What is your background in ballet?
I danced through high school. I was on pointe, performing in local productions of The Nutcracker. I was in New York after college—at J.P. Morgan doing investment banking and corporate strategy. And whenever I could find a moment, I would do drop-in classes at Alvin Ailey or Joffrey. So by the time I was watching Boston Ballet during my first year of business school, I’d had a lifetime of loving dance.
What were your goals for keeping Boston Ballet financially healthy?
It’s nice and good to grow audiences for The Nutcracker, which pays a lot of bills. But you want to see that [growth] for everything you do, particularly the boundary-pushing stuff, and you want to see it grow in diversity. We also run a large school, and that’s an important piece of the DNA—not only to grow revenue, but also to bring more youth into the art form.
What challenges do ballet companies face today?
I could spend an hour on this, but one is dealing with the ballet canon. Ballet is inherently elite and Eurocentric; it originated in the French courts. So you have some incredible technical ballets that are pretty problematic. LaBayadère, for example, is a gorgeous piece that has stereotypes about the Eastern Oriental other, and problematic treatment of women. Do you stop performing those things? Do you put a different story around it?
I have to ask you about Timothée Chalamet, who famously drew criticism last March for saying “nobody cares” about ballet and opera anymore.
We loved the free PR! This happened when we were producing our Winter Experience, and the houses were sold out for two weeks straight on some of the most cutting-edge ballet you’ll see in the world. So it was amazing to be able to respond with, “Doesn’t look like a problem to us.”
What’s your favorite ballet?
Right now, it’s Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon, set to Max Richter’s reinterpretation of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Abstract or contemporary art can risk losing audiences, but this is universally loved because it’s so riveting.
