Kent Stowell - Vancouver Ballet Society

Today’s Pacific Northwest Ballet: A graceful changing of the guard

By Marcie Sillman Pacific Northwest Ballet’s new season, opening later this month, will be the first in more than two decades without longtime principal Lesley Rausch. The ballerina was acclaimed for nuanced performances in everything from Swan Lake to Ulysses Dove’s very contemporary Red Angels.  She will be missed, but Rausch’s retirement is an inflection

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Pacific Northwest Ballet Turns 50: The complexities of success

By Marcie Sillman When Kent Stowell and Francia Russell arrived in Seattle in 1977 to take the reins of a five-year old ballet company, they had one big goal: “We wanted to make a company and a school that we would be proud to be part of as dancers,” Russell recalls. Forty-five years later, the

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