlanta’s Ballethnic Dance Company, who has taken on Tchaikovsky before.

“His 'Urban Nutcracker’ has become an Atlanta tradition” since its 1992 debut, Davis said.

The premiere is doubly-exciting for Davis and her troupe because they will perform with a live orchestra, the three-time Cappie Award-winning Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy Electric Jazz and Student Orchestra under the direction of Conductor Dan Grantham.

“This will be the first time we’ve ever performed with a live orchestra,” Davis said. “You can hear the music as Tchaikovsky wrote it, but played by saxophone and guitars.”

how to go
WHAT: “The Jazzy Sleeping Beauty” by Ballet Tech Cincinnati
WHERE: Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut St., Cincinnati
WHEN: 8 p.m. today; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday
COST: $26
MORE INFO: (513) 621-2787; www.ballettechcincinnati.org