Featuring The Studio of Classical Dance Arts and Our Musical Life children’s chorus

Postponed due to COVID-19

Saturday, May 30, 2020, 7 PM
Sunday, May 31, 2020, 3 PM
UW-Parkside Main Stage Theatre, University Drive, Kenosha, WI 53144

If you experienced our last production of Carmina Burana you will be delighted to hear we are mobilizing our collective forces again. If you missed it last time, make sure you don’t pass on another opportunity to experience this spectacular reprise! Composer Carl Orff intended his setting of medieval poetry to be a feast for the ears and the eyes. The joys and sorrows of youth, love, and fortune will be sumptuously displayed with dance and visual design, wrapped up in some of the most impressive and iconic music ever written. The production will be staged and choreographed by The Studio Artistic Team of Marc and Linda Darling. Adding to this sonic and visual tour de force will be the dancers from The Studio, singers from Our Musical Life and the CAS. Two pianos and a profusion of percussion will crown this boisterous feast for the senses.

Orff selected 24 medieval poems from “Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images” which he set to music in 1936. His Carmina Burana premiered triumphantly in Frankfurt in 1937. Following this, he wrote to his publisher that this work was to mark the beginning of his career, and his earlier work should be disregarded. Carmina has become one of the most popular choral works of the 20^th-21^st centuries, and is usually performed in a concert setting. However, Orff developed the concept of “Theatrum Mundi” in which music, movement, and speech are inseparable, and Carmina Burana was intended to include dance, choreography, and visual design.

Please click below to download information for ticket holders. Thank you.

Carmina Burana Postponed

The Studio of Classical Dance Arts is directed by the husband and wife team of Linda Bennett and Marc Darling, both former members of the Milwaukee Ballet Company.  Local audiences will recognize The Studio and its dancers from its magical holiday production of “The Story of the Nutcracker.”

Our Musical Life (OML) is a growing Racine music education nonprofit which seeks to facilitate and make accessible for all quality musical experiences, in the real world and online, that connect people of culturally diverse backgrounds locally and around the world. Vivre is a 2nd – 5th grade auditioned satellite choir through OML established this spring of 2018 at Giese Elementary School and will be performing in this production.

Linda Bennett, trained at the American Ballet School and in New York at the Joffrey Ballet School, where she also began teaching.  After joining the Milwaukee Ballet Company she rose to the rank of soloist and had the opportunity soloist and principal roles in ballets ranging from full-length classical works to modern and contemporary ballets.  Marc Darling began his career in Chicago under the guidance of legendary ballet instructors Bentley Stone and Walter Camryn, appearing in the famed Stone-Camryn Ballet after just two years of training.  Marc danced with the Pennsylvania Ballet, Ballet Austin, Indianapolis Ballet Theater, Tulsa Ballet Theater, and the Milwaukee Ballet Company performing soloist and principal roles.  Marc met his wife Linda while with the Milwaukee Ballet, and the couple has taught throughout the region before opening their own school in 2005.

Our Musical Life Artistic Executive Director Timothy Keith Griffin, Jr. now serves as the Music Specialist of Giese as of fall 2017. He is a graduate of UW Parkside with a B.A. in Music Education and will soon have his M.A. in Music Education from Anderson University in Indiana. He has been certified in the music pedagogy of Orff-Schulwerk through DePaul University. (Keith) is a past choral director with Milwaukee Children’s Choir and is an acting board member of the Racine Symphony Orchestra.

Funding for this program has been allocated from the Friends of Seniors Fund, the Vonnie and Maglona Jones Fund, and the Unrestricted Fund within the Racine Community Foundation.

This season was supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.