Coda to ballet career

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This article was published 23/02/2023 (928 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Whenever anyone asks André Lewis how he’s doing, he’ll invariably give the same answer: “I’m living the dream.”

Lewis, 68, has been living the dream at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for nearly 50 years, first as a student, then as a company dancer, then as artistic director and chief executive officer. Now, he’s on the precipice of a new dream: in the spring of 2025, Lewis will step down from his position at the RWB after nearly 30 years at its artistic helm.

Lewis was a little emotional as he told his staff the news during a Thursday-morning town hall at the RWB’s Graham Avenue studios. “The reality hasn’t hit me yet,” he told the Free Press afterwards. The company is currently rehearsing for Swan Lake, so the strains of Tchaikovsky fill the air around him. “It’s the right thing to do. I feel that I’ve given it my full attention.”

The RWB will be recruiting two successors, as Lewis’s role will be split into two: executive director and artistic director. The RWB board is hoping to have a new ED in place by this summer and a new AD by 2024. Both will involve an international search.

Lewis is not retiring, however. “I don’t use that term,” he says. “I say stepping down because I wanted to do other things. Exactly what, I don’t know. But I have two years to reflect on that.”

He is hoping for something with a little less pressure and responsibility. When Lewis became CEO in addition to artistic director in 2018, he couldn’t have known that two years later he would be leading the organization through a global pandemic that put the performing arts on indefinite pause. The company was tasked with pirouetting in new directions, experimenting with virtual innovations on a centuries-old medium.

But then, Lewis has always been something of a maverick. Born in Gatineau, Que., Lewis began his ballet studies in Ottawa before being invited into the RWB School’s Professional Division in 1975. He joined the company as a corps de ballet member and was promoted to soloist in 1982.

Under the mentorship of the late visionary Arnold Spohr — widely credited from bringing the RWB out of obscurity and onto the international stage during his own 30-year tenure as artistic director — Lewis joined the artistic staff in 1985. Following his retirement from dance in 1990, Lewis was appointed associate artistic director.

Like Spohr, Lewis had big aspirations for the RWB and, when he assumed the artistic director role in 1996, he got right to work. In addition to presenting beautifully mounted classics such as Romeo & Juliet and Swan Lake, Lewis was also interested in commissioning full-length, contemporary works from emerging and established choreographers alike — beginning, in 1998, with Mark Godden’s Dracula, one of the first modern full-length story ballets to enter the company’s repertoire. The commissions that followed — Godden’s The Magic Flute (2003), Jorden Morris’s Moulin Rouge (2009), Twyla Tharp’s The Princess & The Goblin (2012), to name a slight few — have become synonymous with the RWB.

Lewis also commissioned a new Canadian-themed Nutcracker in 1999 that has gone on to be a bona fide holiday tradition for Winnipeggers.

“It’s done extremely well for us,” he says. “We used to have a (John) Neumeier version which did not celebrate Christmas, which did not have children, and we could only do it every other year. This new one was really important for the RWB. So I’m very proud it.”

He’s proud, too, of the timely, conversation-sparking ballets he’s also brought to the stage, including Lila York’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in 2013, and Godden’s Going Home Star – Truth and Reconciliation in 2014. Going Home Star, which is about the intergenerational trauma experienced by Indian Residential School survivors and their families — was a landmark ballet for the then 75-year-old company.

“I’m particularly proud of Going Home Star – Truth and Reconciliation” Lewis says.

The 2023/24 season, which will be announced in a few weeks, will be one of celebration. But for now, Lewis is relishing the quieter, every day moments — including his end-of-work ritual.

“When I leave for home from my office, I go all the way down the hallway. I see all of the studios — 405, 406, 409 — and all the activity. Then I go down to the second floor and see all the activity in the second-floor studios. I say goodbye to people.

“I won’t get to do that forever, so I might as well take advantage of it while I can.”

He’s living the dream for a little bit longer.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.con