Stoner Winslett gazes around the Richmond Ballet’s sun-brightened boardroom and considers the promotions for past shows. “You sit in this room and see the posters from London, New York and China, and I’m just so lucky, so blessed, to be plunked down in this place where there was a community of, at that point, pretty much board [member] ladies who had a passion.”
Winslett speaks quickly and with enthusiasm, her words tinged with the soothing accent of her Columbia, South Carolina, upbringing and accompanied by expressive gestures that connote her dance background. “They wanted to do something, and we clicked, and [we formed] the partnership with this community, bringing the businessmen, and bringing in the big donors, and now bringing in the alums who were in the school or in the company.”
The memories come fast: assuming direction of a balky “Nutcracker” at the Mosque Auditorium (now the Altria Theater) in 1980 at the age of 21. The company receiving official designation as the State Ballet of Virginia in 1990. The ballet’s 2005 debut at the Joyce Theater in New York and hearing people ask, “Who are these guys? How have we not heard of these guys before?” Performing at London’s Royal Opera House in 2012 and making a four-city tour of China in 2015. The challenges of COVID-19.
Now, after 44 years — a remarkable achievement for any leader — Winslett is stepping down from her position as artistic director of the Richmond Ballet and turning leadership over to her hand-picked successor, Ma Cong. She takes a deep breath. “Everything mushroomed,” she says. “When you look back at an era, you don’t know when it started until it ends.”
The Phone in the Hall
From 1957 to 1975, local private dance studios sent their best students to the Ballet Impromptu (later the Richmond Ballet) under the artistic direction of interior designer and theater impresario Robert Watkins. It was a tradition. “We did the best we could with the dancers we had,” recalled longtime board member Betsy Dale Gayle in 2003.
Stoner Winslett with Kitty Claiborne, the founding board president of the Richmond Ballet professional company (Photo courtesy Richmond Ballet)
When Catherine R. “Kitty” Claiborne joined the board in 1965, she sought to bring a sense of professionalism to the organization. With the financial support of William and Margaret Massey, the ballet founded its school, initially at First and Main streets, a location it quickly outgrew, and then at Lombardy and Broad streets.
About the time of the move to Lombardy and Broad, Gayle’s niece, who was attending Smith College, told her about a “wonderful, brilliant” fellow student who was interested in dance.
On April 21, 1980, the hall phone in Winslett’s dorm at Smith rang, and she answered. Gayle recalled, “I knew she was graduating in June, but if she’d get on a plane to Richmond, I’d put her up to come see what we’ve got down here.”
‘Snow White’
When Winslett was growing up in Columbia, her mother guided her toward dance because, as Winslett puts it, “She was tall and thought I’d be tall. She basically wanted me to stand up straight and that it wouldn’t go much past that,” Winslett says, laughing. “Boy, did I fool her!”
Following jazz and tap instruction, at age 13 Winslett began teaching dance to kids in a neighbor’s basement a couple days a week for $8 a month. She choreographed the movements and used records for the accompaniment. She parlayed the classes into year-end recitals at the A.C. Flora High School auditorium. An early mentor, Anne Brodie of the Calvert-Brodie Studios, encouraged her toward the Columbia City Ballet apprentice company, where she eventually directed pieces, too.
Winslett staged a version of “Snow White” that sold out a three-day run at the auditorium at $5 a person. In a 2003 profile, Winslett said that show made her realize the impact an arts event could have on a community. Riding a department store escalator, she overheard a group of women discussing her “Snow White” with excitement. “They didn’t know who I was or who directed it,” Winslett says. “They were just glad that they’d seen it.”
That revelatory experience remained with her.
Stoner Winslett in a 1973 recital for the neighborhood ballet school she founded (Photo courtesy Richmond Ballet)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Richmond Ballet was one of the few professional dance companies to continue operating. “When your mission is to uplift, awaken and unite human spirits, then you need to try to achieve that every day,” Winslett says. “How do you turn your back on the dancers and the audience during the darkest time for the planet? Then you find ways to do it.”
The company maintained safety protocols, rehearsing and dancing in masks and limiting the studio theater audiences to 60 people. Associate Artistic Director Ma Cong, connected via Zoom from Tulsa, Oklahoma, choreographed new pas de deux pieces from his children’s nursery while using a stuffed animal as a partner. “Is that the right way to choreograph a new pas de deux? Absolutely not,” Winslett says with a weary smile. “Is that the way we want to do it now? No, but it worked then. It helped save us.”
Audiences came, also wearing masks, and left the performances in tears of gratitude. She received notes afterward, expressing what the performances meant to patrons as expressions of hope.
Today they’re showing their regard for the ballet by returning, and, along with new patrons, filling the seats.
‘Windows’ on Creation
Winslett enrolled in Smith College’s dance program because it emphasized ballet. There she encountered an important influence on her art and life, dance history professor Rosalind de Mille, related by marriage to the renowned dance figure Agnes de Mille, and she danced every day under the instruction of artists-in-residence Karen Williamson and Gemze de Leppe.
