As Stoner Winslett watches a rehearsal of her piece, “Echoing Past,” her reaction plays out both on her face and in her body. “I pretty much dance every dancer’s part with them from my chair,” she says.
“Like when I see a guy going into a double tour, I always sit up and find my center, you know?” Winslett continues. “I just try to emit positive energy to them because they work so hard in the studio and I want it to go well for them.”
Over the years, Winslett’s positive energy has built the Richmond Ballet from a small, civic company when she took over as artistic director in 1980 into the State Ballet of Virginia, an internationally celebrated professional company that has performed in New York, London and China.
Winslett was both artistic director and resident choreographer when she first developed “Echoing Past” back in 1996. It ended up being the last one-act ballet she would choreograph on her professional company and one of Richmond Ballet’s most revived pieces, with performances in 1997, 2004, 2005 in New York, 2011, 2016, and 2022.
“Echoing Past” will be staged yet again as the cornerstone of the last show of the company’s 2024-25 season, “Moving Art 2,” opening May 8.
Reviving the dance now has led to a lot of full circle moments. It was first performed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a venue Richmond Ballet returned to just this year. It was her last piece developed as company choreographer and now preparing it for staging will be her last official act as a company employee.
“I stepped down as artistic director last July 1. Over the past year, I’ve just been consulting, supposedly half-time,” Winslett says with a smile.
It wasn’t the plan for Winslett to stop regularly developing new work back in the ‘90s.
“I thought I was going to keep doing a new piece every year,” she says. “About that time my daughter was born so I had an infant and a 10-year-old at home, a lawyer husband with no clients in Richmond so he was traveling all the time, and I was trying, literally at that point, to save the company.”
She decided to flip the challenges into opportunities, inviting others to develop new works for the company: “I decided to take the glass half empty, make it half full and make a place for other people to choreograph. That’s been very satisfying.”
Since opening the doors for others, Richmond Ballet has welcomed a slew of innovative choreographers to collaborate with the company, including those behind the other two pieces on the “Moving Art 2” program.
Appropriately for the venue, Yury Yanowsky’s “Fading Creatures” draws inspiration from Salvador Dalí’s painting, “The Persistence of Memory.” “I was in a museum store in Madrid,” Yanowsky remembers. “I bought a small, cute book of Dali’s paintings and I was like, ‘Oh my god, the melting clocks!’”
Yanowsky will invoke ruminations on time with a bit of stagecraft: “There will be a series of lamps hanging on stage over the dancers and they are going to be swinging, sort of like a defining time. I think it will look very beautiful.”
Kicking off the program will be Joshua L. Peugh’s “Slump,” a piece that’s described as quirky. Certainly, the music employed is eclectic, from Klezmer music to Ella Fitzgerald. Peugh says he chooses music based on its ability to inspire people to move.
“I want the dance to come from the inside out,” Peugh explains. “It has to be something that erupts out of a dancer’s desire to move because that’s what translates to the audience I think.”
The ability Richmond Ballet’s dancers have to adapt to wildly different works is something Winslett takes pride in. As she prepares “Echoing Past,” she’s enjoying being back in the studio with them. “The dancers have been so invested,” she says. “I know they want to do it really well and I know they will.”
She’s missed working so directly with them but doesn’t have any regrets.
“There are a lot of different ways to choreograph a piece on dancers but that doesn’t compare to choreographing the life of a company, choreographing the way a company can affect a community and then, ultimately, a state and a nation,” Winslett says. “I don’t regret it at all.”
“Moving Art 2” will be performed on the Leslie Cheek theater stage at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 200 N Arthur Ashe Blvd. It opens on Thursday, May 8. Tickets and more information available at https://richmondballet.com/.
