Patricia Sigurdson - ballet teacher - Great Starts: American Teacher Series

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Ann Barzel

School of the Salt Creek Ballet, named after a stream that flows through the region, has recently moved into spacious new quarters in Westmont, a suburb of Chicago. Originally known as the Patricia Sigurdson Ballet School, it is the main school (a branch is at the Hinsdale Center for the Arts), where six hundred students study ballet, modem dance, character, jazz, Spanish dance, and mime in three large studios. The faculty totals nine, to which Sigurdson has added guest teachers including Luba Gulyaeva, Marek Kholeva, and Paula Frasz.

By including Salt Creek Ballet, a nonprofit regional company, into the new name of the school, Sigurdson reaffirms her point of view that ballet is a performing art, and it is taught that way in her school.

It also recalls her own performing career that began in Denver, where both parents were involved in opera, and her early ballet training with Lillian Cushing. She remembers a high point of those days-being in a production of The Sleeping Beauty with live orchestral accompaniment.

Sigurdson's first professional job was in Colorado's Central City Opera ballet. In the late 1940s, when her parents went to work in Europe, Cushing arranged for young Patricia to enter the Sadler's Wells Ballet School, where she studied with Harjis Plucis and appeared "in the back line of the Sadler's Wells corps de ballet."

Upon her return to America, Sigurdson studied with Frederic Franklin and Leon Danielian at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo school in New York. After a tour with the Ballet Russe company, Sigurdson returned and went to the Joffrey school. "I studied with Robert Joffrey himself," she says "who was one of the greatest teachers I had the good fortune to know."

Her ambition was to become a member of American Ballet Theatre, and although auditions were tough, she was accepted from an open call. "It was a great time to enter the company," she remembers, "because it was reorganizing after a layoff, and ballets were being rehearsed by the original choreographers - Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and Harald Lander. It was also an opportunity to observe great dancers such as Alicia Alonso, Igor Youskevitch, and Alicia Markova."

She toured with ABT, performing in Cuba, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, and Rumania; in Kansas City, on an American tour, she met and eventually married musician Gary Sigurdson. They joined the faculty of the Intererlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where they left after six years to settle in suburban Chicago. Sigurdson began teaching, first in a gymnasium of a public school, and then in an abandoned schoolhouse.

The development of the not-for-profit school ran parallel to the development of the Salt Creek Ballet in 1985, a company formed of eighteen members and six apprentices, all of whom take three or more classes weekly. A high standard of dancing, large-scale productions, and world - class guest artists and choreographers have made Salt Creek Ballet a major cultural resource in the community.

Performances began when Sigurdson presented the snow scene of The Nutcracker in a local high school auditorium, with guest artists Soili Arvola and Leo Ahonen, staged by Dace Dindonis, now director of Indianapolis Ballet Theatre. The production grew to include a party scene with students of every age, including preschool tots and parents. Guest artists were engaged - George Verdak was Herr Drosselmeier; Sugar Plums and Cavaliers were Julie Kent, Robert Hill, Amy Rose, Wes Chapman, Marie-Christine Mouis, and others. Through the efforts of a dedicated board of directors, productions had professionally prepared scenery and costumes, a thirty-musician orchestra, and a live choir for the snowflake scene. This Nutcracker production is now performed annually in Hinsdale, Aurora, and Skokie, Illinois.

In addition to the Nutcracker season, the company performs several times a year and enters the annual Mid-States Regional Ballet Festival. Choreographers who have been engaged to create new works include Susan O'Connell, a former dancer with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and now a faculty member of SSC, who has proved to be a gifted choreographer.

A milestone for the company was the 1993 production of David Lichine's Graduation Ball, staged by ABT's Enrique Martinez and presented with scenery and costumes rented from ABT.

Although most of the dedicated teenagers in Salt Creek Ballet go to college after graduation from high school, there have been outstanding talents who have joined Boston Ballet, Lexington Ballet, and apprenticed to Houston Ballet. Some have enrolled as dance majors at Indiana and Butler Universities. Kathryn Berger was awarded a one-year full scholarship by the Kirov Ballet Academy in Washington, D.C. Because Sigurdson encourages talented youngsters to enter ballet competitions, Christina Salerno, winner of a Winski Ballet Competition, is now a member of Boston Ballet. Trinity Hamilton, first-prize winner at the 1994 Winski competition, is now at Butler University and won the Winski competition again in 1995.