Mikko Nissinen and the new Boston Ballet

Dance Magazine, Jan, 2003 by Iris Fanger

Mikko Nissinen brings international connections, impressive credentials, and a sunny personality to his new role as Boston Ballet's artistic director. Opposite: International Ballet Competition medalist Sarah Lamb, who joined Boston Ballet in 1999, in Jorma Elo's SHARP side of DARK.

The transformation of the Boston Ballet started at the top when Artistic Director Mikko Nissinen arrived to take command. His contract was retroactive to July 2002, but it wasn't disclosed until September, when sighs of relief greeted the public announcement that a leader had been found for the floundering company. However, as director of the Alberta Ballet in Canada, Nissinen still had promises to keep--a last season to finish there before he could take up his new position.

The Boston Ballet had functioned without permanent direction during the 2001-2002 season because Maina Gielgud had resigned the position of artistic director designate before taking on the full-time job, after former Director Anna-Marie Holmes had departed in 2001.

No doubt Nissinen, a soft-spoken, polite young man with an open, sunny manner, caught the attention of the search committee because of his international connections and impeccable credentials. The fact that he is also enormously personable and almost universally well liked, with a boyish persona that belies his considerable experience as well as his ambition, added to the attractive equation. At age 40, with an impressive performing career behind him, plus the expertise gained from directing a smaller company, he looked poised to take on a large challenge.

Nissinen had trained in his native Finland and then at the Vaganova Academy in Russia, followed by a twenty-year performing career that included the Finnish National, Dutch National, and Basel Ballet troupes and ten years as principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet under Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson. Proficient in four languages and skilled in both the classical and contemporary ballets of choreographers from Europe and America, Nissinen says, "I work in the global sense. I think that's a great help in today's dance world"--a prophetic remark given the choreographers he's announced for his first season: William Forsythe, Jorma Elo, John Cranko, Frederick Ashton, and Rudi van Dantzig, with only Mark Morris and George Balanchine to represent the American-made repertoire.

An administrative bonus was his two-year stint as artistic director of Marin Ballet, a school in San Rafael, California, before taking the same post at Alberta Ballet after he retired from his performing career. For one year at Alberta Nissinen held a dual position of interim executive director along with the artistic leadership. "I have a relatively good understanding of the business issues. Every artistic decision is really a business decision," he says.

Nissinen's administrative acumen will be enhanced by his close relationship with Valerie Wilder, who joined the Boston Ballet as executive director in September 2002, after six years in the same position at the National Ballet of Canada.

After his appointment was official, Nissinen says he went back to "day one" to study how the Boston Ballet evolved. "I looked at the perspective and kind of direction changes in the different eras. I looked at the repertory, what the local audiences had been exposed to," he says. He describes his inheritance as a company with "a certain versatility, definitely in the area of the classics."

The Boston Ballet, which describes itself as "one of the top five ballet companies in North America" was founded in 1963 by E. Virginia Williams and was the first professional repertory ballet company in New England. The succession of directors who followed--Violette Verdy, Bruce Wells for one season, Bruce Marks, and Anna-Marie Holmes-built the company to its present size of forty-one dancers augmented by the ten dancers of Boston Ballet II, who often perform with the main troupe. The Boston Ballet Center for Dance Education, directed by Rachel Moore, operates schools in three locations along with a large summer intensive and some innovative outreach programs. The annual budget for the entire organization runs "plus or minus $22 million," according to a company spokesperson.

Boston's repertoire over the past decade has included the major classics of the nineteenth century, a number of ballets by contemporary choreographers, and works commissioned from choreographers such as Mark Morris, Twyla Tharp, Christopher Wheeldon, and Daniel Pelzig, who was choreographer in residence under Marks. The annual production of The Nutcracker, instituted under Williams, with the legendary Arthur Fiedler as conductor, attracted 150,000 people in 2001.

The problems in the years leading to Nissinen's appointment left the company in turmoil, saddled with a major deficit and internal strife between the board of directors, administrators, and artistic staff. When the search to replace Holmes ended in the fiasco with Gielgud, which was compounded by the loss of several of the administrative staff (not to mention the economic slowdown that put all nonprofit fund-raising at risk), it looked as if the company was in perilous territory.