Brian McSween brings powerful traditions to town
Big change is happening at Chattanooga Ballet. After the short tenure of artistic director Andrew Parker, a new artistic director—Brian McSween, most recently with Ballet Memphis—has joined Chattanooga Ballet after a national recruiting search. A new director of education, Nena Widtfeldt, was appointed in August.
Additionally, the company is making a hard push to be known as the “Fourth Pillar” of the arts in Chattanooga, along with the Hunter Museum, the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera, and the Chattanooga Theatre Center.
Hailing from North Carolina, McSween spent 10 years with the Joffrey Ballet in New York, followed by other prestigious appointments, including a period working with Complexions Dance. His choreography promises to add to the dance conversation in Chattanooga immeasurably.
McSween admires many of the traditions of Chattanooga Ballet, while looking to expand and build artistically, he says.
“The board of directors is incredibly vibrant and excited about the future,” he says. “It’s exciting to be working with them. There are great dancers here…they have a great investment, not just as dancers but as contributors to the organization. I would love to hold on to those things.”
McSween hope to see a stronger professional tradition grow out of this solid foundation.
“I want to see the company have a greater presence on the professional stage,” he says. “I want to see us grow, so that we are having seasons that are professionally based, not student based. I want to have the opportunity…to provide world-class dance to the city of Chattanooga and the surrounding areas. Regardless of what may separate [Chattanoogans], I want them to feel unified in the seats of the auditorium.”
Chattanooga is a strategic location, McSween says, noting that from this base the company can easily find performance venues in six or seven nearby states. His vision is not just performances, but tours that involve a trifecta of traditional performance, school presentations, and master classes.
“We want to grow in a wise way so as to be affordable to smaller communities,” he says. “We want our audience to be a unifier.”
As a choreographer and artistic director, McSween says he relies on mutual trust to develop dancers.
“I trust the dancers to take the choreography and guidance and leadership I’m providing and apply it,” he says. “Dancers trust me; [they know] I’m invested in them as an artist…trusting I am capable of providing the knowledge and guidance they need.”
He is invested in communicating his larger goals and plans with the company and building individual relationships, he says; for instance, he has taken each dancer out to lunch to get to know them better. From here, he hopes to grow the company so they can perform full-length evening ballets—an Apollo is in the works for the spring, in collaboration with the CSO.
Personally, I’m eager to see where all this is going, but the company is taking it slowly for now. Chattanooga is used to seeing lots of dance, at festivals, fairs, fundraisers, curated shows, spectator-interactive events, and more—there’s dance happening somewhere just about every weekend between now and year’s end.
Meanwhile, Chattanooga Ballet has cancelled an October “Ballet in the Park” event, and McSween says the next time we’ll see them is their annual Nutcracker (though I do notice that they’re on the roster for Chattanooga Dances! at CCA this Thursday).
We’re eager to see them, but this train is moving fast. Everyone else will have given their audiences a fat handful of times to see them in motion between now and Nutcracker season. Chattanooga Ballet, come down off that pillar and let’s see what you’ve got.