A sample of Elisa Monte Dance's balletic gumbo -- a world of rhythms and culture fused into powerful statements of being.
A New York-based ballet troupe hits town this week to spice up St Petersburg's wholesome but plain cultural diet.
Two performances of exotic dance potpourri from the Elisa Monte Dance ballet group will have the city's Maly (Musorgsky) Theater well and truly cooking this weekend.
Created in 1981 by Elisa Monte and her partner David Brown, the troupe dance to music from both classical and modern composers.
Using ballet to blend orchestral themes with jazz, rock and spiritual music from the peoples of Africa, America and Asia, the group centers on "the differences that make us the same."
The troupe brings together eight professional soloists from different ballet schools and styles -- from Tokyo, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Tunis and the USA.
Each of the two performance will feature a number of one-act ballets, starting with "Labess, or It's Alright -- I'm Okay," followed by different line-ups each night.
One of Monte and Brown's most remarkable creations, "Feu Follet: A Romantic Cajun Story," will be part of Saturday's entertainment.
Monte, Brown and composer Richard Peaslee were drawn to the Cajun sound simultaneously, though separately -- "hoping to find a way to get back to the nourishing, vibrant energy that we experienced while dancing and listening to Cajun music in Lafayette," according to Monte and Brown.
"Feu Follet" is a fanciful retelling of the Cajun people's history, spanning 300 years.
It relates how the Acadians from France relocate to Novia Scotia in the New World and are then forced to move once more when the English invade -- settling in Louisiana.
The three collaborators realized that they could not simply imitate Cajun culture because that would immediately trivialize it, dooming the work to failure by its inaccuracy or, at best, redundancy.
"The real issue was how to plug into the Cajun panorama with its clearly universal themes, honor and its ability to inspire, then present an outside reaction to it," Monte and Brown said.
What Monte, Brown and Peaslee came up with is a very basic, human story, intertwined with the history of the Cajun people and culture.
The heroes of "Feu Follet" -- Evangeline and Gabriel -- experience love, separation, persecution and loss.
Forced apart when their people move to Louisiana, Evangeline and Gabriel cope with their loss in different ways.
Gabriel finds solace with another, while his former betrothed seeks comfort in the gaiety of the community before being taken to the healer's circle by her mother.
The themes in "Feu Follet" are loosely based on scenarios and images from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Evangeline" and works by other poets.
"Cajun music pierces the heart and pulls at our innr strings ... it twists and turns around a driving backbeat -- a heartbeat -- that anchors it, freeing the the violin and accordion to wail and weave in and out of it all," Mone says.
Monte and Brown have staged more than 20 original ballet performances over the past decade in more than 25 US states at the invitation of many major American dance festivals and arts centers, including the Jacob's Pillow and Spoleto USA festivals. They have also toured in 30 countries on four continents.