Artistic Spotlight

Bruce Simpson / Louisville Ballet

The Three Musketeers

Louisville Ballet is preparing to celebrate six decades of history. Since 1952, the company has contributed approximately six generations of dancers to the world, commissioned a number of new works, and entertained and educated hundreds of thousands of us through their work. Much of that history was made under the leadership of Alun Jones and Helen Starr, who served as co-artistic directors for nearly half of the life of the company. With the new century came new leadership to Louisville Ballet. Bruce Simpson, like Jones and Starr, received his early training close to home in Great Britain. He then spent most of his career in South Africa before relocating to Louisville via Fort Worth, Texas. The ballet industry, especially in its American form, is still a business. For most of its life, the Louisville Ballet has operated with an artistic director who makes all artistic decisions and a lateral business executive responsible for the financial health of the company – ticket sales, insurance matters, etc. With the departure last fall of CEO Dwight Hutton, the Ballet’s board of directors turned to Simpson for help. Since last December he has served successfully as both the business and artistic leader of the organization. From both perspectives, Simpson is conservative in the original sense of the word – he is unwilling to promise anything he is not certain can be delivered at the standard he has set for the Louisville Ballet, so he is holding off on the details of the celebrations planned for next April’s sixtieth anniversary. But he is happy to talk about Louisville Ballet’s upcoming season that opens in September with André Prokovsky’s The Three Musketeers – set to the music of Verdi as arranged by Guy Woolfenden.


