Eugene Ballet artistic director looks back on 46 years of dance and collaboration

Toni Pimble moved to Oregon from Europe more than 46 years ago and co-founded the Eugene Ballet.

As the company’s artistic director, she has choreographed over 60 pieces and collaborated with composers, artists and other organizations, from the Eugene Opera to the Oregon Bach Festival to the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance.

Her award-winning work has also been performed by the New York City Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre and many others.

We sit down with Pimble to talk about her career and her hopes for the company as she prepares to leave her role in June.

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to correct where Pimble moved from before co-founding the Eugene Ballet.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Toni Pimble grew up in England, danced ballet professionally in Germany and then moved to Oregon in 1978. That same year, she co-founded the Eugene Ballet. Over the decades as the company’s artistic director, she choreographed over 60 pieces and collaborated with composers, artists, and organizations like the Eugene Opera and the Oregon Ballet Festival. Her work has been performed by the New York City Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theater and many other companies. Pimble has now spent 46 years at the helm of Eugene Ballet, but she’s decided that this season – which ends in just a few weeks – will be her last as artistic director.

Toni Pimble, congratulations and welcome to Think Out Loud.

Toni Pimble: Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Miller: What brought you to Eugene?

Pimble: Well, at the time, I had been involved with Riley Grannan. We were married and we had visited Eugene on holiday. Fred and Doreen Ditzhazy, who founded the Eugene School of Ballet, wanted to sell and wanted to retire. We wanted to get out of Germany and had the opportunity to buy the school. And then as we took over the school, we talked about having a little performing group.

We were in town, I think, two months, running the school and getting started when the Pacifica Players came to us and they said, “We want to do the Stravinsky’s ‘Soldier’s Tale’ as a ballet. And are you interested in being involved?” And we said, “Yeah, we’d love to do it.” And then we realized, oh wait, somebody’s got to choreograph this. Oh wait, somebody’s got to come up with costumes. Oh wait, somebody’s gotta do the scenic elements.

Miller: So, again, that’s somebody obviously turned into you

Pimble: Yes.

Miller: Was the idea then, let’s put on this ballet, let’s create this work as a kind of one-off and see how it goes, or did you have grander plans?

Pimble: No, I think we knew that we wanted to have a small performing group and we were thinking maybe 10 dancers at the most. So this was the way to start. We were very lucky because at that time there were people in the community who had worked professionally. Tim and Nikki Foster ran a jazz school, but they had danced professional ballet. And then Susan Zadoff had danced professionally. Larry Sutton, who was an English teacher, had danced professionally. All these people were very welcoming and they joined us. Plus, we had behind us this school that Fred and Doreen had run. The students were very well trained and used to performing. So we had this cadre of really good dancers to get started with.

Miller: What do you remember? What were your first impressions of the city of Eugene coming from a small town, what, 20 or 30 miles from London, then dancing in Germany, and then you ended up in a city that I bet a lot of people in Europe had never heard of?

Pimble: That’s for sure. [Laughs] Well, actually, a lot of people didn’t know where Oregon was.

Miller: Fair enough. What was it like for you to get to Eugene in 1978?

Pimble: Well, the one thing that I found difficult was, when I first went to Germany, I got a job and I was 18 years old. And the reason that I went was because someone else had gotten injured. I had a week to actually go to Germany and join the ballet company in Kiel. I didn’t speak German.

Miller: Have I read that you didn’t even have a passport?

Pimble: I didn’t even have a passport. My dad took me out to London to Petty France area where the passport offices were. And within a week, I had a passport and was on a plane to Germany.

Miller: It sounds exciting and terrifying.

Pimble: It was terrifying. Well, it was exciting too. I had a great deal of trepidation, but especially because it was the 1970s and the Second World War was not that far away. So it was amazing that my parents were so supportive actually, because they had been through the Second World War. But you’re young, you’re adventuresome and it was very exciting.

So I thought about moving to the U.S., I’d speak the same language, I’d fit in a lot better. But actually, it was a culture shock and I found that I didn’t speak the same language. Initially, I struggled a bit.

Miller: Going from British English to American English?

Pimble: Yes, yes.

Miller: You were also taking on way more responsibility – running a school, very quickly running a performing arts organization. How much experience did you have that actually prepared you for that?