She also maintained a full, personally designed academic course load: music history, studio art, and technical theater and drama. It was the springboard for her “Windows” piece, first performed at Smith in three parts in 1980 (a fourth section was added for the Richmond Ballet’s 1999 Millennium series), which traces several periods of dance history with corresponding dance styles and costumes.
Winslett’s knees began giving her trouble, and she faced the difficult reality that she wasn’t destined to dance six hours a day. As graduation neared, she applied to the American Ballet Theatre and York University in Canada for graduate work in dance history and criticism.
And then that phone rang.
Raising the Barre
Richmond Ballet’s last day at its Lombardy Street studio in 2000 (Photo courtesy Richmond Ballet)
After she moved to Richmond, the ballet grew, a staff developed, and Winslett, accustomed to directing almost every aspect of the company’s professional existence, learned to delegate. She married attorney Donald Irwin, who in his pre-law life was a cantor at the Washington National Cathedral, singing for eight services a week. They have four children.
“I started the professional company in 1984, and 10 years into the mission, the community had stepped up in incredible ways to support a professional dance company in the commonwealth of Virginia,” Winslett says.
She wanted the ballet to give back while also casting a wider net for training dancers, so in 1994, the organization started the Minds In Motion program. Former dancer Brett Bonda served as its artistic and administrative coordinator for 16 years and today is the ballet’s managing director.
Winslett describes Minds In Motion as a way to bring ballet and dance to children who are from “uninclined families” — those for whom ballet isn’t part of their culture or sphere of interests. Not every youngster who experiences dance will want to continue, but they won’t have a chance unless they are introduced. Minds In Motion started in two elementary schools and pre-pandemic had grown to 25; it dropped to 16 but is climbing back. In 2010, the program established a residency in Israel with partnerships for young Jewish and Arab students.
Winslett receives the keys to the ballet’s Canal Street building from Rodney Hanneman of Reynolds Metals Company in 1997. (Photo courtesy Richmond Ballet)
Succession
In 2000, the Richmond Ballet moved from Broad and Lombardy to its current location, a repurposed industrial site at 407 E. Canal St., enabling expansion that benefited audiences, patrons, dance students and the organization itself. “It’s so funny, like they used to say, ‘We’re Very Richmond,’ because we still call this ‘The New Building,’” Winslett says. “And we’ve been here since 2000!” She pauses, dabbing her brow. “Twenty-four years! I don’t know where all that time went.”
After the move, Winslett began considering the question of succession. “We’d formed a staff that was competent, passionate and energetic enough, and that was a huge relief,” she reflects. With that structure in place, the ballet could go on without her if needed.
She knew that members of the company had moved to Richmond from far-flung locations — South Africa, New Zealand, California — to work for the ballet. And, because she had been essentially the ballet’s first employee, she had hired everyone, or someone she’d hired had hired them. “I take their livelihoods — artistically, professionally, financially — very, very seriously,” she says. “And I also take the responsibility that the community has entrusted me in that direction very seriously. So, I started looking at the board, we got to thinking about it, and they said, ‘Well, you can’t leave until you find somebody.’”
Winslett didn’t want to leave suddenly, and, if something unforeseen should occur, she did want to have a capable person in the wings who could take over. And she didn’t want that individual walking into the situation like she did with her first unfortunate “Nutcracker.” She knew that finding the right person was the first challenge. However, she had seen enough founders of companies take their last bows only for incapable hands to inherit their work to know that artistic leadership can be idiosyncratic, and transitions require a choreography of their own.
Winslett, Ma Cong and the company on tour in China in 2015 (Photo courtesy Richmond Ballet)
Beginning Anew
In the summer of 2008, Ma Cong was one of four choreographers in a showcase event in California. (In China, surnames are listed first, so he will be referred to as Ma.) Dancers from across the country were selected to participate, two of whom came from Richmond: Valerie Tellmann and Lauren Fagone. “Lauren was in my piece, and Valerie watched on the side,” Ma says. They asked if he’d ever met Winslett; he had not. Back in Richmond, Fagone and Tellmann told her about Ma’s approach and style. “And that’s how Stoner heard of me,” he says with a smile. “It’s been 14 years since we met and I began my association with the company, so I’m not like a stranger coming out of nowhere.”
Ma had begun dancing at age 10 when he, and thousands of other youngsters, auditioned for the Beijing Dance Academy; he was one of two selected from the Yunnan province to join the academy and train in Chinese classical dance. He was a member of the National Ballet of China from 1995-1999, working with international choreographers from the Paris Ballet, Kirov Ballet (St. Petersburg, Russia), Royal Ballet (London) and the New York City Ballet. After moving to the U.S., he demonstrated resilience and creative imagination as a member of the Tulsa Ballet in Oklahoma,, where he performed works by contemporary classic choreographers such as George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins and choreographed original works for numerous other companies, including the Houston Ballet and BalletMet in Ohio.
