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
By Deborah Jones A conventional production would have been the safe way to go when staging the first Swan Lake in West Australian Ballet’s 70-year history. Artistic director Aurélien Scannella had other ideas. His company is based in Perth, a city strung along the Swan River in Noongar country. How might local Aboriginal stories and
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