Can beauty be born from something sad? The new fairy-tale ballet Raffaella, premiering June 29-30 at the Morris Performing Arts Center in South Bend, Indiana, assures it can.

“Beauty will save the world” (from Dostoevsky) was the motto of Raffaella Stroik, the daughter of Duncan and Ruth Stroik. She was a member of the St. Louis Ballet, where she danced many roles. Although she died in 2018 at the tender age of 23, she left a beautiful legacy. 

Now, this legacy is growing with this new major work that brings together several areas of the arts to touch hearts and souls.

The idea originated with Raffaella’s parents, renowned architect and University of Notre Dame professor Duncan Stroik and wife Ruth. “I wanted to do this ballet for all of those people that knew Raffaella or lost loved ones themselves, that they would feel her love for them because they showed her a lot of love in her life and then in her death,” Duncan explained.

“If Raffaella could give back to all those people that were kind to her and that celebrated her life,” what would it be? “What if we could do something that she would love, which was a classical ballet? That’s really the goal: to touch, to thank all those people that knew her, as well as people that didn’t know her but that need to be touched. And I hope we can.”

Along with the family, many people, from friends to the larger community, helped to fund the ballet since inspiration struck in 2019.

“We both wrote a story,” Ruth explained, “and then Duncan turned it into a fairy tale. Moments that Raffaella had in her life reminded me of certain ballets. She had moments at her birth that reminded me of Sleeping Beauty, or moments that reminded me of Giselle and La Esmeralda.”

“Her baptism reminded me of a scene in Sleeping Beauty. In the opening scene, there’s a ‘Holy Man,’ again recalling  a moment in her young life. The priest in Raffaella was created in memory of the late Father Al Lauer, who “came to our house on the day that Raffaella was baptized,” Ruth said. Duncan volunteered his first church design for the priest’s retreat center. That drawing began Duncan’s career in church design.

Their daughter loved the storytelling of classic ballet. “What really moved her was a story with a beginning and an end,” Duncan said. “There’s some tension, in a sense, a battle going on, a spiritual battle or an emotional battle. That’s what she loved — Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet, which was the last ballet she danced in.”

“Really, all the great ballets are fairy tales,” Duncan explained. “Because of that, you can take great liberty with the story.” Naturally, the story is told with dance, music, costumes and sets — all without words. 

Her father believes her love of Dostoevsky’s quote was inspired by St. John Paul II’s “Letter to Artists.”

There is much ersatz beauty around in the world, “but true beauty is moral and pure and uplifting and makes us think about the higher things and care about people. She saw that,” her father said of his ballet-loving daughter.

“For her, beauty was this powerful transcendental that can touch people in all the arts, in all kinds of ways,” he added. “Obviously, the beauty of creation is the best, and the beauty of God’s love and his forgiveness is the best. You could say the beauty of the life of Christ and his saints is the highest. And then maybe we can even, in our own little humble way, make some beauty or some art. In a certain way, Raffaella had that little bit in common with John Paul II. He was a dramatist and an author of plays, and, really, ballet is a type of drama.”

Gabrielle Johnson, Raffaella’s older sister and an architect, designed the ballet’s setting. She and Raffaella were both with the ballet corps; then Gabrielle became an architect. She previously designed sets for ballets.

“Faith was so core to who Raffaella was,” said Johnson, a homemaker with four children. “It just exuded from her. She lived her life totally focused on Christ. So we hope to share that through the ballet, as well, even though it’s expressly not telling her life story — it’s definitely a fairy tale. But the element of faith is something that we want to share.”

Because Gabriella and her sister were the best of friends, she called it “a great honor to be involved in this production that honors Raffaella.” 

“It was such a blessing to have her as my sister,” she said. “It means a lot to me because I think it’s something that Raffaella would have loved to do.”

“When all the elements are beautiful, it can be inspiring and uplifting and transcendent,” she added. “In a lot of ways, this ballet is a fulfillment of Raffaella’s vision for how she wanted the ballet world to be, with all the elements of the ballet being beautiful and good and wholesome.”

While the ballet’s 18th-century San Michele locale is a fairy-tale village on Italy’s Lake Como, its Church of San Michele is “inspired by some of the great monumental churches in Rome,” Johnson said. The visible interior of San Michele reflects the Blessed Sacrament Chapel at St. Peter’s Basilica. The major Rome setting is the Piazza del Popolo, with the Basilica of Santa Maria in Montesanto, today considered the “Church of the Artists.” 

“My family is a family of artists, and ballet is a great art,” Johnson explained, “so that is a cool connection.”

Ruth noted Raffaella’s reliance on the leader of the heavenly army, including one particular moment. “She said to me, ‘Mom, I just said a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel.” He rescued her then, and “in the ballet, as well, where St. Michael the Archangel comes to her rescue. It has these profound moments,” she said. Sts. Gabriel and Raphael also make an appearance, Duncan said, “so there is an angelic component to the ballet.”

