Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006080335
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Two new companies have emerged. They join the 12-year-old Roanoke Ballet Theatre, which is bruised but alive after a winter of crises.
"We are rebuilding," board president Jim Hart said.
One of the new companies is a modern-dance group called the Laughing Bodies Dance Theater. Its founder and director is San Francisco-born Nancy Lee, a new member of the dance faculty at Hollins College.
Lee brought Laughing Bodies with her from Los Angeles, where she was a graduate student at UCLA before coming to Hollins last fall. The group gave its first public performance this spring at Hollins. It plans a tour in January, possibly launching it with a Roanoke performance.
The centerpiece will be a work "about women's lives," said Lee, who is 26. She said she hopes local artists Nancy Dahlstrom, a painter, and singer/actress Jane Kaufman will collaborate on the project.
Lee's hope is that Laughing Bodies will become self-sustaining. At present, there are no paid positions, and dancers are recruited as needed. Her principal associate in the enterprise is fellow dancer Jane Real, who was a visiting faculty member at Hollins during the spring semester.
"Basically, Jane and I are the company," Lee said.
The valley's other new dance company is the Southwest Virginia Ballet. It is based at Salem's Post School of Ballet and has ties as well with the Floyd Ward School of Dance in Roanoke.
Its appearance raises the question of whether there are enough dancers and dance patrons in the valley to support two separate ballet companies. Though cooperation might seem to make more sense than competition, given the size of the market, it doesn't appear imminent because of strong company loyalties and a tradition of rivalry.
Nancy Lee, who has contacts with both ballet groups, said valley dance appears to be in "a growing period," with the competition being one aspect of it.
"I think there is potential here," she said. "That's why I came."
Susan Cole said she is pleased by the renewed dance activity because it is necessary for the development of the audience that dance needs in order to survive.
"There needs to be more [dance] so the audience can develop a sense of what they like and what they don't like," said Cole, who is executive director of The Arts Council of Roanoke Valley.
The council has helped fill the void in modern dance by bringing in groups such as Susan Marshall & Company and the School of Hard Knocks, and by making dance a regular part of its annual Rainbow Splashes performance series for children.
Ethnic dance companies have been imported by Virginia Western Community College and the Harrison Museum of African American Culture. Hollins and Roanoke College have brought in the Phoenix Repertory Dance Company, the Battery Dance Company and Les Ballet Trockaderos de Monte Carlo, among others. And in 1989, Dominion Bank presented the Richmond Ballet in a holiday performance of "The Nutcracker" with the Roanoke Symphony.
The Roanoke Valley International Folk Dancers specialize in folk dance. There is a dance program in Roanoke's Magnet School of the Arts, and there are occasional college productions, too, most regularly by Hollins' venerable Orchesis dance organization. There are at least half a dozen dance schools, each of which gives periodic recitals for friends and relatives of the students.
But locally produced ballet in recent years generally has meant the Roanoke Ballet Theatre, which took a series of hard knocks last winter.
The first came late in 1989 when Barbara Muller, the company's longtime executive director, sold her interest in the Floyd Ward School of Dance and parted company with it. The school had provided not only dancers but rehearsal space for the company. It has since become affiliated with the Southwest Virginia Ballet.
Last Feb. 3, Roanoke Ballet Theatre lost Muller herself. She informed the board of directors that she was resigning as artistic director to pursue other interests.
Ten days later, the board voted by secret ballot to dissolve the ballet company altogether. The vote was 4-3, but it was reversed when one of the directors changed his mind. The director, who asked not to be named and who has since left the board, said he changed his mind after reflecting further on the implications and possible legal ramifications of dissolving the company so abruptly.
That episode left Roanoke Ballet Theatre alive but without such necessities as an artistic director, rehearsal space and school affiliation. The latter is vital as a training tool and source of dancers.
The company also was short on dancers, particularly experienced ones, because a number of the older Floyd Ward students/Roanoke Ballet Theatre members had moved to the Post School of Ballet during the fall and winter and had thrown in with the Southwest Virginia Ballet.
Hart, the board president, said Roanoke Ballet Theatre now has eight dancers, some of whom are more active than others.
