Choreographing coast to coast

Dance Magazine, April, 1997 by Martha Ullman West

EUGENE BALLET COMPANY'S TONI PIMBLE IS A REGIONAL BALLET DIRECTOR WHO WORKS WITH COMPANIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

SOME FIVE YEARS AGO, one sunny day in April, Toni Pimble went out into Lincoln Center Plaza and, by her own account, "danced a little jig with this silly grin on my face." Pimble, artistic director of Eugene Ballet Company, had good reason to be jubilant: she had just reported for duty at New York City Ballet as one of the ten choreographers whom ballet master in chief Peter Martins had selected to contribute to the first Diamond Project, in 1992.

Unlike most of her project colleagues, Pimble was little known in New York City. The opportunity to show her work in the Big Apple, accompanied by a full orchestra and performed by City Ballet's first-class dancers, was a large part of what made this usually reserved British native, a graduate of the Elmhurst School of the Arts, want to jump for joy. "This is a tremendous opportunity for me," she said at the time of her selection. "Not only to be able to show my work in New York, but dancers of such a high technical standard can be a great inspiration."

Pimble had cofounded Eugene Ballet Company, with her former husband, Riley Grannan, in 1978. The couple used their retirement money from dancing in German opera houses in Kiel (where they met), Mannheim, and Bonn to buy the Oregon ballet school where Grannan had taken his first ballet lessons. They established the company soon after.

In their first four years in Eugene, the state's second largest city and a university town, Grannan and Pimble did it all. They designed costumes and scenery and danced in the repertory, performing the principal roles.

In 1982 both retired from the stage, though Grannan, who is now managing director of Eugene Ballet, still danced character parts from time to time. The company has doubled in size from its original dozen dancers and now tours throughout the West. (In 1994, Eugene Ballet merged with Ballet Idaho, and the artistic staff, including the dancers, is now based in Boise. The company is called Ballet Idaho when in residence in that state.)

By the time Martins extended his invitation, Pimble had already gained considerable experience as a choreographer. Her artistic vision is as culturally diverse as her adopted country; her choreographic subject matter is as broad as her interests. Furthermore, she has a highly intellectual approach to her work, doing months of research by looking at videotapes and reading about her subject matter. She has made dances about the relationships between people in works such as her Diamond Project piece, Two's Company, and in the earlier May Dances. She has put her own stamp on fairy-tale ballets such as Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Coppelia.

Among her big, evening-length works is Romeo and Juliet (1984), set to Prokofiev's bombastic twentieth-century score but choreographed to place the audience squarely in Elizabethan England. Her 1989 Cinderella is also very English, even reminiscent of Ashton's version, though Pimble says she has never seen it. Her version of A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed by Nevada Dance Theater in February.

There were also choreographic explorations of American culture; her Children of the Raven is based on Pacific Northwest Indian legends, and The Skinwalkers gives a very different treatment to Southwest Indian culture. Silent Movie deals innovatively with the early days of Hollywood; Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear is based on Ken Kesey's retelling of an Ozark folktale.

In 1992 Eugene Ballet presented a concert series, "A Celebration of the Uncommon Woman," five pieces choreographed by women to music of women composers. Her own work, Columba Aspexit, was set to a score by Hildegard of Bingen. In five minutes of sleek neoclassical dancing in a cathedral created with lighting effects by Lloyd Sobel, Pimble made a powerful statement about the traditional church's attitude toward women as either saints or sinners, with nothing in between.

"I feel I started something," Pimble says of the all-women's series. "And while there have been quite a few festivals of women's choreography since then, none of them have been accompanied by the music of women composers." (One of those programs was given by Oregon Ballet Theatre in 1994, with Pimble's Quartet in Blue presented in an evening that included work by Bebe Miller and Karole Armitage.)

By the time she received her Diamond Project commission, Pimble had built a repertory of more than thirty ballets. She still looks every inch the doe-eyed English ballerina, but she has long since traded in her pointe shoes for wrestling shoes ("Wonderful in the rehearsal studio").

Her first choreography was a tap dance, made when she was a twelve-year-old ballet student at the Elmhurst School. "I was already serious about ballet," she says. "But I was also taking tap. I think all kids should take it. It improves the sense of rhythm." While dancing in Germany, she participated in some group choreography. Her first piece for the Eugene company was for a concert version of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. Inevitably, The Nutcracker followed, as well as a host of short works, beginning in 1982 with The Firebird. (Her version of this Stravinsky classic. for which she recruited corps members from Eugene s modern dance community. was the inaugural production for the Hult Center for the Performing Arts.)