Seeing that Raffaella was a daily communicant, “we hope that the ballet will have a Eucharistic theme,” said Ruth, pointing to the inclusion of a first Communion scene and recalling of her daughter: “When Raffaella had her first communion, she always said that that was the happiest day of her life. She looked forward to it as a little girl, and then came the beautiful day of her first Communion. She always talked about that as her favorite day of her life, the day that she received Jesus in the Holy Sacrament.”

“So part of the idea in the ballet was that, at that moment, when I first was imagining the ballet, I imagined a group of young girls receiving Communion,” Ruth continued. “I imagined Jesus touching Raffaella on her shoulder and teaching her a new dance. I thought of that as Jesus teaching us something new. He takes us into this dance with him, which is our life. He’s the leader, and we need to follow his ‘dance steps,’ where he’s taking us. I thought of that as a metaphor for her life and for our life. That is when she began to learn dance, that moment at her first Communion. That was a big Catholic scene.”

In addition, the inclusion of a rose highlights Raffaella’s devotion to St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

The Stroiks gathered talented professional artists, including 45 dancers, nationwide. Raffaella’s childhood friend Isabella LaFreniere, is dancing the title role. They found a stellar choreographer in Claire Kretzschmar, former principal dancer and soloist with the New York City Ballet for several years and now director of the Hartford Ballet in Connecticut. She sees Raffaella as important first of all because it honors “the life of Raffaella Stroik, who was a beautiful influence on so many people and a beautiful ballerina. It’s an act of great generosity for the parents to be creating such a big, new classical ballet to pay homage and to honor their daughter, who lived a beautiful life.”

Kretzschmar finds Raffaella “of great significance. It will be very beautiful, and beauty touches people’s hearts. It transforms people’s hearts and lifts their minds upward. The beauty of the whole ballet, the story with all the sets, and costumes and lights, and choreography and music will all come together to hopefully bring joy to people’s lives and to inspire them to give glory to God.”

The music, an essential element for the entire ballet, was composed by Michael Kurek, composer laureate of the state of Tennessee.

“To ask me to do such a project was an honor,” Kurek told the Register. Kurek has an interest in the fairy-tale genre and has “been looking for a musical equivalent to that genre as a Catholic.” 

Duncan heard Kurek’s Symphony No. 2: Tales From the Realm of Faerie and knew that was what they were looking for. “Also, he was looking for a neo-traditionalist who writes melodies,” said Kurek, whose orchestrations for this ballet are lush, expressive and emotional. The composer was drawn to the ballet’s story and inspired by “Raffaella — just her innocence and her young woman’s sensibility for the loveliness of classical ballet and fairy tales. Who doesn’t love a fairy tale?”

“All the people working on the ballet see her as the archetype of someone who’s got this almost beatified vision of beauty and her theme of her life — that beauty will save the world. I’m very much like that myself,” the composer explained.

The music wouldn’t be out of place in 1915 or 1920, a little later in style than Tchaikovsky. “There is melody and narrative in the music. It’s music that anybody can like” — even sword-fighting music when the blades fly.

Kurek brought out some Catholic elements, he explained: “Very specifically, I used Salve Regina and Tantum Ergo melodies, in my own way, in my own arrangement, when she is going to the chapel to be baptized. There are those specific melodies from the Catholic storehouse of music and chant.”

He continued, “Then there is a general sensibility that this is redemptive. It’s about making you feel, after you’ve heard it, uplifted and happy that you’ve encountered something beautiful. At the end, there’s an apotheosis [the grand finale, the highest moment of elevation to the highest moment] done in such a beautiful, glowing and positive way that it emphasizes our eternal hope. The music has to do the same thing.”

Kurek, who finds it rewarding to have many Catholics come together for such a major project in the arts, envisions other ballet companies wanting to perform Raffaella and hopes “it becomes a standard.”

Kretzschmar thinks likewise: “We are very hopeful that people will be excited about it and will want to have it performed in their hometowns or around the world.”

Duncan Stroik’s hope is that “people will love it and will take it back to other cities and say, ‘Why don’t we do this here?’ It’s a beautiful ballet.”

“My greatest hope for the ballet,” Raffaella’s sister Gabriella added, “is for it to be a beautiful memorial to Raffaella, something that she would be proud of and for it to glorify God. Because through her dancing, she was always desiring to bring beauty into the world and, through that, share the love of God with all the people that she was dancing for.”

GO TO THE BALLET

The ballet premieres June 29 and 30 at the Morris Performing Arts Center in South Bend, Indiana, “Rafaella’s favorite theater to perform in,” according to the ballet’s website.