“Bridge Over Troubled Water” has been such a large part of our culture for close to forty years that it is hard to distinguish where this “pop” standard ends and a beautiful metaphor begins. The twenty-six young men and women of The Pride of Cincinnati illustrated this multi-faceted distinction by performing to Roberta Flack’s emotional rendition of this classic Simon and Garfunkel piece.

The staff, excited to collaborate on another project, was motivated and inspired by transposing these familiar lyrics into visual representations of support, weakness, strength, fear, and courage. Various lifts and tandem choreography served as a conceptual foundation, while a symbolic image of “water” made an aesthetic contribution and continually redefined the stage. As the title suggests and the song has done with listeners for decades, creating literal and figurative “connections” was the driving force behind Pride’s 2008 production of Bridge Over Troubled Water.