Spring in her step Legendary prima ballerina Evelyn Hart returns to RWB for Four Seasons role By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:35 PM CDT Monday, Apr. 27, 2026

For Evelyn Hart, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet will always be home.

The legendary prima ballerina and former RWB principal dancer will return to the Centennial Concert Hall stage this week for the 2025/26 season finale, reprising her role as Winter Woman in James Kudelka’s The Four Seasons. (It’s a reunion of sorts; fellow RWB company alumni Alexander Gamayunov, CindyMarie Small and Dmitri Dovgoselets will also be performing in the work.)

“I keep waking up every day, pinching myself, thinking I’m so lucky. It feels, literally, as if I’ve just been transported back in time,” says Hart, 70, who joined the company 50 years ago, in 1976. (And speaking of long-serving alumni, this show is the last in the final season to be programmed by former artistic director André Lewis, who was recently honoured with the title of artistic director emeritus for his half-century at the company, 30 of those years at its helm.)

The Four Seasons, which uses the Vivaldi masterwork of the same name to tell the story of the four seasons in a man’s life, is a special ballet for Hart. It’s the work that got her back onstage after she’d officially hung up her pointe shoes for good in 2006 (Aug. 23, 2006, to be exact, because a ballerina never forgets that date; these days, she performs in soft shoe).

Kudelka, former artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, invited the Toronto-born dancer to come back to Winnipeg to perform Winter Woman in 2014.

“It opened up a whole new world for me. I realized that I love being in the studio with James. It’s inspiring, it’s enlightening, it’s fun. I mean, sometimes it’s serious — it’s very serious — it’s challenging, it’s all of those things,” says Hart, who would go on to perform in the world première of Kudelka’s Vespers in 2017. “It’s just wonderful to be in the room with someone who has such a clear vision.”

Some things, however, don’t change. She remains a ballet purist — “pink tights and pointe shoes are my thing,” she says — and young dancers, take heart: even Evelyn Hart gets pre-performance jitters.

“The thing about performance is that every single performance is new. There’s always that same anxiety, I think, or worry, or stage nerves. There’s always that. You just learn how to deal with it better and better and better,” she says.

“I was always considered difficult because I always preferred to rehearse more than less, because I always knew that once I got onstage, for me, there was so much distraction with lights and with the audience and with nerves and with the unknown. The more you can put it into a place in the back of your head that can take over, that’s the best.”

The Four Seasons also includes the Winnipeg debut of Cameron Fraser-Monroe’s Segatem (pronounced shAY-ga-tum), which made its world première at New York City Center as part of the invitation-only Fall for Dance Festival in 2024.

Fraser-Monroe, who is an alumni of the RWB School, has had his head down in the studio focused on this week’s run, but seeing the work in dress rehearsal rekindled that feeling of anticipation.

“It was taking me back to sitting in the concert hall at New York City Center and going, ‘Wow, yes, there’s a lot in the day to day, but there is also a real history to this work and a real kind of legacy that’s expanding around it. I think it’s easy to forget in the day to day, because it’s just what we do in rehearsal, but when it premièred in 2024 it was really an exciting moment.”

Šɛgatəm’s première at Fall for Dance was the first time the RWB had performed in NYC since 1979, and the fact it was an Indigenous story told by Indigenous creators that took the company there is significant.

Fraser-Monroe always works with Indigenous designers and composers on his commissions, including Polaris Music Prize-winning tenor-composer Jeremy Dutcher, a member of the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, who did the score for this work.

“It really just speaks to the attention that my work with the RWB is attracting, and First Nations creation and collaboration more broadly in Canada,” Fraser-Monroe says. “So I really hope that the RWB will continue to work with Indigenous artists, because they’ve received great benefit from working in partnership, in relation, with Indigenous artists.”

Fraser-Monroe is thrilled that Segatəm — which means “to lift someone up” in Ayajuthem, the language of the Tla’amin Nation, of which Fraser-Monroe is a member, and is about a leader who must learn to rely on his community — is being presented as part of a triple bill in Winnipeg.

“This is one of my favourite ways to present dance, because you’re able to approach with three different perspectives on work, on ballet, on dance,” he says.

“There’s something for everyone in the evening, and there’s always something to contrast. And I think the most exciting piece of a triple bill is the conversation that can occur. I love going to the theatre for many reasons, but the conversation after … is maybe my second-favourite part, and a triple bill is built for a meaty conversation.”

Rounding out that conversation is the world première of Odyssey by American choreographer Dwight Rhoden, co-founder of Complexions Contemporary Ballet in New York City.

“It’s an abstract articulation of what’s going on in the world,” he says of work, which he describes as athletic and kinetic, with lots of pas de deux.

“So it does have a broad view of how things in the world are sometimes in conflict, how you can see something so gorgeous and beautiful and moving and in the next breath you see something so chaotic and brutal and not so nice to see.” (Anyone who has ever scrolled through social media will know that sensation well.)

Working with the RWB dancers was a pleasure, he says.

“They so embraced the work from Day 1, and they are in it, in it, in it in a great way,” Rhoden says. “It was a bit of a surprise, not because I didn’t think the RWB was a great company, it’s just that I hadn’t experienced it.

“The company isn’t a cookie-cutter company. There are a lot of different dancers with different strengths, different bodies, different qualities. For me, that made it all the more interesting.”

For Hart, seeing the current company dancers in the studio makes her wish she could go back and do it all over again. But she’s also grateful she never truly stopped.

“I realized at one point I kept panicking, because I kept thinking, I need to do something else. I need to find another path. And then I thought, you know, I have to stop that, because I’m going to be a dancer until the day I die. I may not be dancing, but I will be a dancer until the day I die.”

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