Edward Villella, an Italian American, is the greatest male star in the history of American ballet. The former Cover Boy for George Balanchine' New York City Ballet, redefined the male image in the field of ballet, in the '60s and '70s. The small, dark, muscular, hetrosexual changed the "danser noble" purity and effete niceties, and siezed the stage with speed, athleticism, and brute power.

After injury forced his retirement, he then redefined himself as an Artistic Director, and founded the now outstanding Miami Ballet Company 17 years ago.

Now in a bold and courageous attempt to make dance more palatable to pop-culture fans, and create as wide an audience as possible, after 7 years of preparation, last month, "Neighborhood Ballroom" had its Miami premiere — 14 performances "and all of them to standing audiences,"

Villella in his debut as a choreagrapher, is bringing  "Neighborhood Ballroom",  that the LA Times discusses in a full page article. The presentation will cover four time periods in the last century, Belle Epoque, Jazz Age, late Deco, and 50's Latin.

The URL for the LA Times article is at the bottom, but first, I think you will find
Villella's Keynote Speech to the International Society for the Performing Arts, in 2000, not only revealing, but fascinating! Edward Villella is an amazing person!!!!
[ RAA: I will intersperse comments from a different Interview]
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EDWARD VILLELLA: To International Society for the Performing Arts:

When I was asked to talk about "Risk and Reward" I thought for about 12 seconds, and then I said to myself, "Oh, my God! Are you kidding?" Think 1945, a nine-year-old kid in tights becoming a classical ballet dancer in Queens. You don't think that's a risk, eh? My mother was taking my sister to a local ballet school, I got knocked unconscious by a baseball--the next thing I knew I was in tights at the barre.

[ Intersperse: I was a fortunate to be someone whose talent was identified as a child. I was forced into the talent, all because I was too physical for the streets of queens. My mother needed to keep an eye on me, so she made me accompany my sister to ballet school . . . Where I proceeded to disrupt the class with my clowning. To stay, I had to join the class... ]

What were the risks? My pals! When they heard that I was doing these funny things, pointing my toes, they would walk to school with me and go "hoo, hoo!" Along comes high school, and I am told by my family that I've got to finish high school in three years. What was the risk? Hey, man, that's a lot of stuff to get done. I got it done.

What was the reward? My father said to me, "Enough of this. No more ballet dancing." I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" I did high school in three years to become a ballet dancer a year earlier. My father said, "Whew! I don't want to introduce my son, the ballet dancer, any more."

[I had ballet taken away from me at the insistence of an Italian-American trucker/father who wanted the best for me.]

My father ran a trucking business in the garment center here. He didn't understand the esthetic pursuits that I was involved in. So he said, "You're going to college." I went to college. They found out I used to wear tights. What else was the risk or reward? I stopped dancing for four years. What did I get out of it? I got a Bachelor of Science degree in marine transportation.

[He sent me to a military school, the New York State Maritime Academy, to explore the talents between my ears. It didn't occur to me at the time how good this would be for me, to explore my mental capabilities and not just the physical side of me.
While I assimilated the world of export, transport by sea, and maritime law, I was developing my mind and the capacity to service the physical. Ballet is a mind driven, highly sophisticated physicality body to body, but also mind to mind. The talent had been there, but the mind hadn't been.]

What else did I get out of it? I won my letters in baseball and I was Welterweight Boxing Champion. However, something inside said, "Hey, man, I don't want to go to sea. I really want to speak with my body. I want to do a physicality beyond boxing and baseball because the stuff that I had previously been involved in was terrifically physical but it was mind-driven.

So I started to sneak off the campus and become a dancer. Again.

I graduated with my BS. I gave it to my father and told him I was going to become a ballet dancer again. He stopped talking to me for a year. Ah, well.

Anyway, I dive into this thing called classical ballet. What did I have going into it?
I had all the physicality I needed. I could jump. I could do tricks. Hey no problem,
I was a boxer, a baseball player.

