It won’t be your typical ballet when the Rochester City Ballet performs Dangerous Liaisons March 22-24 at Nazareth Arts Center, and that’s just the way the Company likes it!

Company members Shannon Rodriguez, Megan Kamler, and John Deming discussed the upcoming show Tuesday during News 8 at Sunrise.

“It’s a delightfully wicked story, based in 18th Century France about love, and lust, and deceit, and betrayal,” said Rodriguez. “I think people in Rochester will be really interested to see that ballet doesn’t always have to be about fairy tales and princesses, that ballet can also portray a very dark story as well. So I think it’s something that people here really are not going to want to miss because it’s very different than what we normally do.”

The dancing will be accompanied by more acting than you might normally see. “It’s a very different type of acting too,” Deming said. “You’ve got to be very commanding and take the stage by storm, and – kind of touching on what Shannon said – it’s very refreshing to do something that’s not just a fairy tale ballet, or as everybody knows, a Nutcracker. So, it’s quite refreshing.”

Kamler said conveying the story and its complicated relationships has required careful consideration during rehearsals. “One thing that I’ve been working on in this particular ballet is my relationships between each character are very different, so the way I dance with, say, John, is very different than the way I dance with another person in the ballet because the way my character works is she is very manipulative and she has a secret plan behind everything that she does. So the way I act has to be different, and I can’t use words or anything so I have to portray the way I am with my movement, so that’s what I’ve been working on the most.”

Get your tickets for Dangerous Liaisons online at RochesterCityBallet.org.