Pacific Northwest Ballet: PNB coast-to-coast - road tour - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1996 by Martha Ullman West

Hand on the arm her son, her train an expanse of satin rippling behind her, the Queen Mother descended the stairs onto the stage of the Seattle Opera House, and the audience erupted into cheers that nearly stopped the music, let alone the action. When Baron von Rothbart, in billowing cape, made his leaping entrance, a similar ovation occurred.

The occasion was last June's Swan Lake at Pacific Northwest Ballet, the concluding performances of its 1995-96 season. Seattle audiences always applaud the principal dancers when they make their first entrances onstage. These were bit players, however, and they had drawn a packed house on the sunny Sunday afternoon when the Seattle Supersonics were about to play their second at-home game against the Chicago Bulls in the National Basketball Association playoffs.

The citizens of Seattle love their ballet company, and on this occasion they were letting Francia Russell, the Queen Mother, and Kent Stowell, Rothbart, know it. Everything the couple has done since 1977 to establish a company that is now considered one of the top five in the United States has been calculated to give them pride of ownership.

When Russell and Stowell arrived in Seattle, the company had a budget of under $300,000 and a school founded by Janet Reed in 1974 at Wallingford's Good Shepherd Center, far away from downtown. It had given only a few performances, including a Nutcracker series with guest artists in the lead roles.

PNB now has an annual budget of more than $10.4 million, 12,500 subscribers, a state-of-the-art building four grands jetes from the opera house, forty-nine dancers, a school that some rank as high as third in the nation, and two outreach programs, all of which bring a quarter of a million people into the Seattle Opera House annually.

The company's repertoire includes seventeen works by George Balanchine, six evening-length ballets, including Balanchine's Midsummer Night's Dream, which will receive a new production next May, works by Jerome Robbins, Antony Tudor, Glen Tetley, and Paul Taylor, and contemporary works by Mark Dendy, Lila York, and Dutch choreographer Ton Simons. There are also nearly two dozen ballets by resident choreographer Stowell.

Working tirelessly with the dancers, the school, and a community that not only supports the arts but also turns out for them, Russell and Stowell have made Seattle known for more than just its natural beauty, Microsoft, Boeing Aircraft, and the Space Needle. Two arts fundraising organizations, the Corporate Council for the Arts and Patrons of Northwest Civic Cultural and Charitable Organizations (PONCHO), are proof that Seattleites pay more than lip service to arts support.

"Kent and Francia are always there--for board members, subscribers, donors, someone from the larger community--to help people understand what they are doing," says Susan Brotman, who has been chairperson of the company's board of directors since the move into the Phelps Center in January 1993. "They really share their enthusiasm, and their work is their life."

Stowell and Russell, who were among the recipients of the 1996 Dance Magazine Awards, are both former New York City Ballet dancers. Russell stopped dancing in the early sixties to become one of Balanchine's first ballet mistresses. After she married Stowell she accompanied him to Germany in 1970 when he became a lead dancer and choreographer with Munich Opera Ballet. The two were artistic directors of Frankfurt Ballet for two years before packing up their three sons and heading for Seattle in 1977.

Their cameo appearances in Swan Lake last June were made as a gesture of affection for longtime company member Benjamin Houk--"our all-American boy," Russell calls him--who was dancing Siegfried in his last performance in Seattle before taking up duties as artistic director of Nashville Ballet. Trained in PNB's school, which Russell directs, Houk began dancing with the company as an apprentice thirteen years ago. He became a principal in 1989.

"We thought it would be fun to do it with Ben," says Russell, her carriage still worthy of a queen, as she sits in her elegantly appointed office in the Phelps Center on Seattle's Mercer Street.

"She does the mime better than anyone else in the company anyway," Stowell adds. "Though one of the dancers said I looked like Kramer on Seinfeld." Russell's mime was indeed clearly and imperiously performed. Stowell, however, was a rather restrained Rothbart with none of the rubbery gawkiness of the television sitcom character.

Both are willing to run risks a lot more hazardous than comparisons with a TV actor for the sake of PNB's dancers. At a time when producers are retrenching all over the country and both government and corporate support for the arts are drying up, touring is one of those risks, although a three-year $425,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for touring certainly helps defray the expense. "We're using up the last of it," Russell said, "because we want our dancers to have the opportunity to be seen in New York."