I go back to dancing. What a reward that was! To step back, to recapture the passion of my earlier times--a passion that continues to drive me   to possess the ability to move with quality, the ability to speak in an international language that crosses borders. Wow!

And who are the guys I was hanging out with? George Balanchine. Jerome Robbins. Igor Stravinsky. Lincoln Kirstin. Whoa! To be the raw material for these guys and make my own comment on what they provided for me. And again, I thought, "Hey. I'm an athlete. I'm physical--that's all I need. You jump up and down, you grab the girls, you pick 'em up, you put 'em down, that's all there is to it.

But I had to get serious about this. I had to risk body and soul. Wow, did I ever do that. I loved it. It was nuts, four years of not dancing and I plunged right in. It was in the early days of television, when they had [huge] cameras and cement floors for the stages. The reward: Wow! I became this almost household name on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Bell Telephone Hour, Carol Burnett's show--all of them.

What did I risk? I have nine broken toes, stress fractures in both legs, I have a knee that can't be operated on again, two artificial hips, a bad back, and a bad neck. None of that from that sissy stuff--from baseball and boxing--but from this other thing.

So there I am, working with Balanchine at the very best place that I would ever want to work, in the second golden age of ballet. But pretty soon, my body starts to tell me "You know what? You really messed this up." And as I continued, my body got tighter and tighter. I was desperate.

Balanchine introduced me to a man named Stanley Williams, who became my very best friend. He was a dancer becoming a teacher at the Royal Danish Ballet. I took Stanley's class. He changed my life. He changed my whole understanding of what dance was all about. It wasn't just flying around and jumping and doing all that stuff that I could somehow do with a certain joie de vivre. I had been missing the internal qualities of what it was to be a performer. Wow! The challenge, the risk to get to "artist."

What did I have to risk? I stopped taking Balanchine's class. Everybody took his class. If you missed one, you were obvious by your absence. Thirteen years I didn't go to George Balanchine's class. What were the risks? Obvious. What were the rewards? I danced for 20 years.

But not only that, Williams became my buddy--him an emerging teacher and me an emerging dancer. After a performance we'd sit at the old Carnegie Tavern 'til three or four o'clock in the morning, drinking beer, talking about where a tendu battement comes from, what the attacks are, what the musicalities, the styles, the period, the energies, the relationships, the communications. What rewards, what rewards.

[There are a series of simplicities that make up an apparent complexity in this artform. If the mind does not understand, it becomes complex, but if the mind does understand, it becomes simple. It's almost a greek ideal of mind, body and form. It's an elegant physicality, elegant to the point that it is an artform, created by key genuises throughout the last few centuries. Once again, mind to mind, body to body.]

I still live with that. I live with the genius of Balanchine, the genius of Robbins, of Williams. I had an intimate exploration of the technical and musical elements of a tendu battement. As time went on I started to get offers, from commercial sources, like television and Broadway. I had to ask Balanchine his permission, I was going to do a Gene Kelley special. And he said to me: "You know, dear, you should only work for Picasso, Cocteau, and Stravinsky. Well, of course, he meant himself as well. Again, a risk.

I did every show you can imagine. I did six revivals of "Brigadoon" at City Center. There are great ups and downs in life. I had a great up: I danced at the White House. The next day I had a great down: My hip went away, and that was the end. I was dancing for President Ford. I had a little pain in my leg and I went to the orthopedic surgeon. He said, "That's it. This was the reward for being foolish, for not having the internal understanding, for going too far, too fast. But, that's me. That's who I am.

You want to take a risk? Know who you are. Understand the risks and reap the rewards. The rewards for me were overwhelming. There was no choice.

So what to do with the rest of my life? I produced, directed, and wrote for TV. I choreographed, I taught, I lectured, I won an Emmy. It wasn't really what I wanted to do. Sure, it was interesting and offered some wonderful challenges, but where was the final reward that I could put my arms around?

