Eight years ago, Ashley Bontrager played Elizabeth (Lizzy) Bennett in Ballet Fantastique’s production of “Pride and Prejudice.” This Valentine’s Day weekend, Bontrager returns to the stage.
When Bontrager first played Lizzy, Gustavo Ramirez was cast as Mr. Darcy, costar and love interest. Bontrager and Ramirez met through the show, and are still dating today.
“It’s like a joke, but we fell in love while we were doing the show,” Bontrager said.
Bontrager had been serving as a principal dancer at the Ballet Fantastique since 2010. Her mother is the artistic director and founder of the company, and her older sister, Hannah Bontrager, is also a dancer.
Hannah and Ashley Bontrager kicked off their first dance performance when they were only five and seven years old. They put on backyard productions for their neighbors under their very own production company, “The Littlest Theatre Group.” The two sisters would go thrift shopping for costumes, collect cardboards for stage sets and work in the garage and backyard for rehearsals and preparations. “We went all out,” Bontrager said.
Bontrager grew up in a dancing environment. Her family often says, “pick one thing and do as hard as you can,” as a motto. When she went to college at the University of Oregon to study journalism, it was the first time she was exposed to life outside of ballet.
“It was the time when I realized that I love ballet,” Bontrager said. “In ballet you can be so many different characters and live so many different lives.”
As she considered her future career in the ballet world, she began to raise a common concern for dancers: it has an expiration date. In the physically demanding world of art, injuries and physical capacity are crucial things. Bontrager said that she is fortunate to never have had any major injuries, and she hopes to stay in the ballet world in some form.
For now, as a principal dancer, “I have to keep working harder,” Bontrager said. She said that even the most famous ballerinas aspire to keep achieving more and work hard.
Bontrager calls herself a “book nerd,” because she reads “Pride and Prejudice” at least once a year and watches the BBC version of the movie every summer with her cousins. One of her favorite scenes to dance is when Lizzy refuses Darcy’s first proposal.
“I like how Lizzy gets angry and stands up for herself,” Botrager said. She said these emotions are not often portrayed in ballet, and she enjoys dancing it.
The “Pride and Prejudice” ballet, based on Jane Austen’s classic romance book, touches on themes such as family, marriage and of course, pride and prejudice. In Ballet Fantastique’s show, there are some “tweaks” to it. The scene is the 1920s in Paris, and the Gerry Rempel Jazz Syndicate plays French jazz alongside the ballerinas.
Pride & Prejudice — A Parisian Jazz Ballet by Ballet Fantastique — will be performed at the Hult Center on the evenings of Feb. 13 to Feb. 16. Tickets are ranging from $22 to $120 depending on the seats.
