History

Louisville Ballet, the State Ballet of Kentucky, was founded in March 1952 as a civic ballet company. At the time, Louisville Ballet employed guest artistic directors and choreographers on a production-by-production basis. In 1965, Larry Gradus was engaged as a full-time resident Artistic Director with a troupe of temporary dancers. Ten years later, under the direction of Richard and Cristina Munro, the company achieved professional status by employing eight dancers to form the ensemble company. The Academy of the Louisville Ballet, now the Louisville Ballet School, opened the same year (1975) with Alun Jones as Associate Director. In 1978, Jones became Louisville Ballet’s Artistic Director, a position he held until his retirement in 2002. In addition to his duties as Artistic Director, Mr. Jones choreographed numerous works for the Company and also did a great deal of costume and scenic design during his tenure with the Louisville Ballet.

The Louisville Ballet holds the distinction of being the only regional company with which Mikhail Baryshnikov has performed in repertoire productions. He danced with the company during the 1978-79 and 1979-80 seasons, after which Louisville Ballet supported his performances in Dallas and Houston. Louisville Ballet reaches an audience of nearly 50,000 people each year and has earned a national reputation as one of the country’s leading regional ballet companies.

The Louisville Ballet named Bruce Simpson its new Artistic Director of the Company and the Louisville Ballet School in the Spring of 2002. Under the artistic direction of Mr. Simpson, the Louisville Ballet continues its philosophy of presenting an eclectic range of exciting work underscored by a foundation rooted in the classical repertoire. Through the dedication of its dancers, staff, school faculty and Board of Directors, the Company continues to enrich the community and its audiences.

Louisville Ballet has over sixty-five world-premiere ballets to its credit and a repertoire of over 150 works by such choreographers as Sir Frederick Ashton, Erik Bruhn, George Balanchine, Antony Tudor, John Cranko, Jack Carter, Kurt Jooss, Choo-San Goh, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, David Parsons, Eugene Loring, Saeko Ichinohe and Domy Reiter-Soffer, along with Fokine and Bournonville ballets. Among the company’s full-length ballets are Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, Coppelia, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Giselle, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and The Three Musketeers. In addition to the regular subscription series, Louisville Ballet presents The Brown-Forman Nutcracker each holiday season.

The Louisville Ballet Center is located on East Main Street in downtown Louisville and functions as the Company’s headquarters. A $2.2 million facility built in 1995; the modern warehouse-inspired building houses two large rehearsal studios and administrative offices. The Louisville Ballet Center received the Honor Award for Excellence in Architectural Design by the Kentucky chapter of the American Institute of Architects and was featured in the May 1997 edition of Architecture Magazine.

Sharing the art form of dance with the children of Kentucky and Southern Indiana is a long-standing tradition of the Louisville Ballet. The company’s student education programs reach over 12,000 schoolchildren annually through student matinee performances and on-site lecture demonstrations. Since the first outreach efforts in 1973, three distinct types of education programs have developed to help teachers incorporate the ballet experience into their classroom activities: in-school programs are interactive workshops held in school gymnasiums; in-theater programs are student matinee productions held in the company’s usual performance hall at the Kentucky Center for the Arts; and in-studio programs are a behind-the-scenes look at company rehearsals in the Louisville Ballet Center.

The Louisville Ballet School found a new home in 1999 at the St. Matthew’s Pavilion (formerly Artopia Creative Arts Studios, a state-of-the-art facility for dance, drama and visual arts) located in the east end of Louisville. In January 2003, the school opened a satellite facility at the Ogle Center located on the campus of Indiana University Southeast. With an enrollment approaching 400 students, the Louisville Ballet School instructs young dancers at all levels in a wide range of styles. Chosen each year by audition, the Youth Ensemble supports the professional company in larger productions and performs at the annual SERBA festival (Southeast Regional Ballet Association) hosted by Regional Dance America.

The Louisville Ballet marked five decades of dance in March of 2003. This professional company, which now employs dancers from around the world, celebrates its rich history, its reputation in the global landscape of dance and looks forward to another fifty years of excellence in performance, outreach and education.

In the Fall of 2004, the Louisville Ballet named Adam Hougland as the Company’s Principal Choreographer. As such, Mr. Hougland created the first of three world premieres for the Company. Devolve, premiered in March of 2005 followed by Made to Be Broken in October 2005. The Louisville Ballet debuted the third ballet, Fragile Stasis, in February 2007. Prior to his appointment, the Louisville Ballet commissioned Hougland to create Cold Virtues (2003) and to re-stage Beyond (2002).