Carolina pair invited by Royal Ballet of Flanders

Carolina Ballet principal dancers Margaret Severin-Hansen and Gabor Kapin have been invited to perform with the Royal Ballet of Flanders in Antwerp for the 2013-2014 season, reports Ballet News.  “This is a great honour for these two wonderful dancers and a coup for the company,” says artistic director Robert Weiss. “It will be an excellent experience for them to showcase their talent on the international stage.”  Margaret Severin-Hansen is a founding member of Carolina Ballet. She was hired as an apprentice from the School of American Ballet in New York City in 1998. She quickly became a member of the corps de ballet and rose through the ranks to principal dancer in only a number of years.  At Carolina Ballet she has danced the premier roles for a ballerina in the classical ballet repertoire – Giselle, La Sylphide, Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, Nutcracker to name just a few.  She has also danced many lead roles in the ballets of George Balanchine, and in October 2013 she will dance the female lead in Rubies on Carolina Ballet’s Balanchine programme which opens the season. Gabor Kapin arrived at Carolina Ballet at the beginning of the company’s second season from the Hungarian National Ballet as a member of the corps de ballet.  After rising to the rank of soloist, Kapin took a leave of absence from the company in the fall of 2005 to join Boston Ballet; he returned to Carolina Ballet as a principal dancer in 2008. He has danced the majority of the lead male roles in the company’s repertory including the lead in Messiah which he will reprise in November, dancing with Margaret Severin-Hansen as the Angel in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium.  Kapin and Severin-Hansen were married in 2008.