Stevenson to step down - News - Houston Ballet's Ben Stevenson retires - Brief Article

Dance Magazine, July, 2002 by Molly Glentzer

Ben Stevenson will retire as Houston Ballet's artistic director at the end of the 2002-2003 season, opening a new era at the nation's fifth-largest ballet company. As artistic director emeritus, Stevenson, 66, will concentrate on teaching, coaching, and choreographing for the new Houston Ballet Youth Dancers. He will also serve as artistic advisor for the nearby Fort Worth Dallas Ballet while that company searches for a new director.

"I'll have the freedom to go after many different things," he said. He's already at it: In October, the Central Ballet of China will produce his new version of The Fountains of Bakhchisarai.

Houston Ballet hopes to begin interviewing artistic-director candidates by summer's end. "It's not a set-in-stone schedule," said Houston Ballet Foundation board member Jesse H. Jones II. He leads a fourteen-member search committee that includes Stevenson and managing director Cecil C. Conner. The company's dancers have a nonvoting representative. Jones said the search will be "a very considered process.... We're allowing ourselves time to do a thorough search."

They'll be looking for someone with a vision. It's unlikely, though, that Stevenson's heir will have the carte blanche he did. When Stevenson landed there in 1976, Houston Ballet was a regional troupe with twenty-eight dancers and a budget of about $1 million. Today, the company has fifty-four dancers, a rich repertoire that balances Stevenson's bread-and-butter blockbusters with major contemporary works, and an operating budget of more than $12 million. Stevenson also developed the Houston Ballet Academy, which now supplies more than 60 percent of the company's dancers, including half of its principals (among them, international star Lauren Anderson).

"Obviously, we've got a tremendous inventory and investment," said board Chairman John H. Smither. "We'll expect a new artistic director to incorporate those things and build with his own vision as well."

"A good artistic director does not have to be a choreographer," Stevenson added. "There's a situation of working with the dancers, the orchestra, the stage crew, the students and the parents in the school, the board--and keeping them all reasonably happy. The artistic side, working in the studio, is the little moment you have of bliss."

Stevenson has wanted more bliss for several years. He surprised the company in March 2001 when he first attempted to retire (see Presstime News, Dance Magazine, May 2001, page 44). This spring he tried again, more diplomatically, but the board convinced him to stay one more season to make the transition smoother.

"I don't see how we could be in a stronger position to make a transition that is inevitable," Smither said.