Dancers welcome new home in building made for ballet

After a decades-long wait, the National Ballet of Canada finally put on a performance in a spacethe artistic director said allows the dance to be fully appreciated.

"I'm over the moon. It's an incredibly beautiful place," Karen Kainsaid after the National Ballet's inaugural performance Thursday in Toronto's Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

"Seeing the amazing dancers of the National Ballet of Canada on this stage and hearing our orchestra I am so happy to be in a place where I can hear the music well and I can see the dancers' expressions and I can see the art form the way it was meant to be seen. "

All 2,043 tickets to the performance sold out in advance and an additional crowd watched a live broadcast in nearby Nathan Phillips Square.

"The city's been waiting over 30 years for this night and the ballet at least as long,"National Ballet executive director Kevin Garlandsaid in an interview with CBC Radio.

"Everybody dances at some point in their life, even if they're only dancing as a toddler, so dance is universal, so therefore being able to bring this to everybody in the city inthe simulcast and the theatres, and then of course going forward with, we hope, the next 40 or 50 years is just so exciting," she said.

The Thursday night program featured a selection of pas de deux, including Sonia Rodriguez and Piotr Stanczyk dancing the theatrical pas de deux from Don Quixote and Keiichi Hirano and Stacey Shiori Minagawain the romantic Bluebird pas de deux from The Sleeping Beauty.

The National Ballet shares the new building with the Canadian Opera Company, which had its first performance last week.

The new horseshoe-shaped performance space puts the audience closer to the dance and the dancers were impressed with both the sound and sight lines.

"I was here last week the opera company had a few performances and the acoustics are amazing like they said," said dancer Jillian Vanstone. "It looks great. The sight lines are really great, so I'm really excited about it."

The opening of the centre is good for Toronto's arts scene as well as for the National Ballet, dancer Etienne Lavigne said after the performance.

"This is why it's at University and Richmond. With the big glass window it's supposed to be happening in the city," he said.

"People see what's happening and hopefully they'll want to come in and see it up front and up close."

There wassome nostalgia among dancersfor the old Hummingbird Centre, but the onlyregret came from Garland.

"I guess my only regret might be that the ballet did not become a partner with the opera company in this," she said. "But it was another time and were happy to be the prime tenant and of course the theatre is spectacular."