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Alexander Stabler Flies to Top as Vegas Dancer, Aerialist
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Tuesday, September 11, 2018
 

BY KAREN BOSSICK

Alexander Stabler closed his eyes as he swung out upside down over his fellow dancers on what resembled a metal corkscrew.

“After you swing out 50 or 60 feet, it helps to close your eyes and just remember what you’re doing because it can get scary,” said the 2003 Wood River High School graduate, who was performing as a cherub in “Broadway Bares.”

Twisting high above a Broadway stage, doing a headstand upside down on ladders, and performing gravity-defying stunts amidst soaring waterfalls is Stabler’s idea of living the dream.

After finding his passion for dance 15 years ago with Footlight Dance Centre, Stabler is now front and center at “Le Reve,” a 75-minute in-the-round show at Wynn Las Vegas.

He’s performed with the likes of Lady Gaga. And he’s in high demand for shows such as “Broadway Bares: Top Bottom of Burlesque”--two-time Tony Award-winning producer Jerry Mitchell’s spin on the classic Broadway musical “42nd Street.”

“It’s thrilling but there’s a definite risk of danger,” he said. “It involves a lot of training and paying attention to safety and what my body is telling me.”

Stabler returned to Sun Valley this weekend to teach a dance, improvisation and movement workshop for intermediate and advanced middle and high school actors and dancers.

The workshop was sponsored by the Wood River High School Dance Honor Society and the National Dance Honor Society. The WRHS chapter, overseen by WRHS teacher Joyce Pratt, Hilarie Neely and Kassidy Thompson, is one of more than 300 National Dance Honor Society chapters across the United States that supports excellence in the dance arts, academic achievement and leadership.

The workshop was provided free of charge, thanks to a grant from the Papoose Club with support from Annabel Jenson, who raised money through her Montessori classroom program.

Stabler tagged along with his sisters to dance classes as a 5-year-old growing up in the Los Angeles area. But he stopped taking classes at age 10 to concentrate on swim team and didn’t resume them until he was a 17-year-od senior at Wood River High School.

That’s when several Footlight Dance Centre students told Anne Winton about the young man with a gymnastics and dance background. Winton and other Footlight Dance instructors promptly trotted out to the BCRD Aquatic pool where they agreed that Stabler’s body made him a perfect fit for ballet and other forms of dance.

“When he walked into the dance studio and started to move we said, ‘This kid is a natural. He has natural stage presence and he’s a dancer,’ ” Neely recalled. “He had a natural body and great natural body position and structure that made it easy for him to step into the techniques and achieve the control that finishes you. He’s was a protégé kind of kid.”

Footlight Dance had one year with Stabler before he headed off to Boise State University where he worked with dance professor Marla Hansen. After a summer intensive, he easily landed a job as a dancer with Idaho Dance Theatre where Hansen is artistic director.

He returned to the valley in the lead of Prince Charming performing opposite of Christina Arpp in the 2004 Footlight Dance production “Sleeping Beauty.”

“The artistic expression of dance, feeling the movement in my body ignited a passion for dance in me,” he said.

After three years with Idaho Dance Theatre, Stabler took a thousand dollars he had saved and packed his clothes, pillows and a big canvas he’d painted black into his 1966 Volkswagen Golf GTI and moved to Los Angeles.

He stayed on a cousin’s couch for two weeks before answering an ad to share a one-bedroom apartment that he promptly turned into a two-bedroom apartment as he took up residence in the living room.

“I stayed in Las Vegas overnight on the way to Los Angeles, never thinking I would ever come back to live and perform there,” he said.

Without an agent, Stabler began performing freestyle dance at a L.A. club. And, when he saw some dancers doing aerial performance, he decided to give it a try.

“Aerial work takes dance and makes it fly,” he said. “But it’s very painful learning because you have to put a lot of weight on different body parts and position your body in ways that aren’t natural.  Ballet also has some unnatural positions, as it forces you to turn out from the hips and knees. I used to say: If it hurts, you’re probably doing it right.”

There was no ballet company in Los Angeles when Stabler moved there. But when Judith FLEX Helle started Luminario Ballet of Los Angeles—a hybrid of contemporary and classic ballet with aerial art—she asked Stabler to be one of two poster children for the six original dancers.

“I tell aspiring young dancers that you have to live in New York or Los Angeles at least one year to see what opportunities come up. If you’re like me, you get bit by the bug and you’re hungry enough to do anything to make it,” Stabler said.

In fact, while working with the ballet company, Stabler continued to do freelance projects, flipping, flying and diving. He was performing in Downtown Disney when someone with Cirque du Soleil saw him. And soon he found himself performing in that company’s Zumanity five days a week while working in Los Angeles the other two.

Three years later his passion and intensity earned him a lead role in “Le Reve.” Known as “The Dream” in English, the love story follows a young woman as she makes the decision between true love and dark passion. Stabler plays true love or the Prince Charming.

“It requires ballroom dancing and I didn’t have any ballroom dance experience so I hired a coach,” Stabler recounted. “Ballroom is rather the opposite of ballet, in that ballet is very upright whereas in ballroom you present your hips and everything else forward.”

The ballroom dancing in “Le Reve” is made all the more challenging because the dancers are dancing in knee deep water and diving into a 30-foot-deep pool. Stabler has aerial components, as well. And, in one instance, one of his colleagues drops from the 80-fioot ceiling in front of the 1,500 spectators.

“It’s a water spectacular—and it’s just beautiful. It’s like watching a well-oiled machine in a picturesque setting. And it’s one of the few shows in Las Vegas done in the round so it’s very intimate, a fully immersive experience,” Stabler said.

Neely can attest to that, having seen “Le Reve.”

“It’s so beautiful what with the water sequences with dance and aerials,” she said. “And watching Alex I had the biggest smile on my face the whole program. He just radiates energy.”

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