So how about becoming an artistic director? What are the challenges? There is no education process for an artistic director. Doesn't exist. Take your tights off, hang up your dance belt. Now you're an artistic director.

I said no. It's not who I am or what I am or what I want to be. I like to know what I'm doing before I do it, not invent things as I go along.

My wife said to me "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm going back to school. I have to learn. I have to figure it all out again. I know the studio stuff, I know the stage stuff. But what about boards and fundraising and finance and PR and marketing and dealing with unions and orchestras and contracts and all of those things?

I took over two companies over about a four- to six-year period and they had the worst problems you can imagine. I spent about six or seven years learning how to solve them. My reward was, I was lecturing in Miami and five people came up to me and said, "We want to make a company here. Can you help us? Can you guide us? Can you consult?" I said "Sure." I wrote an 11-and-1/2-year plan: A year-and-a-half of organization and pre-production and raising money and various and sundry other things, letting the community know what was coming at them. And a three-, five-, and a ten-year production plan. I did five years of programming before we opened, so that as I was bringing up dancers I was also bringing up audience.

So these people in Miami said, "Wow! Would you do it?" I said, "No, no, no. I'm from New York. I was born here. Nobody leaves New York. New Yorkers don't do that." I went back to my wife, I said "Hey, this is the challenge. This is a risk." She said to me, "What's the reward?" I said, "I think we can hit a homerun down there." "But, you're telling me all your friends say it's a wasteland. You want to take a risk in a cultural wasteland?" Well, I did some research and I found that, at that time, there were a thousand people a day moving to South Florida.

And they were coming from up around here and other major places. Then I found out there was an opera company, symphony, theater company, and I said, "My God, there's an audience down there!" My wife said, Do you want to risk it?" I said, "If you do, I will." She said "Okay." So we did. We left New York. That was 1985.

We now have as our reward a company in its 14th season. We do approximately 160 performances a season. We have a repertoire of over 85 ballets. We have an audience of about 16,000 subscribers, in four counties. Wow! I predicted we'd have 2,500 people as subscribers in our first year. We had 5,000. Wow, what a reward!

Of course, as you go along, odd things occur. Hurricane Andrew occurred to us. And that was in a very early time. Cost us half-a-million dollars in lost revenues and other things.

Two weeks after that our orchestra came to me and declared "We are yours forever. Not only that, we don't audition, not only that, we all declare tenure."I said "Guys, I got a four letter word for you: Tape." What was the risk? Getting picketed and having all kinds of terrible things happen--that guy from Vegas from the International came, Sam Folio.Ug. Sam told me his father died on the line with John L. Lewis. I said "I wish you the same success as your father."

Anyway, we behaved legally, because my two top administrators were attorneys. Not too many attorneys in the pit. And they began to behave badly. They were taking a risk, because we sued them. We sued the International. Know what happened? The local went bankrupt, all the instigators got fired, and we negotiated with the International. I said, "I'm not withdrawing this Federal suit until you change your manner and attitude. I'm not going to start back where we were." Guess what? We now sub-contract with a union orchestra. We have a "requirements" contract. I can hire four people or 48, or I can do tape. It's called survival. If I hadn't risked that, I wouldn't be here right now. I'd have my grocery store down in Coral Gables or something.

I'm not afraid. I'm crazy, that's why I'm not afraid. I look at the risk, I imagine the reward. I'd been at the New York City Ballet for 20 years. You may have heard about the recent circumstances there, when the orchestra struck and for the first time the New York City Ballet said "No. We're going to work to tape." I started getting phone calls from them: "How are your tapes?"

We are evolving and developing. And as we do, more and more presenters such as yourselves are interested in us. The Lyon Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the Kennedy Center. I said to my board, "Hey, guys, if we are gonna do this I can't go with a minimum number of people. I can't have the same number of people on stage as in the company, it just doesn't work. And we've got these big ballets coming on." I added close to a million dollars to the budget, and that board was ready to kill me, except they were a little afraid of me. I'm nasty. I'm from Queens. Don't fool with people from Queens.