It was as a guest choreographer that Ma, like many others, came into the Richmond Ballet fold. If Winslett liked what she saw, she’d ask them back to direct, teach during the summer, invite them to dinner with a trustee. After a successful 15-minute sketch in the New Works festival, Ma returned in 2009 with “Ershter Vals,” inspired by Hollywood films of World War II and music of the Jewish ghettos from that period, and in 2012 for “Luminitza,” a commission inspired by Romanian culture and the musician Alexander Belanescu.
This led to teaching, a tour of China with the Richmond Ballet and more pieces, including “Lift the Fallen,” a tribute to Ma’s mother, who died in 2012, that was commissioned by the Richmond Ballet and premiered in 2014.
“I wanted to create a work in tribute to her and in tribute to all the people who experience the losing of loved ones and how they can make themselves come back to the real life and in moving forward,” he explained in a company video. Ma’s full-length ballet “Tchaikovsky: The Man Behind the Music,” which premiered with the Tulsa company in 2019, demonstrated his connection to the creator of “Swan Lake” and “The Nutcracker.”
To Ma, dance is a language interpreted through music and, as such, the expression of the full spectrum of emotions. Ballet isn’t obscure. He is aware of the art’s rich history but is also eager to make things new. He is exactly the person Winslett was looking for.
For her 40th anniversary with the Richmond Ballet, Winslett asked the board to allow her to appoint an associate artistic director with an eye toward developing an eventual successor. Ma received the offer in January 2020, and then, two months later, the pandemic began.
Winslett realized companies across the country were furloughing their staffs and dancers. She instead wanted to give a clear signal to both the community and the ballet that a future existed, and that Ma would be a part of it. He Zoomed in from Tulsa for a year and a half before moving to Richmond in 2023 with his husband and their twin sons to ensure the Richmond Ballet’s creative life goes on.
“In some ways we couldn’t be more different,” Winslett says. “He’s from a western province of China, I’m from Columbia, South Carolina. He’s male, and I’m female. So many different things, but in the ways that matter, we both share a love and enjoyment of the dance and a commitment that it’s not only for the people doing it, but the people seeing it, and that presented in the right ways and the right places at the right times to the right people, it can make a huge difference in the world. And I love that about him.”
Ma Cong in rehearsal with the company in 2010 for “Ershter Vals,” his first work choreographed for Richmond Ballet (Photo courtesy Richmond Ballet)
Next Stages
Ma may have to deal with some old business as he moves on to the new. Late last year, reports emerged on Axios and other media that two former dancers were suing the Richmond Ballet for a combined $21 million. They allege that the ballet “acted negligently and intentionally inflicted emotional distress,” particularly regarding dancers’ weights. The plaintiffs argue that the ballet staff enforced an “optimum Body Mass Index” for trainees and reserved the right to remove those who exceeded it. Through its lawyer, the ballet has denied the allegations. “I stand behind the integrity of my colleagues,” Winslett said in December with the cases still pending. “After all these years of the Richmond Ballet, we’ve never had an employee lawsuit. … It’s sad, and it’s all going to turn out fine, but these things drag on forever. You put that over here, we keep our eye on the ball, the mission, vision, of awakening, uniting and inspiring human beings. Truth is truth, you know. Truth is truth.”
Looking to the future, Winslett and Ma are both enthusiastic about the ballet’s new partnership with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Since TheatreVirginia shut down in 2022, the Leslie Cheek Theater has played host to film events, lectures, and occasional plays and musical performances but otherwise drowsed in the dark. That’ll change in September.
The VMFA is engaging in a $190 million expansion project that includes a modernization of the Cheek, first opened in 1955. Among the upgrades is the extension of the proscenium to 30 to 37 feet in width. The “New Building” on Canal wasn’t intended as a performance space (“We used it because we had it,” Winslett says.) so the ballet will move its new and repertory works to the museum stage.
Ma says the resulting performances won’t be termed the “Studio Series,” because the company is leaving the name behind with the space. As one might with a new baby, the ballet is considering what to name its new showcase.
“It’s a great auditorium and also seats more people,” Ma says, adding that the venue is spacious enough to allow for live musical accompaniment. He views this as an exciting marriage of the arts: the Richmond Symphony, the ballet and the VMFA. “That is a happy place,” he says, envisioning evenings like a multicourse meal with up to four pieces ranging from classical to contemporary.
Ma knows a fine balance is necessary for presentation to a broad audience. In this way, the ballet contends with the same struggle as a theater company. Some people love their “Nutcracker,” while others may also want something spicier and new. “Some people think of ballet as all tutus and pointe shoes,” he says, and, sure, there is some of that, “but ballet as a form has grown, and so has the Richmond Ballet.”
Winslett acknowledges that the ballet she’s nurtured for decades will change — as it should. “It’s time for fresh ideas and fresh energy,” she says, “and I don’t think it’s going to be a dramatic left turn.”
Although she is stepping down from her position on July 1, Winslett will stay on part time for a year to help donors and patrons understand what an endowment gift or a planned gift means to ballet’s future. “People are saying to me, ‘Won’t you be upset?’” She says, laughing. “No! I’m going to be excited to see what [Ma] does, and I’ll be cheering from the audience.”