Hart, a retired IBM engineer who lives on Smith Mountain Lake, was introduced to the ballet company when his daughter joined as a dancer and his wife joined the auxiliary. He said his involvement deepened when he observed a pattern of "crisis management and last-minute planning" on the part of the board.
"When I see something that's not organized and doing the best it can, I get hooked," said Hart, who uses words like "stubborn" and "strong-willed" to describe himself.
Hart is at work on rebuilding the company and establishing a school to support it. He has advertised in national dance publications for an artistic director. He is assembling a new board of directors, planning a fund-raising campaign and combing the valley for potential rehearsal space.
In the meantime, about half a dozen of the company's remaining members have been studying with Colin Worth, director of dance at the Lynchburg Fine Arts Center.
"I'd hate to see [Roanoke Ballet Theatre] fall down," said Worth, who also works with principal dancers of the Southwest Virginia Ballet. "I think Roanoke needs a good civic ballet."
Hart said Roanoke Ballet Theatre has no immediate production plans, but hopes to do something around the first of the year "for momentum."
"I'm a believer that you've got to perform," he said. "You've got to give the girls that carrot of a performance."
Terri Post says she didn't form Southwest Virginia Ballet to try to "destroy" Roanoke Ballet Theatre or to contribute to its problems during a difficult period. She says she started the company because friends encouraged the move and because she believes she can present better ballet.
"I was not very impressed [by the Roanoke Ballet Theatre's most recent performance]," Post said during an interview at her Salem school. "After all this time I expected more. It surged up in me. I feel I have to do it and I feel I can do more than that."
Post is a Norfolk native who studied with the then-Norfolk Civic Ballet and later with the American Ballet Theater in New York. She danced with the Radio City Music Hall Ballet Corps, the Metropolitan Opera and with Joffrey II, but left because she didn't like the touring or the drug use that she said was prevalent in New York dance circles during the 1960s and early '70s.
Post subsequently taught and danced at Old Dominion University, ran a ballet school in Waynesboro while her husband worked for General Electric there, then came to Salem in 1978 when he was transferred by GE. A year later, having noticed that "nothing was happening as far as dance was concerned," Post and others founded the Roanoke Valley Civic Ballet.
Post said she had contacted Muller and understood they were going to work together with the company, but something went awry.
"Barbara changed her mind and wouldn't say why," Post said. "The next thing I knew she had started Roanoke Ballet Theatre, so then there were two."
Muller declined to be interviewed for this story.
The Roanoke Valley Civic Ballet lasted until 1983 - by then it was called Roanoke Ballet. It died from the combined effects of financial anemia, internal politics and exceptional bad luck. Bad weather plagued its performances, and a ballyhooed guest appearance by ballet star Alexander Godunov fizzled when he danced only 12 minutes because of bad health and/or an injury; explanations were unclear.
Post said her experience with the company upset her so much that she renounced dance altogether.
"If it came on television I turned it off. I even canceled my subscription to Dance Magazine."
But she caught the bug again. She opened her Salem school in 1986 and told herself she might start a ballet company if she ever had enough dancers and if circumstances were right.
That time has come, said Post. She has about 100 students, and she regards the Roanoke Valley's thriving arts environment as conducive to the nurturing of a new dance company.
"I feel like we're ready for it," she said. "I think we have the interest."
Post said she expects her Southwest Virginia Ballet to give its premiere performance sometime in the fall. A number of the company's dancers will perform in "Coppelia" June 9 at Olin Hall, but that is a production of Post's school rather than of Southwest Virginia Ballet.
"I just want to get off on a positive note," she said. "I wish the other company well. I just think it's a shame we have to compete. . . . I feel we could make it into one really successful company if some people were willing to put aside prejudices."
Post said she plans no overtures to Roanoke Ballet Theatre. Nor does Hart foresee such a move on his part.
"I've got my hands busy," he said. "It'd be more work for me. . . . I'd really like to see there not be competition. I don't know whether there's room for both. I guess I'm convinced that quality will win out."
In the view of Colin Worth, two companies shouldn't be a problem. He said Lynchburg supports two civic ballets and Roanoke ought to be able to do the same, the important thing being to coordinate performance schedules and avoid other public conflicts.
"Audiences respond best to harmonious conditions," Worth said.
by CNB