Pimble: None. [Laughs] But in a way, it was good because we were so young, so we were learning as we went.

Miller: How old were you?

Pimble: I was probably 25, 26 when I went and we didn’t know any better – and sometimes that’s the best way to be. We were also in the right place at the right time, because a bond measure had passed to build the Hult Center. That was built in 1982, opened in September …

Miller: A performing arts venue, a place where you could then perform?

Pimble: Yes, exactly, because we were performing in high schools. And Benson Snyder was the fundraiser that was raising funds for the Hult Center and he was going around watching all the performances of the local arts groups, wanting to find out what quality we were. He came to Riley and me and he had seen a performance. I think it was a joint performance between the Eugene Opera and the Eugene Ballet, in which we did “Pagliacci” and “Pulcinella.” He came up to us afterwards and he said, “That was really great.” He said, “I really wanna meet your board.” And we said, “Board, what’s a board?” We didn’t even have a board and he said, “Oh, you need help.”

Miller: So you weren’t a nonprofit?

Pimble: No, we weren’t. We were doing everything by the seat of our pants. We were paying dancers if we could, if we made the ticket budget. But we didn’t care, we just wanted to get on stage and create.

Miller: Were there times when you questioned what you’d gotten yourself into?

Pimble: I think the transition from being a performing arts group at a South Eugene High School Theater to the Hult Center stage – which is a fabulous facility – was a big step for all of the arts groups in Eugene. But I think it’s really wonderful that we have the Hult Foundation that is supporting local arts groups, and the fact that they made this decision not to have this be just a roadshow but to be a facility for the symphony, the opera, the ballet, the concert choir.

Miller: Was that a point when you realized that the company was going to survive, four years in, when you had a brand new beautiful theater to perform in?

Pimble: On one level, but on another level, we also realized that fundraising was going to be absolutely crucial to our survival. And when the Hult Center opened in 1982 in September, the first show was the Eugene Symphony with Marilyn Horne as a guest artist. The second show on that stage was the Eugene Ballet, with “The Firebird,” with the symphony in the pit. That was a huge financial undertaking. We had Peter Dean Beck and Molly Maginnis design the sets. They were built up here in Portland at ACME Scenic shop. That was a tremendous outlay of money. So we realized that, in many ways, this was a very big undertaking.

Miller: I want to go back in time. What first attracted you to dance? Why had you ended up spending your life devoting it to this art form?

Pimble: Well, originally my mother wanted me to play the piano like my brother, but I was a very lively child and would spend most of my time dancing around the room and not practicing. But also, my parents had those Reader Digest LPs of classical music and I loved classical music. I would listen to it with my parents and I loved dancing. In the ‘50s, in England, there was sort of this movement. There was a lot of interest in classical ballet and enrolling your girls into classical ballet, because they felt that it would give them grace and a physical prowess. So it was a natural step.

But the extraordinary thing about that for me was that I was living in Camberley, Surrey, which is where Elmhurst Ballet School, which was a professional ballet school, was situated. And I also had a very good teacher initially, Ivy Kirby, who had actually been on tour with Anna Pavlova – can you believe that? – in America. So I had a very good training with her from the age of 8 until 11. When she suggested to my parents that I should audition for Elmhurst, I did audition and I was accepted.

For me, it changed my life because I was not a child that could sit at a desk and learn that way. That simply wasn’t who I was. And I had been in a primary school with 30 kids. One year I remember I decided, “Oh, I’m not gonna learn anything today, this year. I’m just gonna draw horses in the back.” And of course, nobody could see me. And then suddenly I was in this private school with 10 kids in the class and I had to learn. But I was also doing ballet class every single day. That was my outlet and that was my love.

Miller: How have you maintained that love, even as you’ve had to do all of the logistics and fundraising? And you were talking about everything you have to learn to turn this into and keep this as a functioning arts organization, all of which is related to it. It enables the art, but it’s not the art itself. How have you been able to maintain your love for the art itself?

Pimble: Well, one of the things that I think has been really important is being realistic, because if you want an arts organization to survive, you have to recognize the lean times and you have to adapt to the lean times as much as you do to those times when you get a great grant that funds a specific ballet. So I was able to find ways, with my love of music and choreographing, to adapt to those lean times as much as to the times when things were going really well.

