The DANCE MAGAZINE Awards

Dance Magazine, April, 2000

Stevenson, given an Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth last December, won the Royal Academy of Dancing's Adeline Genee Gold Medal for best dancer when he graduated from London's Arts Educational School. He was invited to join Sadler's Wells Ballet by Dame Ninette de Valois. There, he worked with choreographers Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, and John Cranko. He also performed in London's West End productions, taking the juvenile lead in The Music Man, and creating roles in Half a Sixpence and The Boys from Syracuse, as well as dancing on television with the likes of Judy Garland.

In 1967 he staged The Sleeping Beauty, starring Margot Fonteyn, for the London Festival Ballet, crossing the pond the next year and working with the newly-formed Harkness Youth Dancers. He followed with Cinderella, choreographed in 1970 for the National Ballet in Washington, D.C., and a new Beauty to help inaugurate the Kennedy Center.

Since becoming artistic director of the Houston Ballet in 1976, he has commissioned works, engaging the choreographic talents of MacMillan and Christopher Bruce during the 1980s as the first in a core of dancemakers who have enriched the Houston repertory. The British influence, and evidence of what Dance Magazine Senior Editor Clive Barnes calls Anglo-Russian style, is visible in the illustrious roster of Houston ballerinas past and present. They include Janie Parker, Barbara Bears, and Lauren Anderson, the dancer he had in mind when he created Cleopatra, which premiered last month.

Stevenson also coaches renowned dancers from great companies worldwide, among them Angel Corella and Nina Ananiashvili. The latter is to star in a new full-length of Camille, which Stevenson will stage for the Bolshoi Ballet. He often works with the Ballet de Santiago in Chile and the Beijing Dance Academy. Wherever he goes, Stevenson carries with him the English tradition of full-length story ballets, and with it the excitement of growing new dancers--and building new audiences.