DANCE COLLECTION DANSE

Although several people considered Ballard to be
next in line as artistic director – and she was certainly
asked by the board to apply, more than once – she
was conflicted by a lack of assurance that either she or
Browne had any kind of a future with the company at
all. In an act of defiance over how the search process was
handled, Ballard withdrew her application and followed
Browne out the doors at the end of the 1982/83 season.
Facing the loss of the company structure in which she
had thrived for the last eleven years, Ballard adjusted
to a challenging new reality as an independent dance
artist, leaning on her network for support. Since The
White Goddess, Ballard had remained in close touch with
dancer/choreographer Margie Gillis, whose solo career
had by then earned her a reputation as an international
superstar and beloved Canadian icon. Despite this, Gillis
was seeking artistic advice and asked Ballard to come
to Montreal to observe some of her work. An artistic
exchange began to take shape and Ballard became Gillis’s
artistic advisor and company manager for the next ten
years. During a decade of working together, Ballard also
set several of her own works on Gillis, including Lithium
for Medea (1984) and Gillis’s signature solo, Mara (1989).
Ballard was well recog nized for her success in the
1980s, receiving the Clifford E. Lee Choreography
Award in 1982, the Jean A. Chalmers Award in 1985
and the Jacqueline Lemieux prize in 1986. And, though
she worked closely with Gillis and lived with her parttime
in Montreal, Ballard spread her talent and energy
across North America like creative wildfire. By 1986,
Starrett had been appointed artistic director of South
Carolina’s Columbia City Ballet and began commissioning
Ballard to set some of her modern work on the
company. Keeping to her roots, she also maintained
an apartment in Winnipeg (which she rented to visiting
artists) and occasionally returned to create work
such as Trouble in the House (1986), Anna (1987) and
Continuum (1990). Of particular note is Continuum, an
expression of artistic and feminine lineage set on several
dancers from Ballard’s past including Thomson,
Petursson-Hiley, Rabin, Gillis, WCD dancers D-Anne
Kuby and Ruth Cansfield and, of course, Browne.
Ballard admits that, at the age of forty, she was
thinking heavily about the concept of continuum
that year. Having graduated from the apprentice
program with Thomson in 1972 and watched other
colleagues follow closely behind, Ballard was struck
by the interconnectedness of their paths. Reflecting
on her family of dancers and the artistic and feminine
histories that connect them, Ballard wrote in the program
notes that Continuum celebrates “an energized
dance relationship between dance artists that I have
worked with, some for as long as eighteen years.”
This theme of heritage and legacy would become
a cornerstone of Ballard’s career. In the mid-nineties,
Ballard embarked on an extensive project with the
intention to explore and document several overlapping
concepts of personal legacy. The Legacy Project,
as it was called, involved not only the revisiting and
documentation of Ballard’s artistic history but also the
exploration of movement as a form of revealing legacy
itself – a way in which, working from the inside out, she
feels we simultaneously discover and express ourselves
by exploring movement patterns and impulses
Rachel Browne in Stephanie Ballard’s Homeagain (2010)
Photo: Vince Pahkala
36 Dance Collection Danse