NEWS RELEASE

Communications and Marketing Office
600 S. Clyde Morris Blvd.
Daytona Beach, FL 32114-3900

For more information, contact:
Phone: 386-226-6157
Fax: 386-226-6158
Contact: Mary Van Buren
Phone: 386-226-6525

Embry-Riddle Celebrates Firebird Ballet Centenary with Film and Lecture

Firebird Illustration Daytona Beach, Fla., Sept. 7, 2010 -- Embry-Riddle will mark the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky’s Russian nationalist ballet The Firebird with a showing of a film of the complete ballet, introduced by Embry-Riddle Professors Michael Perez and Paul Edson.

Their lecture will cover Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario who assembled the artists who created The Firebird; Igor Stravinsky, the composer of the music; Michel Fokine, the choreographer; and Tamara Karsavina, the ballerina who danced the part of the Firebird in the June 25, 1910, premiere of the ballet in Paris.

The film of the ballet showcases Stravinsky’s music and Fokine’s choreography and features Leanne Benjamin as the Firebird and the artists of the Royal Ballet Covent Garden. It was produced by the British Broadcasting Company in association with Opus Arte.

Michael Perez danced professionally for several ballet and modern dance companies before becoming an English and communications professor. He writes and publishes poetry.

Paul Edson teaches music appreciation, music history, and East European studies at Embry-Riddle. He has written about dance for The Detroit Free Press and Detroit Dance News.

“Since ballerinas were flying without aircraft centuries before the Wright brothers,” Edson said, “it makes sense to celebrate the centenary of one of the 20th century’s epochal ballets at the nation’s preeminent aviation and aerospace university.”

The Firebird is based on Russian folktales of a magical glowing bird that is both a blessing and a curse to its captor. The ballet has historic significance not only as Stravinsky’s breakthrough work but also as the beginning of the collaboration between Diaghilev and Stravinsky that later produced Petrushka and The Rite of Spring.

Free and open to the public, the lecture and film will be presented Saturday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. in the Miller Instructional Center auditorium on Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach campus, 600 S. Clyde Morris Blvd. For more information, call (386) 226-6668.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the world’s largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, offers more than 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in its colleges of Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Engineering. Embry-Riddle educates more than 34,000 students annually at residential campuses in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Prescott, Ariz., through the Worldwide Campus at more than 150 campuses in the United States, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the Middle East, and through online learning. For more information, visit www.embryriddle.edu.