BY JANELLE GELFAND
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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As Victoria Morgan puts Jonathan Stiles through the paces, their images are reflected in a mirror at the Cincinnati Ballet studios.
(Michael E. Keating photo)
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Victoria Morgan strikes a pose, her long, lanky legs all angles, her arms flung behind her, her Peter-Pan-coifed head thrown back. "Try it this way," she says, searching the eyes of the dancer, as if silently challenging him.
Ms. Morgan, artistic director of the Cincinnati Ballet, is critiquing the Spanish Dance, to be performed in the company's annual Nutcracker this month. Her work is hands-on as she coaxes, laughs, frowns and claps time.
She wears no makeup, and her blue leggings stop at black high-top sneakers. In the heat of her work in studio A on Central Parkway, she strips down to a leotard, and ties her sweat shirt around her waist.
"Sometimes I feel like I'm more of a mother than anything else," says Ms. Morgan, 47. "I've learned if I count on the dancers, and push them to make a statement, the performance is much better."
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Ms. Morgan and her husband, Mark Jones, in her apartment downtown. They have a commuter marriage. He lives in San Francisco.
(Yoni Pozner photo)
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Ask her what she is most passionate about, and she will tell you "quality."
"I have to say the potential is exciting," she says, cautiously enthusiastic about the calibre of Cincinnati Ballet's dancers. Since she became artistic director last year, she has hired dancers from Moscow, France, Peru, Romania and Canada. There are four principal dancers; she would like to have six.
With a combination of the board's commitment and Ms. Morgan's grit and vision, she knows Cincinnati could become a destination for dancers and a force on the national dance scene. But Ms. Morgan, a former principal dancer for Ballet West in Salt Lake City and San Francisco Ballet, also knows the company has work to do before it reaches its pinnacle.
"Sometimes I'm frustrated because I wish we were already there," she says.
Sees behind the surface
She shakes her head, still not pleased with the Spanish Dance, and confers with the ballet mistress, Johanna Bernstein Wilt. The 13 performances of Nutcracker are the company's bread and butter, representing an astonishing half of its ticket revenue. But keeping it fresh - for the dancers as well as the audience - is a challenge.
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MORGAN FILE
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Birth date and place: March 18, 1951, Salt Lake City.
Current home: Cincinnati (downtown) and San Francisco.
Marital status: Married Mark Jones on Aug. 8. No children.
Education: Bachelor's and master's degrees, University of Utah.
Special project: Produced Ballet CD-ROM in 1996 ($49.95 Mac and PC, plus $5 shipping, Performing Arts Video Inc., 800-600-6568), in which dancers from San Francisco Ballet illustrate 700 dance steps. Includes interviews with dancers on topics such as anorexia, nerves and being tall.
Favorite restaurant: Plaza 600, downtown.
Goal for Cincinnati Ballet: "That we become a top-tier company." Thoughts on taking risk in the arts: "You're dead in the water if you're in an arts organization and you're not taking some kind of risk. You'll become boring, you'll become predictable, and the very thing you are seeking to secure - audience approval - you will lose."
Best idea: A women's festival, choreographed by Lila York and Kathryn Posin to music by Joan Tower. "Women are coming forward with a stronger voice."
Best advice ever received: "Don't forget to laugh. I'm vulnerable to laughter. My dancers make me laugh all the time."
When she retires: "I'm going to paint. I feel like I have one more career in me. This is prime time."
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"I choreographed my first Spanish Dance last year . . . and there were things as I watched the performance that just haunted me," she says later during a break. "There's something about the blood in the Spaniard that's so earthy, and I felt I had missed the sensuality of that. I want to give it more of that dimension."
"Victoria has a very good sense of looking behind the surface of what most of us see," says Mark Jones, 45, Ms. Morgan's husband. A businessman, he was in Cincinnati for the weekend. They married in August after a decade-long partnership and now have a commuter marriage. He lives in San Francisco.
"Her creative processes are really quite amazing to me. I don't know how choreographers and dancers do what they do. I think she's a uniquely talented individual for this kind of artistic leadership."
Few female directors
For her new job, Ms. Morgan had role models not in the dance arena, but in the opera world. In her most recent work as resident choreographer for San Francisco Opera, she worked with opera directors Francesca Zambello and Linda Brovsky, and points to them for inspiration. The reason is simple. Few women have broken the centuries-old glass ceiling in ballet. Among the 50 or so mid-level ballet companies in the United States, Ms. Morgan is one of only a handful of women directors.