We went ahead, hired our people. We had grand success at the Edinburgh Festival, the Lyons Festival, the Kennedy Center--it kind of put us on the map. And we got the money done. A scary time. But we got the money done.

Which brings us to the current situation at Miami City Ballet. Seven years ago we began to think about a new facility, because it was desperately needed. As of last year we had raised $12 million. We had a 62,000 sq. ft. facility coming on, eight 60 x 40 studios, board room, costume shop, administration, a school of 600 to 700.

What's the risk? What happens a after capital campaign? Donors are very happy to have names on buildings, but what if they don't want to give to operations? Well, what happens is, we have all these wonderful tours--Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Spoleto, West Coast, Berkeley, East Coast, where we performed at the New Jersey PAC and 18 New York critics came. The risk there was NOT to have additional dancers. Again, in a financially challenging time when we had just raised $12 million in our first-ever capital campaign.

And, in the face of a serious financial problem, I hired another $250,000 worth of dancers. Whew. I'm not afraid. We came back from the West Coast tour with reviews that I'm so thrilled about. We came here to the East Coast, the New York Times, which doesn't like me so good, called us "nothing short of a triumph."

I returned to Miami. I was told to cut 23 dancers. I said, "When the going gets tough, get the hell out of my way. Here I come." We have raised about $800,000 in the last eight weeks. We have a million more on the books. I've got to raise another $1.5 million before April 30th.

But look at what I've got. Boy, have I got a product! I also have the reviews. I'm going home to my guys and I'm saying, "Read the reviews." The first thing I did was, my wife and I made a $10,000 challenge to our board, our major donors, our community. I visited with the Non Group, which is a top-25 business people in Miami, the Mesa Redondo, which is the top-25 Hispanic people. I had a meeting with Mayor Penelas, I petitioned Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State, our dancers have joined in--it's become a community circumstance now. I have a $10 million dollar budget. I've got to cut back to $8.5 million, reduce operations by 15%. What are operations? Dancers' salaries, that's what operations are. We're digging in, we've got that building flying, we've got the reviews flying, we've got dancers like we've never had before. That's my risk.

You see, the moment you play it safe, you're practically moribund. Nobody wants safe. Everybody wants risk, where there's reward at the end of it. Don't be afraid. Just a little afraid.

Because if you can't take the risk, there is no reward. If you can't stand the heat, don't be a chef. If you can't do some of the things that I've been doing, don't be an artistic director. It's a nightmare. It's a wonderful nightmare, because I know what these guys have done for me. I know what the community has done for me. The community knows now what we have done for them, and to me that's the reward for risk.

Ideas - Edward Villella - International Society for the Performing Arts
http://www.ispa.org/ideas/villella.html

The Story of Edward Villella
 

I Had That Taken Away From Me At The Insistence Of An Italian-American Trucker/Father Who Wanted The Best For Me.

He Sent Me To A Military School, The New York State Maritime Academy, To Explore The Talents Between My Ears. It Didn't Occur To Me At The Time How Good This Would Be For Me, To Explore My Mental Capabilities And Not Just The Physical Side Of Me.

I Have Always Spoken A Physical Language And At Maritime College I Immediately Plunged Into Athletics, Such As Boxing And Baseball.

While I Assimilated The World Of Export, Transport By Sea, And Maritime Law, I Was Developing My Mind And The Capacity To Service The Physical.
Ballet Is A Mind Driven, Highly Sophisticated Physicality Body To Body, But Also Mind To Mind. The Talent Had Been There, But The Mind Hadn't Been.

When I Re-Entered The World Of Ballet, I Was Supported By The Genius Of Choreographers George Balanchine And Jerome Robbins. But I Also Needed To Learn An Approach To The Technique, Which Was Not Forthcoming From The Likes Of Balanchine Or Robbins.

