Children's Dance Theatre offers up a terpsichorean mystery of sorts

For this year's Children's Dance Theatre production, "The Dream Stealer," artistic director Mary Ann Lee wanted to do something different.

"We decided to do something a bit darker, a mystery of sorts," Lee said before a rehearsal. "We also wanted to weave themes into the production. The first weave is, obviously, dreams. The idea that dreams are dances while you are sleeping. The second weave is that everyone has a dream, and the third weave is finding knowledge from books.

"We tried to get those points across through our interpretation of this wonderful story."

"The Dream Stealer" is based on a children's book written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Carol Heyer. The premise is a child sets off with the town librarian to capture the Dream Stealer, someone who takes good dreams and replaces them with nightmares.

"We actually had the idea to do 'The Dream Stealer' last year," said Lee. "But we had to make a decision because we also had the story 'A Blue So Blue.' So we decided to hold 'The Dream Stealer' until this year.

"And the book's author, Stephen, has been so good to work with," she said. "He came to visit us 1 1/2 years ago when we asked if we could use his book. He came and liked our dance program. Then we asked if we could change things around to make the book into a full-length dance production. He told us we could do what we wanted.

"We have been sending him revampings of the script to keep him apprised of our situation," said Lee.

One thing that has been changed from book to stage is the fact that the title character is a woman instead of a man.

"We cast Natosha Washington, who is one of our faculty, to be the Dream Stealer," said Lee. "We felt that character and the character of Bartholomew, danced by Nathan Shaw, had to be adults."

While some of the story's aspects have been changed, the CDT production crew is still pretty much the same, said Lee. "The music is composed by Tristan Moore, and the costumes were designed and built by Cynthia and Wendy Turner and Nancy Cook."

The lighting design this year will be by M. Kay Barrell, who works with Ballet West, and the narrator will be actress Anne Cullimore Decker.

"We're excited to see how this turns out," said Lee. "I was watching some rehearsals the other day of the nightmare scenes, and it's spooky. I guess that's why we added a little more humor in the script this time. You know, to lighten things up.

"Not that we are getting real scary," said Lee with a laugh.

Also on the program will be Jacque Lynne Bell's "Ryoanji" and Tina Misaka's "Flight," which made its world premiere at the Child International Conference in Den Haag, Netherlands, in July 2006.

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E-mail: scott@desnews.com