"Ballerinas are put on this pedestal, and Balanchine said 'ballet is woman.' And yet, it's ironic that there aren't that many women directors," she says.
As she works on this Nutcracker, she is reminded of her first Nutcracker, when she made her dance debut in her hometown, Salt Lake City. She was 10.
"That was such a fantasy, that I could actually be up there dancing in The Nutcracker with a costume," she says. "It was such a rush."
The Nutcracker party scene was not unlike her own Christmases, where there might be 30 cousins and lots of laughter. Born into a big Mormon family, her father, John, invested in real estate while her mother, Daisy, raised four children.
Victoria had taken up dance on the advice of a doctor, who prescribed exercise due to a weak stomach wall. But a career in ballet was not an option. She was expected to go to college, study "something concrete" and marry.
"When I started getting some lead roles and attention in the newspaper, (my parents) started liking it. But it took them a while," she says.
Perhaps to prove to her parents that she could do it all, she graduated with two degrees from the University of Utah magna cum laude - while she was a principal dancer for Ballet West.
Deep down, she knew that a dancer's career is short-lived, that she would need other skills. The best dance years are the 20s, and if one is lucky, early 30s.
She was obsessed. Dance became her life. She would stay late at rehearsal, go home and soak her feet and aching muscles, drop into bed, and do it again the next day.
The pain was manifested later in her own watercolors on ballet, which hang in her Cincinnati riverfront apartment. The paintings resulted during the year she left dance.
Work, mixed with laughter
Her break is over, and Ms. Morgan begins to work with her corps in the Nutcracker's Chinese Dance. "Make sure you really flex your feet," she tells the dancers, as they jete behind twirling umbrellas.
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IF YOU GO
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What: Frisch's Nutcracker
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Saturday, next Sunday, Dec. 22, 23, 26 and 27; 2:30 p.m. Saturday, next Sunday, 22, 23, 26, 27 (Note: 7:30 p.m. Dec. 27 is Nutty Nutcracker, "a combination of wacky humor, frantic frolicking and loony local celebrities."
Where: Music Hall.
Tickets: $6-$33 at Music Hall box office, Ticketmaster outlets or call 241-7469.
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She laughs, finding humor in the dancers' bobbing heads, yet she prods them to tighten their movement, to step "just a hair" sooner.
Laughter - the need to laugh - is part of her philosophy of life and of work. Her Cincinnati choreography debut last month was not a serious piece, but the childhood story, Princess and the Pea.
"I enjoy humor, I enjoy characters, playfulness and sets," she says. "I also think this art form is serious; it's an adult art form. If you look at the conquest of it, the stretch for the dancers, the high calibre, they're inspiring."
She turns to her dancers. "This needs to be really sharp," she says, illustrating what she wants. Others sit on the sides, take off their ballet slippers and rub sore, reddened heels.
She worries about these young dancers and their futures. She knows they live for the moment.
"The tendency is to hang out with other dancers, and that closes your world even more," she says. "I went with a dancer for a while. Then we split up, and I had to see him every day in rehearsal!"
Tragic turning point
Three times in her life, she has stood at a crossroads.
The first time was in 1978. She was toying with the idea of leaving Salt Lake City. But she stalled.
"I was thinking, I've gone as far as I can go, but this is really comfortable," she says. Then her brother John, who was 25, was killed in a hiking accident.
"His death had a major impact on me. He was a year younger than me, and I thought, oh my God, people actually die," she says. "When that happened, it made me realize that life is short, it's fragile. You can be here today and gone tomorrow."
Two months later, she was a principal dancer for San Francisco Ballet. Her artistry grew to include solo work for film and television. She was soloist in PBS productions of Michael Smuin's The Tempest and Robert Gladstein's Symphony in Three Movements.
She starred in Robert Sund's dance film, Women Song, a series of dances speaking to female issues, set to music by the Bulgarian State Female Vocal Choir.
She also ventured into her own choreography for the documentary The Creation of O.M.O. "(San Francisco Ballet artistic director) Michael Smuin encouraged his dancers to be brave, and to choreograph," she says.
"Four of us put together an evening which was all original music and original design; we wanted to create this Diaghilev sort of feeling. It was just about our feeling adventuresome."
Short break from ballet
Then, in 1987, Ms. Morgan retired from dancing.
Her swan song was to be "Rubies" (from Balanchine's Jewels), but days before, she pulled a muscle and couldn't dance. It was a sign to "get out of this and get on with my life."
She felt abandoned. She had felt a false sense of family in the dance world. She was 36 and at another crossroads.
