A very personal RWB rollout On theme of Living the Dream, next season is work of and ode to CEO André Lewis’s 50-year career By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Tuesday, Apr. 4, 2023

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A new season at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet always bears the fingerprints of André Lewis.

But the upcoming 2023/24 season will also double as a celebration of the longtime artistic director and CEO. In February, Lewis announced he will be stepping down from that role in 2025 after 50 years with the company, beginning as a RWB School Professional Division student in 1975, then as a company dancer.

The season’s theme is Living the Dream, in honour of Lewis’ half-century ballet career — and a wink to his signature reply whenever anyone asks him how he’s doing. Every piece selected for the 2023/24 season has significance to Lewis, whether it’s the bold new acquisition, the romantic classic with a long personal history, or the ballet now synonymous with Christmastime in Winnipeg.

First, a dream come true: the 2023/24 season will kick off with French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj’s ink-black take on Snow White, which will arrive on the Centennial Concert Hall stage on Sept. 27, running through Oct. 1.

“We’ve been working on this for almost five years,” says Lewis, who is in the observation gallery overlooking the studio where the company is attending an afternoon ballet class. “It was meant to be done, I think, in ’21, but of course, with the pandemic, we had to cancel. But sets and costumes are coming. The stager is coming. It’s happening.

“It’s a really cool version of it,” he says of the ballet. “I saw it many years ago when I was in Berlin, with the Berlin State Opera, and it was absolutely stunning.”

Set to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 with couture costumes by French fashion enfant terrible Jean Paul Gaultier, Preljocaj’s contemporary ballet is an edgier, more adult adaptation of the original fairy tale by The Brothers Grimm, which is many shades darker than the Disney version many of us are familiar with. With that in mind, this show is not recommended to audiences under 13.

Family-friendly fare returns for the holidays with Nutcracker, which will run Dec. 21 to 30 at the Centennial Concert Hall. The annual tradition is a big piece of Lewis’ legacy at the RWB: he commissioned the Galina Yordanova and Nina Menon version that replaced the previous John Neumeier version in 1999.

Neumeier’s Nutcracker could only be done every other year, which meant the company had to mount a different ballet over the holidays on the off years. And Neumeier’s just didn’t have the same charm. For one, it didn’t have children in it, which meant there weren’t performance opportunities for the young students in the RWB School. For another, it didn’t celebrate Christmas. And so, Lewis tapped Yordanova and Menon to choreograph a Nutcracker, still set to Tchaikovsky’s singular score, that Winnipeg — and Canada — could really call its own.

“It has a Canadian flair to it, it has children in it. It’s got a whole pile of various aspects to it that makes it very endearing. And it’s set in Winnipeg at the turn of the last century.”–André Lewis

“It’s a beautiful version that we’ve been very fortunate to create,” Lewis says. “It has a Canadian flair to it, it has children in it. It’s got a whole pile of various aspects to it that makes it very endearing. And it’s set in Winnipeg at the turn of the last century.”

Romeo & Juliet, the romantic masterwork from Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev based on the Shakespeare classic, makes its return Feb. 14 to 18, 2024 at the Centennial Concert Hall. “It would come back every year if I could,” Lewis says.

The RWB’s version of Romeo & Juliet was choreographed by Rudi van Dantzig. It was the late Dutch choreographer’s first full-length ballet, staged in the early 1980s on the RWB company, which then included Canadian prima ballerina Evelyn Hart — and one young André Lewis.

“My first role was Mercutio, but I also performed Romeo, so, on the nights that I didn’t do Mercutio I did Romeo, which was very nerve wracking,” Lewis recalls. “I was just a little Corps de Ballet member in those days, but Rudi really liked me. He felt I was appropriate for both roles. So that’s what I did.”

Lewis and van Dantzig, who died in 2012, would go on to have a working relationship and friendship that spanned decades.

“He actually reached out to me for some reason to stage it with him in Florence, Italy,” Lewis says, though perhaps the “some reason” is obvious: van Dantzig trusted Lewis with the ballet. “I had stopped dancing by then so I was quite good as far as time was concerned. And then I staged it in Hong Kong for him, and Marseille for him, in Greece and also in Boston. I traveled a lot with it.”

Spring will see the return of another fan — and Lewis — favourite: Carmina Burana, Argentine choreographer Mauricio Wainrot’s vignettes inspired by the cantata of the same name by German composer Carl Orff. Lewis first brought Carmina Burana, which will run April 24 to 28, 2024 at the Centennial Concert Hall, to RWB in 2002 and it has gone on to become one of the company’s most-requested performances.

“I’ve always been attracted to that music,” Lewis says. “When I was a student in high school, we did a production of Carmina, where I danced, but I mean, it was just more of a, how would you call that, exercise. It was amateur, very much so. But it was fun to do. And I really got into the music, the power of it.”

Carmina Burana will be paired with a world premiere by Cameron Fraser-Monroe, who will be the RWB’s 2023/24 choreographer in residence. Fraser-Monroe’s STAVE premiered in Winnipeg at the end of March as part of the RWB’s Fast Forward program.

“He’s just a talented person,” Lewis says of the RWB School alumni. “He’s got great ideas and I love the music he uses.”

Indeed, part of “living the dream” for Lewis is helping young artists achieve theirs. To that end, the season will conclude with a pair of showcases: Spotlight, featuring works performed by students in the RWB School’s Professional Division, on May 23 to 26, 2024 at Manitoba Theatre for Young People, and On the Edge, a program of classics and new creations featuring the Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirants, on June 5 to 7, 2024 at the RWB Founders’ Studio.

Lewis looks out the window of the observation gallery. “I look at Michel, Cleighden, Logan, Zack, Liam — all those people did Spotlight,” he says, picking out company dancers who have come up through the school.

“On the Edge, same thing. It offers our graduate students an opportunity to perform and gain experience being on stage because, you know, it’s OK to be in the studio but you need ultimately to face the music, as they say.”

The Aspirants will perform another van Dantzig signature, Four Last Songs. It was Lewis’s turn in that ballet, in fact, that got him cast as Romeo a year later.

As much as the 2023/24 season is meant to celebrate Lewis, Lewis would much rather celebrate his dancers and students.

“Ninety per cent, I think approximately, of the company is from our school. That’s quite tremendous,” he says, watching the ballet class unfold below. “I think it’s with pride that we say that. There’s so many who have become dancers or choreographers. I look at many of the ones that have come through our school and company and have gone on to do other wonderful things.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegtreepress.com