Starting off on the right foot New AD has big plans for Royal Winnipeg Ballet By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:24 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 26, 2025

One gets the sense that nothing gets by Christopher Stowell.

The new artistic director of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is in a studio on Graham Avenue, coaching his company dancers in an afternoon rehearsal. They are working on Stowell’s own adaptation of The Sleeping Beauty, which won’t be on the Centennial Concert Hall stage until March, and he is watching them intently. Feet placement, arm lines — he sees it all.

“Put one paw down before the other one instead of both at the same time,” he advises Puss in Boots on some catlike choreography.

It’s a small detail, but those are the kind he has a keen eye for. Besides, he’s right: instant improvement.

“I have been really rolling up my sleeves and working with the dancers on a really individual level, and also really getting down to refinement of both fundamentals and details,” says the former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer.

We’re sitting in his office on Graham Avenue that, until just a few months ago, was inhabited by André Lewis, who was the artistic director of the RWB for 30 years.

Stowell, 59, was announced as Lewis’s successor in January, following an extensive nine-month international search that attracted candidates from Canada, the United States, Australia and Europe.

It’s a new era for the RWB, and Stowell knows Winnipeg is eager to see which direction “the new guy at the ballet,” as he’s congenially been referred to, will take the 86-year-old company.

But what he’s feeling isn’t pressure. It’s excitement.

“One thing that’s on my mind is not wanting to miss out on the window of time where everyone’s really paying attention to the organization and expecting some change and transformation — but also not pushing so fast that it feels like, ‘What’s this guy doing?’” he says.

“I think — I hope — that my enthusiasm is hopefully inspiring or just encouraging, that it’s about excitement and not about change for change’s sake. Everything is about the future of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and what’s best for the organization.”

The 2025/26 season, which begins Oct. 9 at the Centennial Concert Hall with the Manitoba debut of Loughlan Prior’s Hansel & Gretel, is the last to be curated by Lewis. The 2026/27 season will be the first to be entirely Stowell programmed and, while he won’t divulge specifics — seasons are planned well in advance — he has a vision for what he’d like to see moving forward.

“I think – I hope – that my enthusiasm is hopefully inspiring or just encouraging, that it’s about excitement and not about change for change’s sake.”

“I would like to not have a formula to the season. Now, that’s not to say that André didn’t understand a really good formula for many, many years. We’ve sort of agreed as an organization that we’re going to take some risks and not stick to the formula and just see what happens,” Stowell says.

That might look like more mixed-repertoire evenings and perhaps fewer narrative ballets.

“Not that I don’t love them, but it’s my belief that to get more people in, we need to be selling the brand of the organization rather than the specific title of the work,” he says.

Stowell would like to see the company perform outside the concert hall more often, and perform more often in general. He would also like to make more use of the Founders’ Studio, the RWB’s 220-seat black box theatre at 380 Graham Ave., and he’s looking forward to a lobby renovation that will create a more welcoming space that further connects the RWB campus to downtown.

But how the company dances is just as important to him as what and where the company dances. To that end, Stowell hasn’t been spending too much time behind a desk since he started the job on June 1. He’s been in the studio, working closely with the dancers.

“We’ve basically been working for six weeks on how I want us to dance, and now we’re going to apply all of that to Sleeping Beauty,” he says. “You should talk to some dancers, but I feel like people are really, really embracing — and hungry for — this level of detail and discussion of how best to achieve what’s possible in their bodies, that kind of thing.”

Corps de ballet member Kyra Soo certainly is.

“I thrive on strong, clear direction, and he’s definitely been giving us that,” she says.

“Sometimes when you have some creative freedom, it’s harder to make a decision on what you want to do because there’s so many options. But when you have a bit more direction, like he’s been giving us, and helpful suggestions for technique and artistry for Sleeping Beauty, it’s been a great new experience overall.”

Soo says Stowell is demanding in the best way.

“He commands that respect, and you want to be able to show that you are able to rise to the challenge because he’s one to always ask for more.”

Principal dancer Stephan Azulay, who has been with the company since 2017, has been impressed with what he’s seen so far — especially after the two-week intensive working on The Sleeping Beauty.

“I have to say, the company looked very strong after those two weeks of rehearsal, probably the strongest I’ve ever seen in a classical ballet rehearsal. With any transition, we’re learning what he likes and what he wants, but I think the energy is good,” he says.

“A new leader brings a fresh perspective, and it allows everyone to have a little reset of their own.”

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Stowell was born in New York City to Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, who were both dancers at the New York City Ballet before taking on top artistic leadership positions at the Frankfurt Ballet.

But Stowell didn’t grow up wanting to be a ballet dancer.

“I thought I wanted to be a scenery and costume designer. I loved all the trappings of the theatre. My parents were lucky in that they could flop me in the corner and I wouldn’t say anything for five hours.”

When his family moved back to America from Europe in the late 1970s — his parents became the founding artistic directors of the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle — Stowell had his first taste of a Christmastime Nutcracker production, which he says isn’t as common in Europe, and certainly not one with so many children in it.

