You’re a prolific choreographer, and I imagine you’ll continue to be, but I’m wondering: Does it feel like a sacrifice of your own creative energies to launch this new company? Does it mean scaling back your own work, and does that bother you?

At first when I was applying for directorships, I did wonder, “Is this something I actually really want to do? To invest a lot of my time on creating opportunities for other people to choreograph?” And I realized yes, I want to do that. Because I think curation is like choreography in its own way. What interests me about choreography is assembling: assembling imagery, assembling ideas, then figuring out how to produce the highest level of excellence within what I'm working on. 

I’ve loved coaching Christopher Wheeldon’s ballet, “After the Rain,” even though it’s very different from what I would make. It’s very fulfilling to work with the dancers on it and really try to deliver what Chris invested so much time in creating, preserving that. And I know for Vancouver, it’s going to be so incredible for them to experience his work for the first time. So, to be honest, I thought I might experience a bigger feeling of sacrifice than I have. We’re about to announce our next Ballet Vancouver season, and I’m not creating anything for it. We’ll dance three of my pieces, but all pre-existing. While the company’s getting set up, I feel like I have enough work that I would like to still share with my community that already exists. My time and focus is better suited to building the organization right now.

Why do you think ballet is important?

For me, in my dancing—and this is from a very Eurocentric lens—but in my dance practice, everything comes back to the basic essentials of what ballet is teaching you to consider in your own body. As a dance artist, I’m thinking about opposition. I’m thinking about length. I’m thinking about the breath through transfer of weight and opposition. I’m thinking about texture and nuance and musicality, all of these things that ballet conditions you to be continuously present with. It’s not necessarily about the technique itself. The fundamental principles and practices apply to so many other things. 

And then, for the general public, I just think ballet is such a transcendent form, because the athleticism is so obvious. In some contemporary dance that can also be very true: You see a phrase and think, “Oh, wow, that’s one of the most virtuosic things I’ve ever seen.” But in ballet, you have these fundamentals. You’re almost always going to see a pirouette, a jump, a lift, these displays of strength and virtuosity. But then it’s paired with grace and resonance: all of this athleticism is working towards communicating something of a greater depth, whether that’s the nuances of beauty in an abstract ballet, or telling a devastating story. The form has such endless capacity to exist in all these different ways and reinvent itself. 

I certainly wouldn’t disagree.

And, I’ve heard people say the answer to moving forward in ballet is to program contemporary dance. But I think there’s so much space between ballet and contemporary dance and how they influence each other. And the work that is actually the most interesting to me is the work that’s in the middle. That’s really what I want to program, in addition to work that is unquestionably ballet, traditional ballet, neoclassical ballet. But what does a contemporary choreographer make for ballet dancers? 

I’m excited about your agenda here.

“Chroma” by Wayne McGregor is a perfect example, or Crystal Pites’s “Emergence.” I feel like back in that era of curation, that’s what a lot of ballet directors were interested in. And now I think a lot of directors are commissioning contemporary dance or presenting contemporary dance, which I also love. But what I think is really exciting about leading in ballet is finding that space in the middle—the kind of work only ballet companies present, that is still really of its time.

For these first performances of Vancouver Ballet, you’ve tapped a lot of dancers that you've worked with before from New York, or in Benjamin Freemantle’s case, he’s Canadian, but he spent his early career at San Francisco Ballet. Are there dancers you’ve worked with in your own company in Vancouver in the mix? How does the combination of local dancers and visiting dancers work?

For this program, we’re working with a temporary company that basically has been put together to illustrate to the community that this is what this company is going to be, and this is the type of work that we’re going to do. A number of the dancers are with American Ballet Theatre, some of whom I’ve worked with before: Betsy McBride, and Patrick Fernette, who is actually from Vancouver and trained at Goh Ballet Academy. Joseph Markey I hadn't worked with before, but he was recommended to me, and he's phenomenal. So much of the work that I had produced under Joshua Beamish/MoveTheCompany featured ABT dancers. It just works that their off time aligned with what I would produce. I love the culture of how they are with one another and how and how they work. 

So moving into Vancouver Ballet, I thought, “What I can do for this production is bring some of the best ballet dancers in the world to Vancouver to perform and demonstrate what is possible if ballet is supported here.” And another mandate of the organization is to bring back people from Vancouver who have been celebrated in the ballet world and have not had an opportunity to perform at home, either because there was no company for them be in, or because they got scooped up by these major places around the world, and then we didn't get to experience their career, like Benjamin Freemantle, Frances Chung, Heather Ogden. A lot of the people who are on our advisory board, like Crystal Costa, Celine Gittens, these are some of the most celebrated dancers in ballet, and Vancouver never gets to see them. Patrick and Benjamin were two people I asked to come for that reason. And then there are a number of local dancers who were dancing for Joshua Beamish/MoveTheCompany who are in this program as well. And most of them are in my new work.