Woman creates avant-garde Nascar themed ballet

[Zuni]

In April, choreographer Jenefer Davies Mansfield staged her "NASCAR Ballet" production at the Roanoke (Va.) Ballet Theatre, featuring 20 colorfully unitard-clad dancers, wearing corporate patches of the theater's sponsors, prancing and leaping around a banked-racetrack stage (to new-age music and the sounds of revving engines), "racing" but occasionally crashing into each other, to be rescued by other dancers who are the "pit crews." Mansfield was hoping for a big crossover audience of NASCAR fans gathered for a big race in nearby Martinsville. "In this business," she said, "you've got to take chances."