“I was incredibly lucky in that I had such an interesting, varied and much bigger career as a dancer than I had ever imagined.”

He saw all those kids onstage in their costumes under the lights, and a switch was flipped: he wanted to be up there, too.

“And my parents said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to study ballet if you want to do that. That was the beginning,” he says.

After completing his training at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and the School of American Ballet, he joined the San Francisco Ballet in 1985, promoted to principal dancer in 1990. He would dance with the SFB for 16 years, touring the world and working with some of ballet’s leading contemporary choreographers, including Mark Morris, William Forsythe, David Bintley and James Kudelka.

“I was incredibly lucky in that I had such an interesting, varied and much bigger career as a dancer than I had ever imagined,” he says.

Stowell also appeared in almost every George Balanchine ballet performed by the San Francisco Ballet. (Soo has Balanchine on her repertoire wishlist, knowing her new boss’s Balanchine bona fides.)

Stowell was quite literally raised on Balanchine. The master choreographer was artistic director of the New York City Ballet, which he co-founded, when Stowell’s parents were dancers there. Stowell recently told Q’s Tom Power that Balanchine was one of the first to meet Stowell after he was born and Balanchine said, “‘Not as bad as I expected.’”

By the time Stowell was 34, he started noticing changes in his body.

“I think I realized that maintaining the level that I had been at, continuing to do really athletic parts, was starting to become challenging,” he says.

He decided to do one last season and retire on his terms in 2001. After closing that chapter of his career, Stowell took some time to pursue his other interests beyond dance.

“I love travelling. I took some classes at Berkeley on creative writing, specifically about food and memory. I studied opera directing. I just did all this stuff.”

Almost exactly a year after Stowell retired from the stage, he got a phone call encouraging him to apply for the directorship of Oregon Ballet Theatre in Portland and made the grand jeté back into dance.

Here was an opportunity to elevate other dancers from a leadership position, to set them up to have the kind of fulfilling career in dance that he did.

“I was tired of worrying about myself: my body, my injuries, all my stuff. I was tired of thinking about myself. So, the idea of thinking about other people was really, really attractive. How can I help others have satisfying experiences?” says Stowell, who took over the artistic helm of Oregon Ballet Theatre in 2003 and remained artistic director until 2012.

Yuka Iino Capizzi was a principal dancer at Oregon Ballet Theatre during his tenure, beginning with the company the same year. They’ve maintained a strong working relationship; she was the original Aurora in his adaptation of The Sleeping Beauty, and she came to Winnipeg this summer to work with the RWB.

“What I remember about him that struck me the most is that he had a very high and clear standard, but that was in a way that never felt pressuring to me or the dancers to do it this way or that way,” she says.

“Instead, he really guided me and made me want to question, what is my standard? How do I want to dance? And, on my own, made me want to become better or grow.”

After Oregon, Stowell was assistant to the artistic director of San Francisco Ballet from 2014 to 2015, and served as a juror for international competitions in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Beijing, China, as well as a guest répétiteur/teacher with such organizations as Hong Kong Ballet, the Royal Ballet School, Dutch National Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, Guangzhou Ballet and New York City Ballet.

“So, the idea of thinking about other people was really, really attractive. How can I help others have satisfying experiences?”

In 2017, ballet brought him to Canada. Stowell was named the first associate artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, a position he held until 2022, working alongside former prima ballerina and artistic director emerita Karen Kain.

Every organization he’s worked with has provided learning experiences he’s carried to the next one, he says.

“I was very enthusiastic but naive when I took over Oregon Ballet Theatre. I was only 36 years old, and I had the idea, the simplistic idea, that if you make better art, everything will be fine. Better art is key, but you have to do a bunch of other stuff, too,” he says.

He’s a self-professed geeky ballet teacher and coach who would spend all day, every day in the studio if he could. But he’s learned that being the face of the organization means putting in face time with the community, as he’s made a priority of doing in Winnipeg.

“And that’s not a duty — I actually want to do that.”

Stowell and his husband, Chris (who is Canadian), spent the spring and summer trying to get out into their new city as much as they possibly could, and have been making fast friends. They’ve closed on a house and are putting down roots. They both find Winnipeg warm and welcoming.

“Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows about the RWB. Whether they go all the time or not is another story, but everyone is proud of having a world-class ballet company here,” he says.

“It just feels like it’s made my job easier to walk into this civic pride around the organization I’m leading now.”

Azulay has been pleasantly surprised by how many people have told him they’ve already met his new AD.

“That’s good to see. That’s something that, in my opinion, is really important to RWB, to connect with Winnipeg communities and branch out a bit,” he says.

Stowell loves the fact that the RWB has such a storied history; it’s one of the things that brought him here, one of the things that made him take notice of the company when he first encountered RWB as a teenage ballet student. But he’s also motivated and inspired by all the possibilities that remain ahead of it.

“So much can happen with this organization. So much already has, and I don’t feel like there are limitations,” he says.

“I really feel like this organization is poised to do a lot of exciting things — and I feel a great sense of energy, here in the organization and in the community, wanting us to be successful and fresh.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca