Lone star dreams - News - Stephen Austin, Ballet Austin Dance Education Center

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2003 by Janine Gastineau

The time is 2005. The place is downtown Austin, Texas. Pedestrians conducting the business of the day encounter an element unfamiliar to this urban landscape: ballet. At the intersection of San Antonio and West Third Streets, floor-to-ceiling windows offer passersby a glimpse into dance's creative process by exposing the rehearsal studios of its hometown ballet company's new digs, the Ballet Austin Dance Education Center.

In October 2002, Stephen Mills, artistic director of Ballet Austin, announced the purchase of a 28,000-square-foot building that will house the company's studios (an increase in number from two to seven), administrative offices, technical storage space, gift shop and box office, and, not least, its academy. After more than forty years of rehearsing and conducting classes throughout the city in different locations, including an ice rink, a strip mall, a fitness center, and a historic firehouse, Ballet Austin will conduct all its activities under one roof. The activities include rehearsing and administering the twenty-three-member professional company, which is employed thirty-four weeks a year, to dance in five different mainstage productions under Mills's direction and to tour. (They performed at New York's Joyce Theater in January.)

Ballet Austin also boasts a paid apprentice company, Ballet Austin II; outreach programming for youth and adults (including community benefits and lectures on dance appreciation, history, and the choreographic process); several summer ballet intensives for dancers of all levels; and fitness training and Pilates classes. The Dance Education Center will also be home to the Ballet Austin Academy, the largest classical ballet school in Texas.

"The move to Austin's central business district," says Cookie Ruiz, Ballet Austin's executive director, "locates us exactly one block west of the epicenter of Austin's live music scene--and within steps of skyscrapers full of individuals who can drop in during lunch for Pilates or fitness training or walk by and see a rehearsal in progress."

Mills began his tenure at BA as a principal dancer in 1987, started choreographing for the company the next year, and was named resident choreographer in 1994. He assumed the post of artistic director in 2000 and says he is thrilled with the expansion, especially the inclusion of a small performance space, because it opens tremendous possibility to achieve something near and dear to him: promoting the invention of choreography.

"The creation of new work is what I'm most interested in," says Mills. "With the world mentality of blockbusters for revenue streams, it becomes more important than ever to be diligent in [this]. Visual artists of today don't recreate Van Gogh or Rembrandt, and classical ballet companies don't always look at it that way, us included. That's not just creation but the training of teachers as well."