The other thing that also happened was, in 1994, we created an alliance with Ballet Idaho. Things were tough and Ballet Idaho was struggling. We were struggling and we decided that it made logical sense to become a two-city operation with one set of dancers, production values and an artistic director. So even though the dancers lived in Boise, Idaho and we rehearsed at the Simplot Center, we performed both in the Hult Center and in the Morrison Center. So we did that for 14 years, from 1994 to 2008.

Miller: Can you tell us about what it was like to choose just four works for the recent tribute show, a kind of swan song?

Pimble: “The Toni’s”

Miller: “The Toni’s” it was called, with an “i.” And this was just last month. What was the process of choosing those pieces like? You choreographed 60-plus pieces, many more were performed by your group, but you could only do a small number for this show.

Pimble: Yes, and initially I was just lost. How on earth do I choose? And then Josh Neckels, who’s our executive director, said, “Well, why don’t you think in decades?” And I thought, oh yeah, that’s a really great idea. So the very first piece that I chose was a piece called “May Dances” – which we performed originally in 1980, before the Hult Center was even built – to “Davidsbündlertänze.” And that was Schumann. That was a piece that a lot of those people that helped us get started danced in, so that made a logical sense.

Then in the ‘90s, I started to do more work with other companies, which was really wonderful for me. So I was invited to do a piece for the Diamond Project’s opening at New York City Ballet. I did a piece called “Two’s Company.” It made sense to me to bring that into the mix, because there were works that I was creating for other companies that I was then able to bring back to my own company. Plus, we have done a great deal of collaboration with other arts organizations, including the Oregon Bach Festival. Our next piece was a piece called “Concerto for Seven Dancers,” which we actually did originally with the Oregon Bach Festival. So that was like the 2000s.

Miller: And then the last one was a premiere, if I’m not mistaken.

Pimble: Yes, I did a pas de deux from “Taming of the Shrew.” I’ve done a number of full length ballets, but you can’t present a full length ballet two-hour program. So that was the next thing. Then I had always wanted to do Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending,” which is such a beautiful piece of music. [It] holds a special place in my heart because as a kid, my parents used to, when the sun finally shone, jump in the car and we would go down to Wittering, which is on the South Coast of England, and spend a day there. We would park in a farmer’s field and there were all these larks. We would hear them and I would just love them. So I loved that piece of music. I’ve always thought of doing it and decided, well, if I’m going to do it, I better get it done now. So I did.

Miller: You’ve said that you feel very good about the fact that your successor is also going to be a woman – Jennifer Martin, who’s been the associate artistic director. Why was this important to you?

Pimble: Because a lot of ballet companies have been founded by women such as Dame Ninette de Valois founded the Royal Ballet; Marie Rambert, Rambert Ballet; Lucia Chase founded American Ballet Theater. The list goes on and on. And yet, the very next person that comes in is a male. That then continues without looking for women. And I felt very strongly, being a woman, that having started a ballet company in Eugene – an opportunity that I would never have had in England, I would never have had in Germany – that I wanted a woman to take over.

Jennifer has been with me since 1994, first as a dancer, then she became a principal. Then when she retired, she became a ballet mistress and then later, as an associate artistic director. I wanted somebody who was not going to use the company as a stepping stone – not somebody from outside, but somebody inside the organization who values the organization and wants to stay and continue to run the Eugene Ballet Company.

Miller: We have about a minute left. What are you most excited to do right now in terms of choreography?

Pimble: Oh gosh. [Laughs] Well, actually everyone’s said, “Oh, we’re gonna miss you, Toni.” And I said, “No, you’re not, because I am going to continue to oversee my own work,” which will be presented by Eugene Ballet. But we’re also talking about doing a new “Swan Lake” for the 50th, which is not that far away. I have been working on that. So, Suzanne Haag – our resident choreographer – Jennifer Martin and myself will be working to create that new “Swan Lake.”

Miller: Toni Pimble, thank you so much and congratulations.

Pimble: Thank you very much, Dave.

Miller: Toni Pimble is about to step down after nearly 50 years as the artistic director of the Eugene Ballet.

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