BWW Previews: Curran Lands on Feet as New Louisville Ballet A.D.

Four weeks into his new job, Robert Curran has a bit of a challenge. The native Australian has to get the lay of the land in his new home while hitting the ground running.

He happens to be good on his feet.

Curran is freshly installed as the new artistic director for the Louisville Ballet. The 38-year-old stepped into the role right at the timing of "Giselle," the company's 2014-2015 season premiere. With the company's Raise the Barre fundraiser on Oct. 11, the Studio Connections series the following weekend and a couple of gigs happening in the downtown area before taking on the Brown-Forman Nutcracker for December, he had a full agenda on day one.

So, he got to work.

"It's busy. There's not a lot of settling in happening. It's been straight to work, and I wouldn't have it any other way," he said in an interview last week.

Curran was chosen from a pool of more than 80 candidates compiled by a search committee that set to work to find the new artistic leader of the organization after former artistic director Bruce Simpson announced his impending retirement last November. As one of four finalists in the search, Curran was invited to Louisville to meet with dancers, staff and board members, teach a class, and present a plan for the company's next five years.

"The search process was immaculate in terms of how well it was organized and implemented (and) how comprehensive they were in exposing me to the company and the company to me during the process," Curran said. "It was really by far the best search process I've been through in the two and a half years since I retired from dancing. So that was a brilliant beginning, to know that the board was so organized and open-minded and involved."

Curran also credited the health of Louisville's arts ecosystem for confirming that the Ballet was the right fit for him.

"The support for the arts here is so exciting," he said. "There's the incredible change that's happening across every organization in the arts community, with Teddy [Abrams, new music director for the Louisville Orchestra] arriving, with the Opera's new direction, with the exciting new developments in Kentucky Shakespeare and the successes they've had. There's just so much going on here. And whilst it's a little bit daunting in terms of competition, it's also just really exciting because the arts ecology here is just so strong and so well-supported."

Curran danced for 16 years with The Australian Ballet, 10 as a principal artist. He didn't consciously pursue a path in arts administration - "I fell into it...not literally, being a dancer," he said with a laugh - but duties away from the dance floor put Curran in a management role many times. He worked on behalf of Australia Ballet company dancers to create new opportunities for exhibitions and as a go-between for management and the company on labor relations, and later co-founded the project-based dance company Jack Productions with a colleague, serving all administrative functions while studying for a business degree.

All this progressed to a defining moment for him: after a performance of "Don Quixote," Curran's artistic director met with him about an issue with another dancer in the company. Curran offered his perspective on how to address the problem.

"Just before leaving my dressing room, he said 'This is gonna be you. You're gonna be doing this in a couple of years. I can see that you would make a really good artistic director,'" he said. "It was not really until then that I thought 'Well, actually, I have put everything in place.' All of a sudden, I could look in a mirror and understand why other people thought that might be what my ambition was.

"This realization of wanting to be a leader also assisted me greatly in my decision to retire, when the excitement and the motivation and the inspiration that I could envisage in my leadership role started to shadow the inspiration and motivation I had as a dancer after a 16-year career," he said. "It made that decision very easy to leave the stage. I feel really, really lucky."

Curran joins an organization steeped in both tradition and innovation. The Louisville Ballet boasts 150 works in its repertoire, with over 70 world premieres. The company finds equal footing in the classical and the eclectic.

One element he will bring as artistic director that he will apply to both classical and new works: an emphasis on the reality of the performance, affecting both the dancer and audience with the relevance and immediacy of the work.

"It's vital," Curran said. "This company will, for as long as I'm here, will continue to do the classics. We'll continue to do "Giselle," "Sleeping Beauty," "Swan Lake," "Nutcracker." Those are the traditions, and that is the heritage that we must respect. It's the technique that facilities, that liberates the dancer. No other dance form has such an extreme physicality, an extreme strength in range. The dancers have to have incredible hyper-mobility and be able to control that hyper-mobility in very particular ways, and that is something that liberates a dancer to explore new choreography. But you can't do it without those classics. They have to stay in the repertoire, in my opinion."

Curran recalled a recent experience at the Kentucky Center for the Art's Whitney Hall, coming at intermission of "Giselle," the company's season opener, illustrating both his perspective on the state of the art form and the quality of the Ballet's ensemble.

"As I left after the first act, I heard a woman having a very loud and confident discussion with her guests, saying 'Ballet's not like it used to be. There's so much more drama onstage and so much more reality about how they portray their roles. I feel like maybe they might have been crying at the end of that act,'" he recalled. "I got chills. 'Yes! Can I give you a microphone?'

"The cinema, the film community, keeps going back to period pieces, and it doesn't bother the community at all," he said. "But these are real actors investing real emotions, putting their whole lives into their craft to tell these period stories with all of the technology they use to film them as well. That's what ballet should be doing with these traditional works. We should be putting it out there like it's a cinema. There's no artifice. There's no fake makeup. It's just real people playing real roles in a ballet. That's something that I worked on really, really hard with the dancers for 'Giselle.' If they invest in that character and they really believe in that character, they get to take really incredible risks on stage, because if those things are driven by the character and they're real, they will draw a real reaction out of the person they're interacting with on the stage, and more importantly, they'll draw a real reaction from the audience.

"I do believe that every human is sensitive to what somebody else is feeling. I do believe that there is that empathy and sympathy relationship that happens between an audience and a performer. You don't have to do pantomime. You don't have to overdo your acting to instill that feeling in an audience, whether they're sitting in A Row or W Row. But it's never going to happen if the person on stage isn't being that character, isn't feeling the emotions that character would feel in that moment. You go somewhere else. It's only then that you move away from the transactional relationship with the audience and toward the transformational relationship with the audience. It's not just a give-and-take. You break down that fourth wall and reach into the audience and touch them and they leave different than they arrive."

Now firmly in place at the Ballet, Curran is looking forward to getting to know his new home and exploring the possibilities Louisville offers in making the most of the Ballet's mix of the classic and the innovative.

"One of the things I'm looking forward to in the coming weeks is exploring, seeing what's out there already both in terms of artistic offering and in terms of artistic venues, getting my creative brain going in terms of what we might participate in, taking the incredible dancers of this company out into the community in new ways," he said.

"Come along and join us. You will be seeing the new Louisville Ballet. There is so much new stuff that we're about to drop into the community in new and exciting ways."

To post a comment, you must register and login.