Francia Russell: holding Balanchine's torch high - former New York City solist's dedication to producing the works of George Balanchine with her company, Pacific Northwest Ballet

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1994 by Martha Ullman West

Francia Russell is directing Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet in a stage rehearsal of Balanchine's Serenade. The rehearsal is not going well--several corps dancers are out with injuries, and advanced students have had to replace them. The company is to perform the ballet for the first time in five years that evening.

A tall, slender figure in black slacks and top, with a paisley scarf draped casually around her shoulders and long red hair pulled onto the top of her head, Russell keeps time by slapping her hand against her thigh. Uncharacteristically, she is about to lose her temper.

"No-o-o--God!" she says, stopping the rehearsal. "You're not there. You're not together. You're nothing! And there isn't time to give you notes."

Kent Stowell, Russell's husband since 1965 and fellow artistic director of PNB since 1977, takes over the stage to rehearse his new Carmina Burana while Russell takes a breather. "I don't know why I did that," she says, sinking onto a couch in the lobby of the Seattle Opera House. "It doesn't do any good, and it's not their fault. I guess I'm nervous. I don't know why."

Russell believes that a ballet mistress and teacher must nurture her dancers; she is intensely proud of the dancers in her company, of their technical skill as performers as well as their growth as artists. As one of the first ballet mistresses appointed by Balanchine, she has little reason to be jittery about setting his ballets, especially on dancers who have been trained by her and others to absorb his movement into the marrow of their bones. "I use notes, video, and muscle memory, as well as the recollections of others," she says.

With these tools she has staged more than a hundred productions all over the world, including Theme and Variations at the Kirov in 1989, the first full-length Balanchine work performed by that company. Of the twenty-five Balanchine ballets in PNB's repertoire, Russell has staged seventeen; she has earned critical praise from the most exacting of the New York City critics, who nevertheless have expressed some surprise that the choreographer's works can be successfully--never mind accurately--performed so far away from their city of origin.

It is an attitude that makes Russell impatient: "I resent the pats on the head we get from the East Coast, as if we can't be serious because we're not in New York."

Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1938 and grew up in a family that was serious about the arts. When her sister began taking dancing lessons Russell's father, a writer of historical fiction who had also sung opera, decided that seven-year-old Francia should take them too. "I had long legs, nice feet, and was excruciatingly shy," she says. "But I enjoyed dancing."

Until the family, which had moved to San Francisco. went to Europe a few years later, Russell took classes at the San Francisco Ballet School, beginning training that she now feels was inconsistent and scattershot. In Paris the young girl had private lessons from Kschessinska, an experience she recalls more for its historical value than for any learning of technique.

"She taught in her apartment, wearing high-heeled mules," Russell says of Kschessinksa, "and the Grand Duke was there. I don't suppose I learned anything much. Then we moved to London so I could go to the Royal Ballet School, but they turned me down. They said, based on my father's height, which was six feet two inches, that I would be too tall; my toes were too long, and they advised me to give up any hope of a career in classical ballet."

The twelve-year-old was devastated by the rejection, but, as Russell says has happened so often in her life, "my greatest disappointment led to the greatest good fortune, because I then studied with Vera Volkova."

In her simple, elegant office in PNB's superb new building, Russell takes a framed photograph of the ballerina off the antique table that serves as her desk. "I only studied with her for a year," she says, "because we couldn't get the papers to stay in London. But we had a very special relationship." Eventually, when she was fourteen, the family migrated to New York, where she studied with Benjamin Harkarvy and at the schools of American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey. "I didn't like City Ballet," Russell recalls. "But I didn't get into Ballet Theatre because Lucia Chase said I was too tall and too thin. My idol was Alonso, but my parents wouldn't allow me to go to Cuba, so I went to SAB."

Once again disappointment led to good fortune, and the dancer's leggy, five-foot-six-inch body, pretty feet, and long toes worked to her advantage. After she had spent three short weeks in class, Balanchine took her into the company. The year was 1956, when Russell says her dance education really began and she learned, as she told Francis Mason, to stretch her body to the ultimate: "It felt wonderful to dance in Balanchine's ballets."

In six years Russell progressed from corps member to soloist at New York City Ballet, and danced in such jewels of the Balanchine repertoire as Swan Lake, Liebeslieder Walzer and, above all, Agon.