Active in Seattle - Pacific Northwest Ballet principal Manard Stewart - Cover Story

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1998 by Valerie Gladstone

When Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet made its splashy return to New York City in the fall of 1996, Manard' Stewart had no idea he would dance thirty ballets in two weeks. But when Paul Gibson injured himself one week before the City Center engagement, company directors Francia Russell and Kent Stowell knew Stewart could handle the demands--from the rigors of Balanchine to the subtleties of Mark Dendy's Symmetries--and gave him a schedule that would intimidate many a hardened performer. He came through with flying colors, winning over audiences with his sparkling clarity and gallant partnering.

A member of PNB since 1994, Stewart says that his varied dance experience gave him the confidence and stamina to take on the challenge. He started with tap at his local hometown dance school in DeKalb, Illinois. "I was a spooky kid," he admits. "Any time I put on music, I started to dance." Coming from an athletic family--his father was a gymnast and his mother a physical education teacher--didn't make it easy to confess that it was ballet that attracted him, not baseball or football.

"My mother is a feminist," explains Stewart, "and part of her resistance to ballet came from how cruel she thought pointe shoes were and how inappropriate she felt its overidealization of women was." But after a few years of tap ("I must have been one of the worst tap dancers") and with his school's ballet teachers begging him to come to classes, his parents finally gave in. Stewart thinks they did so "because they saw me doing well in school, not getting involved with drugs, and figured what I was doing must be good for me." Everything about the art form pleased him except having to wear tights. Sensitive to his self-consciousness, his instructors allowed him to substitute shorts during the early years.

Stewart started dance studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb while still in high school and moved on to American Ballet Theatre's second company by the time he was twenty. The Cleveland Ballet came next. "When I joined the National Ballet of Canada in 1984," he continues, "they told me that I had been impeccably trained." Stewart credits Erik Bruhn, with whom he studied for three years at that company, with stretching his limits. At first, he was intimidated: "I thought Erik's classes demanded more than was humanly possible. I thought of him as a god."

At the National Ballet of Canada, Stewart also got his first taste of modern ballet in Robert Desrosiers's Blue Snake and liked it. More recently, he has made guest appearances with the White Oak Dance Project, performing works by Mark Morris. "Sometimes I think I'm a modern dancer trapped in the body of a ballet dancer," he confesses half-jokingly. In the future he hopes to have more opportunities to let that trapped dancer escape.

Further challenges came when he joined Ballet Chicago, where director Daniel Duell introduced him to Balanchine and an eclectic repertory. Duell has nothing but praise for Stewart, whom he first saw in a 1988 performance of Ruth Page's annual Nutcracker in Chicago. "Manard's performance of the Spanish solo stood out for its beauty of line, classic proportions, and clear executions," he says. "I thought, He's the kind of dancer I would love to have at Ballet Chicago." Within a year Stewart was in the company and performing a wide variety of roles. He scored in such contemporary works as David Parsons's A Hairy Night on Bald Mountain, but he really shone in Balanchine. Of Stewart's Apollo Duell says, "You can see the choreography and the music when he dances."

In Chicago he was challenged to do the exact opposite of traditional ballet, steeped in Bournonville and the Russian style, that he had done in Canada. He says, "Everything was different--where you hold your weight, the way you use your feet, your port de bras. I had to rethink pirouettes. Dan was incredibly patient with me."

There was no difficulty in being patient with so hardworking a dancer, Duell recalls: "Manard was an inspiration to the company because of his commitment. He would try and try to perform some step until he was exhausted. I've rarely seen someone work so hard to make himself better. And the hard work paid off in clean, unmannered lines."

The only thing the financially plagued Ballet Chicago could not supply was a secure base. The invitation from Pacific Northwest Ballet was, for a dancer as adventurous as Stewart, the perfect match. PNB had a repertory of seventy works--including Stowell, Balanchine, Petipa, Antony Tudor, Glen Tetley, and Paul Taylor--that would give him the opportunities he desired to expand his repertory. It also has a worldwide reputation and a state-of-the-art facility, the Phelps Center, as its home.

After so much moving around, he happily put down roots in Seattle. He likes to garden and worries about his tomato plants when the company is on tour. The only thing he had ever enjoyed about being on the road was maid service. "I've always made sure I've done other things than just dance," he says. Besides gardening, he sings in a church choir and does volunteer work with AIDS Patients.