Balanchine Brought The Great Danish Teacher Stanley Williams To New York At A Critical Time For Me And Saved My Career. What I Missed Over The Years From 16 To 20 Was Development Of The Technique, And That Is What Stanley Taught Me. I Could Jump As High As Anybody In Ballet, But I Didn't Know How To Land. My Mind Had Not Been Trained To Understand What My Body Was Doing.

There Are A Series Of Simplicities That Make Up An Apparent Complexity In This Artform. If The Mind Does Not Understand, It Becomes Complex, But If The Mind Does Understand, It Becomes Simple. It's Almost A Greek Ideal Of Mind, Body And Form. It's An Elegant Physicality, Elegant To The Point That It Is An Artform, Created By Key Genuises Throughout The Last Few Centuries.
Once Again, Mind To Mind, Body To Body.
In 1975 I Stopped Dancing Abruptly. The Long Years Of Punishment To Which I Had Subjected My Bones Finally Caught Up With Me During A Performance At The White House, And My Hip Gave Out. I Was Crippled By The Injury. The Next Night It Took Two Lights For Me To Make It Across Broadway.
What Was So Devastating Was That I Lost My Physicality. I Lost My Identity, And I Was In Pain. Ballet Totally Involves The Mind And Body, So Passionate, So Emotional. One Day I Was At The Top Of The Artform, The Next Day That Was Gone.
What Do You Do Afterwards? First, You Allow The Depression To Come And Go. You Then Reinvestigate Who You Are And What You Want To Be. I Found That The Passion Was Still There And The Pleasure Was Still There.
What Was The Next Best Thing To Do Once The Physical Couldn't Support What Had Been The Pleasure Of My Life? Pass It On. Pass On The Wealth Of Information That I Had Absorbed From George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins And Stanley Williams, Body To Body, But Specifically Mind To Mind.
I Did A Series Of Things Next. I Produced And Directed Television, Wrote, Choreographed, Taught. I Decided That I Wanted To Direct A Company, And Reinvent Myself As An Artistic Director.
There Was No Process For Learning How To Become An Artistic Director, No Stanley Williams To Show Me The Abcs. I Had To Learn It Myself. I Was Very Practical About It, And Began By Working With Small Companies That Had Problems. I Accepted The Directorships Thereof And Began To Solve Their Problems. It Was A Fantastic Education, Because Later On You Don't Have To Re-Live The Problems Because You Already Have The Solutions.
At The Right Moment, Fortunately For Me, I Met Toby Lerner Ansin, Barbara Singer, Charlie Cinnamon, David Eden And Robin Reiter In Miami. I Was Asked To Use All Of My Background To Create A New Cultural Institution, A Classical Ballet Company In Florida. I'd Describe Florida As A Most Unusual Place In The Mid-80s, Especially Because The Economy Was Not As It Is Today. It Seemed Like Folly But There Was Such An Explosion Of Population That I Decided To Explore And Discover From Whence Those "Munitions"Were Coming.
Most Of The People Arriving Were From The Northeast, From Urban Areas. I Was Told That This Was A Cultural Wasteland But I Knew The Inclinations Of These People Because I Had Spent My Career Dancing For Them. In Addition To Which, There Was Not Only Miami, But Also Fort Lauderdale And Palm Beach, From Which To Attract An Audience.
I Knew My Own Fields, Dancing And Artistic Direction. But This, I Knew, Wasn't Enough. The Key To The Success Of Miami City Ballet Would Also Come Through Careful Planning, Studying The Audience, And Generating A Base Of Community Support Beyond Just The Sale Of Tickets.....

Miami City Ballet- Introduction
http://www.co.broward.fl.us/lii11301.htm
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Edward Villella steps out
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/printedition/suncalendar/la-ca-perlmutter
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