"Taking that away was disorienting. I didn't know how to define myself anymore," she says. "When you fill out the forms, you say you're a dancer. Then suddenly not to be that - what are you?"
She took up painting. "It was cathartic for me, because I'd left (ballet), and that brought me back a little bit." The lines in her paintings capture theatrical backstage moments in sweeping pastel hues.
She got a real estate license. ("Would you like to see the bathroom?" she says, laughing.)
Finally, she got a job as event planner for a major San Francisco accounting firm. She planned parties.
It ended one day when she got in the elevator, and the intercom was playing music used in Chaconne, one of her favorite ballets. She could feel the movement start her body.
"I was really into it, and I rode the elevator up and down a couple times to get through the piece. When I got to the end I thought, what am I doing in an accounting company?"
That's when the opening occurred at San Francisco Opera.
Searches for spirit
Her body taut and erect, Ms. Morgan turns to her corps, experiments with a new step, then urges her dancers to "work it out" while she turns to help others. "Try it again; listen to the music," she says.
"I thought the dancers seemed a little sluggish today," she says later in her office upstairs, where she will work late, going through mail that piled up over Thanksgiving. Feeling motherly again, she adds, "As far as I know they're good eaters. I have one I'm a little bit worried about."
Even without makeup, you might mistake her for a model. She has changed into a miniskirt, soft leather jacket and flimsy scarf that trails to her knees. Tall and slender, she is a vegetarian who sometimes gives in. (Recently, it was for Thanksgiving turkey.) She keeps herself in shape by rising at 6:30 a.m. to work out at the Y.
"When I was a dancer, I was so obsessed about technique," she says. "Now being an audience member, that's not the first thing you see. The first thing you see is who is that dancer and what is their spirit."
When she addressed the crowd at the ballet's Princess and the Pea Festival, she admits she was nervous. For someone who has always been a star, public speaking is new for her - like her new business wardrobe.
"When I came, I had a great bunch of sweats," she says, laughing.
Marriage is also new. Ms. Morgan met Mr. Jones at a party 13 years ago. "I showed up and knocked on the door, and there's this tall man (about 6 feet 6 inches). He really got under my skin," Ms. Morgan says.
They were complete opposites: He is an entrepreneur with an alternative energy project in Palm Springs, and a balletomane for years. His analytical, logical style complemented her emotional, spontaneous nature.
They were romantically involved for 11 years, but when she came to Cincinnati, Ms. Morgan had trouble imagining their future. "Part of my wanting to be married has to do with wanting to create a sense of family. For me, a way of doing that is making this commitment and believing we're going to be together," she says.
On Aug. 8, Lake Tahoe, Calif., was the backdrop for their outdoor wedding. Cincinnati Ballet principal dancers Anna Reznik and Alexei Kremnev danced a pas de deux, and Ms. Morgan's two little nieces wrapped the couple in a ribbon dance.
"I've been proud of Victoria for a long time, not because she's up on a stage or in front of a crowd. She's a unique individual; she's extremely bright and funny and easy-going and nice to be around. That's the part that touches me the most," Mr. Jones says.
Crossroads No. 3
Ironically, Ms. Morgan heard about the Cincinnati opening after the application deadline had past. She decided to apply anyway, because she had reached another plateau, another crossroads.
"People don't come to watch dance in opera," she says. "Only a part of me was being used. I felt that maybe I was turning into a boring person, because I didn't have enough challenge and excitement."
"During the interviews, I went to the Playhouse and the symphony, and I had a chance to get a feeling for the vitality of the city. I was attracted to the energy. I was intrigued. It's got to be more than just a ballet company," she says.
Says ballet board member Carol Olson: "She was a breath of fresh air; we felt she would be a wonderful ambassador for the ballet in our community. One reason was her enthusiasm for the art form. The other was her ability to articulate what her vision was. She talks in concrete terms and makes it understandable for non-ballet people."
Part of Ms. Morgan's job will be selling an art form whose image has suffered. The stereotype that ballet is stuffy, elitist and effeminate are images she hopes to banish.
Ballet is about power and grace, she says. "It's a great example of human beings being able to go beyond limitations."
Deeply committed to education, she sees a time when the company will have satellite studios and 2,000 students.
For now, she is reveling in the discovery of a world she barely knew in the remote world of the ballet dancer.
"To discover that (ballet) is just such a small sliver of this life, that's helpful to come to that realization," she says. "Ballet is still vital to me, but discovering how much is out there is a joy for me now. In some ways, I feel like a child."
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