By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2010
JACKSON, MISS. -- The performance is over, but the dancers aren't finished. Now they want to come up the aisles and pray with you.
"This is why we dance," announces Erin Beaver, one of Ballet Magnificat's tour directors, speaking into a microphone while she paces the stage at the Jackson Academy's Performing Arts Center. Beaver, an energetic woman with a powerful smile, has the upbeat, insistent delivery of a televangelist, but she's not ministering alone. As she urges the audience to come to Jesus, slender young women with perfect posture and turned-out feet file into the audience, still in their knee-length costumes. They wait in the aisles for the kind of standing ovation they cherish: audience members so moved by the dancing that they want to leave their seats and worship with the cast.
"Let me get something straight," Beaver tells the crowd of nearly 500. "There's nothing magical about praying with a sweaty dancer." The audience laughs.
"But this is real," she continues. "You're real.
"Let's go to a real God."
It wasn't always this easy to find God at the ballet. Back in 1986, when Kathy Thibodeaux started Ballet Magnificat, the nation's first Christian ballet company, people told her it was a big mistake.
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