BS: The Three Musketeers is a really interesting ballet to set. People often think you have a great idea for a ballet and you just do it. But there are many circumstances to consider, both in and out of the theatre.
SD: It is two years this month since the creator of this ballet, André Prokovsky, passed away. You were a long-time friend and colleague of his.
BS: I first worked with André in 1968 as a dancer and we had a relationship for many years. I loved doing his ballets. He created ballets that dancers love to do because they are so human and, at the same time, very technically demanding. He was one of the best choreographers in the Post WWII period to write full-length theatre stories in dance.
SD: That’s a pretty exclusive club.
BS: As an artistic director, when I go out looking for a full-length ballet that I can afford and the audience will want to sit through for two and one-half hours, I can tell you they’re few and far between. Born in Paris with Russian heritage, André was passionate about opera. He traveled the world as a dancer and started his own company, The New London Ballet, with then-wife Galina Samsova in the early ’70s.
SD: He really began to choreograph then.
BS: He had an extraordinary, highly developed sense of theatre. When he was commissioned to do Anna Karenina for The Australian Ballet just as they were moving into the new Sydney Opera House, he discovered there was a wing space issue – the wings weren’t wide enough for some of the set pieces.
SD: Was that significant to the story line?
BS: Well, she gets run over by a train at the end of the ballet and there was no room for the train in the wings. So at the premiere and during the first Australian performances, it was challenging. The audience sat there enjoying the ballet and when they got to the end of the scene, they had to sit in the dark for two minutes while people moved the scenery around. André was particularly frustrated by this.
SD: Let me add that this was his first major commission. The Three Musketeers, also for Australia, was his second.
BS: Yes, and the ballet was an extraordinary overall success. I danced the ballet every second year for most of my career. When the Australian Ballet came back a couple of years later, he thought, “Well, I’ve written a tragic ballet about a woman; so let’s flip that and do a ballet for guys that is a comedy.” The Three Musketeers was the perfect foil for that. But this time during the design process, he created a ballet where nothing goes off the stage sideways. It all goes up by ropes into the fly loft above the stage.
SD: I’m happy you explained that. For those of us in the audience, decisions like that can seem incomprehensible.
BS: It really helps to have that little bit of background on the challenges the company and the choreographer were facing at that time. There is a history to every ballet, and one of the things I love about my profession is the way these stories move across time and across the planet. We did Anna Karenina in South Africa. When we moved from our reasonably large theatre, the Civic Theatre, in Johannesburg to the massive State Theatre in Pretoria, some of the sets and costumes were too small for that huge stage. Anna Karenina was one of the ballets we had to rebuild, so we sold the smaller version to Ballet West in Salt Lake City, who subsequently sold it to Tulsa Ballet. When we did Anna Karenina here in Louisville, I called Marcello in Tulsa and arranged to rent the sets and costumes. As I looked at them in the costume shop, I found my name in some of the costumes from when I danced it in the mid-’70s!
SD: I imagine those links must be even closer in Europe than they are between Louisville and South Africa.
BS: I think of Helen Starr, Alun Jones and myself: where we worked in the United Kingdom; the people who left Russia during the revolution and came to work in England; the ballet masters and ballet mistresses of the Paris Opera who escaped the Franco-Prussian War by going to St. Petersburg at the time of Petipa (1870-71). We can actually trace, person by person by person, our tradition through people. Not through letters or documents, but through people, back to the original Paris Opera production of Coppélia in 1870. It’s a kind of connection most people don’t really understand. You cannot do ballet without that kind of intellectual property.
SD: Ballet is in many ways an oral tradition.
BS: Absolutely! For example, when I was negotiating and trying to choose a designer and a choreographer for the new Brown-Forman Nutcracker two years ago, a few things were really important to me. The first one was that through having the same sense of humor, we would all view our world in a similar way. The three of us – designer Peter Cazalet from South Africa, choreographer Val Caniparoli from the San Francisco Ballet, and I – all take our art form incredibly seriously and ourselves not at all. That dynamic allowed us to approach the production with the required light-hearted spirit. The way we functioned during that process of a three-year collaboration was really important.
SD: In that process, how long did it take you to cement your point of view?
BS: The portfolio of what we were trying to achieve with the ballet was set the first time we sat down and had a conversation. We all three had strong, clear opinions but a mutual understanding of what had to be achieved.
SD: Tell me about Marshall Magoon’s role in the Brown-Forman Nutcracker.
BS: Marshall Magoon was the illusionist for that production. When people design a new Nutcracker, they usually leave the magic out because they don’t have a budget for it and that aspect ends up being something less substantial than you want. From the very beginning, in talking to Val and Peter, we thought it was crucial to have a really good illusionist in at the beginning and get that right. Taking that back to something like The Three Musketeers– by the very nature of André Prokovsky’s having worked with stages all over the world, he was sympathetic to artistic directors. He really knew where he could be flexible and where to draw absolute boundaries to maintain dramatic effect and artistic integrity. So when we put something like The Three Musketeers on the stage here, I really feel quite easy about it because it’s been proven in hundreds of theatres around the world these past thirty-odd years. The only risk then is to do it well.
SD: The Kentucky Center is doing some work in the ceiling of Whitney Hall. Will that create any challenges for you?
BS: We don’t have any issues with that at all. We work very closely with The Kentucky Center, and they’re absolutely fantastic in doing stuff between resident group productions. I’ll give you a perfect example: When we designed the new Brown-Forman Nutcracker, we wanted to develop an environment that went from the tiny work shop on one side of the stage and gradually grew bigger until the second act where it becomes a universal space without external dimensions – much like the Christmas tree grows in Act I. The reason I wanted that is because people are going to be coming to see this for fifteen years. So we had to find a way to change the environment without spending an extraordinary amount of money. The solution was light. It may look completely different in ten years, but we have an environment that’s changeable without having to redesign it. We knew that the computer board for the lighting system at The Kentucky Center was being considered for an upgrade. Our lighting designer Mike Ford and I then created a design that was able to utilize the new system. When Frankfort gave The Kentucky Center a grant to upgrade 700 electric circuits in the stage system, we were able to capitalize and light the second act two years ago in a way that we hadn’t expected to utilize until 2014.
SD: In addition to artistic director, you have now added the title executive director to your business card. Is that a new model for you?
BS: It’s not something I’ve ever done before personally, but there are some wonderful examples of the artistic director successfully doing both jobs. For many years, Cincinnati Ballet’s Victoria Morgan has been artistic director and CEO. Dennis Nahat in San Jose/Silicon Valley is another excellent example. The general feeling is that it depends on the environment. I’ve always had excellent relationships with my executive directors in what can be a challenging situation.
SD: Where does the tension come from in that relationship?
BS: Often the artistic director wants to do something creatively and the executive director says, “We can’t afford it.” I’m kind of selfish in that I don’t want to plan a season and be told in April that we can’t afford it. Then I spend three months trying to completely redesign a season. It affects absolutely everything. I’m not going to say the extra work hasn’t been stressful, spiritually and physically. At the same time, I’m always up for learning new stuff. It’s one of the reasons I came to America ten years ago. When I left Africa, I could have gone home to Scotland to my own culture and been very comfortable. But at the age of fifty, that’s exactly what I did not want.
SD: What were you hoping to learn here?
BS: I wanted to be in an environment that was the complete antithesis of everything I was used to. A good example of that is I had worked my whole life in an egalitarian society in which government had funded the arts…you never had to worry about it. Coming to the United States – where everything artistic is philanthropic and every non-profit has to go out there and find the money to survive – is a lifetime of learning that I’ve gone through in ten years.
SD: What insights have you gained from the CEO experience so far?
BS: It has forced me to take the foundation of my life skills of forty years in the industry and apply it in completely different and new ways – and still pay attention to what it means to be a dancer. The integrity of that is not to betray the integrity of the classical ballet process. I’ve had fantastic support in that I have colleagues all over – from the Royal Danish, to the Bolshoi in Moscow, to the Hong Kong Ballet – that I can call for a discussion about any given aspect of the industry. But I think we all realize that with the downturn in the economy, our world has changed forever.
SD: Do you expect this to be the model going forward at Louisville Ballet?
BS: I’ve no idea. From November to April, we went through a rigorous internal process, completely reexamining how we do business on every level from the box office to the stage. We looked closely at audience preferences and reviewed our price points. Part of the consensus from that process was the need to have a very strong staff in this economy – not just the administrative staff, but dancers, wardrobe, designers, everything. For example, Mike Harris, our production director, has been here 36 years; Mike Ford, our lighting director, has been here for 36 years; Dan Fedie, our costume master, has been here 20 years. We have employees around here with extraordinary intellectual property – you name it, they know it. On the other side, you need really strong people in finance, marketing and development. We’ve been reorganizing while at the same time maintaining the quality of the product we put on stage. At the moment, I’m okay. I’ve learned much that I never wanted to learn. At the same time, it’s been really interesting to have to learn it. I know, for instance, that it takes ten years to make a dancer. Having done this new job since Christmas, I now have a greater empathy for the frustrations of the executive director.
SD: The dancers are coming back this month to prepare for the sixtieth anniversary season. Anything special planned?
BS: Sure. Like other arts groups in the city, we never know what our real budget is until the end of May. It’s the same time that many of the major funders make their commitments for the year, so I was not prepared, in the name of fiscal responsibility, to contract choreographers and ballets for the sixtieth anniversary next April until I was sure what the final budget would be. We knew we could do The Three Musketeers, Cinderella and the Brown-Forman Nutcracker. Yes, I’ve commissioned a ballet for the Brown Theatre next April. But I’m keeping my cards close to my chest until I’m absolutely certain I can do it. I will say, however, that those performances will not disappoint!

For more information on Louisville Ballet and to purchase tickets, go to louisvilleballet.org or call 502.58DANCE.