Graham Watts talks to Hope Muir, Artistic Director of The National Ballet of Canada, on the eve of the company’s London performances.
Several years ago, the outstanding South African dancer, Dane Hurst told me that, when he joined Rambert, he was in awe of another dancer who could easily outjump everyone else. That was Hope Muir and now that her jumping days are done, she’s still aiming high with a progression of appointments up the ladder of artistic leadership, the latest high rung of which came, in 2022, as artistic director of The National Ballet of Canada. I spoke to her across the Atlantic Ocean – over Zoom – just a few days ahead of the company’s long-awaited, but brief, season at London’s Sadler’s Wells theatre, in early October.
Born in Toronto, Muir’s family relocated to London when she was fifteen where she became a founder member of Peter Schaufuss‘ London Festival Ballet School: one of an initial cohort of ten students, selected from around 400 auditionees. Her training both at the school and in her subsequent five-year stint with the company (now English National Ballet) included intense coaching in the Bournonville style, to which Muir partly ascribes her much-admired jump. Challenging dancers with different dance styles is something she believes in passionately, developing the “hybrid” dancer that she seeks, and this approach is already something she has introduced to the company in Canada.
Since childhood, Muir had always been drawn to contemporary dance and she left ENB to join Rambert at the same time that Christopher Bruce became director. She relished the opportunity to work with Bruce, whom Muir had known for some years, and particularly the chance to dance the work of Mats Ek (she described his unique way of working as both ‘funny and scary’) and Bruce himself. She had particular fond memories of dancing his Swansong – a piece actually created for three men – and Four Scenes, one of seven works that Bruce created on her.
Muir’s ten-year career with Rambert matched Bruce’s tenure as director and, in 2004 – facilitated by Bruce’s contacts – she moved back across the Atlantic to join Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago. A key motivation was to be able to experience work by William Forsythe. Three years later, Muir retired from the stage to become a guest teacher, repetiteur and rehearsal director. Her wealth of experience in both classical and contemporary dance meant that she was in great demand. Looking back, Muir recognised that this range of experience was unusual at the time.
Following teacher training at the Royal Academy of Dance, Muir assisted Emily Molnar at Ballet British Columbia (her first role back in Canada), and then took a full-time position as a ballet master with Scottish Ballet (although she noted that the company was specifically ‘looking for a man’). In 2015, she was appointed assistant artistic director to Christopher Hampson. Muir credits Hampson as being instrumental in her leadership training, openly involving her in the artistic direction of the company and enabling her to gain invaluable experience for a future job as artistic director.
After a couple of applications which went nowhere, Muir was appointed as artistic director of Charlotte Ballet, in the famous “Queen City” of North Carolina, a small company of some 20 dancers. In her five years at Charlotte, the company produced an impressive number of world (12) and US (6) premieres. She initiated collaborations with other arts organisations in the city ‘in order to get a good culture ‘buzz’ going’. The workload was intense, and things didn’t always go to plan. When I went to review the premiere of The Most Incredible Thing (choreography by Javier De Frutos and music by the Pet Shop Boys) in 2018, the opening night had to be postponed by 24 hours due to a technical hitch. But Muir was at last responsible for all aspects of company life, and she learned a huge amount.
We talked about her own choreography and Muir said that although she had created some small pieces, she knew that others could do it better and she had decided to concentrate her efforts on other aspects. Her philosophy has always been to take chances wherever they occur, believing that each and every part of her experience has allowed her to steadily acquire the skills needed for every aspect of running a company.
Her present role came about because she was invited to apply. She did so without any expectation of success, believing that the invitation might just be a “box-ticking exercise” to have a Canadian woman on the slate. She had just bought a property in Charlotte and was not keen to move. However, during an extended interview process – over Zoom, during the pandemic – the job steadily became more appealing and by the end of the process she was hooked.
Succeeding a director who had been in post for many years is never easy. While Muir acknowledged that her predecessor, Karen Kain, could not have been more gracious and helpful, her new regime is different, and there has been a need to build trust and respect. The pandemic had forced a natural attrition and several dancers had decided to retire; so, Muir had been able to recruit more than a dozen new dancers, which has helped provide a new foundation for the company under her leadership.
Muir is very hands-on in wanting to work with dancers in the studio. She spends part of her time teaching and wants to see her dancers through every stage of the creative process. She felt that this was perhaps the biggest change for the dancers themselves. The company is about to stage Ashton’s Rhapsody, for which she is taking coaching responsibility, blocking out studio time in her busy schedule.
Finally, we discussed the triple bill of modern work by Canadian choreographers that the company is to present at Sadler’s Wells – all unknown to British audiences. Crystal Pite’s Angels’ Atlas had been on the list for when a tour had first been mooted prior to Covid, and Muir had been keen to keep it as the ‘anchor’ for the evening. Alongside that would be former company director, James Kudelka’s Passion and Emma Portner’s Islands, a complex and intimate duet for two female dancers.
In previous interviews, Muir has been described as a ‘bold leader’, ‘a visionary’, ‘collaborative’ and ‘innovative’ and it seems to me that all these epithets are true. I asked what she considered to be the primary attribute of a good director, and she replied that it has to be the ability to communicate and – through good communication – to foster collaboration; aligned to an ethos of continual improvement. In closing, Muir noted that the choreographer – and Muir’s good friend – Helen Pickett had described her as a ‘collector of ideas and people’; a description which she is happy to accept!
Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA). He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.
He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv. He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.