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The Prima Ballerinas Go Communal

By Karyn Campbell
Video by Becca Purice
Photos by Thomas Martinez

In a concrete office space under a concrete overpass next a parking garage, two young girls on point smile softly, masking the superb difficulty of their precise body placement. With each limb taut, their thumbs flexing according to plan, the playful Habanera aria from Bizet’s opera Carmen comes to an end. The ballet studio goes quiet for a moment, and all eyes go from the dancers to the directors. “Yes! That was so good!” Hannah Bontrager yells with enthusiasm in her sprite-like voice. The music starts again and dancers get back in motion. Hannah consults her mother and co-director Donna, who keeps her eyes focused on the dancers as she nods in response. Ashley, Hannah’s sister and one of the dancers, has just gone from tights to t-shirt and dashes out the door to make it to her job as a waitress on time.

This is the Bontrager family office, the Ballet Fantastique company studio in downtown Eugene. VHS tapes lay stacked next to bejeweled plastic crowns, cardboard boxes and scraps of red costume pieces lay strewn on the office floor. It’s crunch time for Ms. Donna Bontrager, the company’s artistic director, and her daughter Hannah, Executive Director and professional ballet dancer. Their company will perform an exhausting 2-act show with only 5 professional dancers at the Hult Center in less than a week. Hannah has to fly back to her chamber company in Virginia the following day, and her younger sister and fellow dancer Ashley has her mind on things besides ballet (a job, school, a boyfriend and a career in Journalism). With Ashley about to graduate and unsure about her future and Hannah on the East Coast, Donna admits decisions will have to be made soon as to whether Ballet Fantastique can survive without its key members. Next week’s performance could be their best, and Donna hopes, not the last of its caliber. The make up is off but the Bontragers are on point and under pressure.

For Donna, Hannah and Ashley Bontrager, Ballet has become a sport, an art and a social project. Their school, Ballet Fantastique, trains classical dancers, produces professional chamber-company performances and recently became a non-profit organization that does community outreach by bringing ballet to public schools in low-income areas. They built their studio with the hope that a Northwest audience can learn to appreciate and participate in local ballet, which will in turn encourage dancers to flourish within regions where the art hasn’t been a traditional institution. “I feel it’s also really important for the community, for the Northwest, to have our artists here to nurture, to support them, and to benefit from their talent, their energy and their dynamism,” says Hannah. “We’re outsourcing our most talented young people. It just doesn’t sense.”

A week before Valentines Day, Ballet Fantastique dancers box up the extra ballet slippers and plastic crowns and head to the Hult Center, where they’ll dance to the Habanera again, this time in front of a crowd. Backstage the girls paint their brows, and the boys squeeze into their Spanish jackets in a haze of hairspray and blush powder. Hannah, still in legwarmers and a purple leotard, hashes out the last details onstage with fellow dancers Ya Xi Fu, Alonzo Moore, Amelia Unsicker and Ashley, before the onlookers arrive. Sounds of Spanish guitar linger backstage, mixing with the high-pitched voices of the ballet dancers and the sudden, suspenseful sounds of the accordion warming up. The globe trotting Russian musicians, the Trio Voronezh, are still fiddling with their strings, shirts untucked, preparing to unleash two hours of lively and technically daunting pieces. Donna has a read sweater swathed over her petite frame, focused and serious watching her dancers rehearse.

Donna began ballet training too late in her life to reach the levels of mastery she so passionately sought. As a child growing up in a family with Mennonite values in the Midwest, she wasn’t allowed to participate in ballet. The community didn’t have a nurturing environment for young dancers. But when Donna married and moved to New York, she began studying Pedagogy, the art of ballet instruction. More specifically she immersed herself in the Vaganova Method, also known as the Kirov Syllabus, an extensive classical ballet training program originated in Russia. She became fascinated by the notated and logical approach to classical teaching, which, was little known in the United States at the time. “I thought this is such an amazing thing. It looks so artistic in how it uses the entire body to express the dance step, not just the leg and the feet. It had so much artistry in the upper body,” she says. “I just wanted to understand about that kind of training and I wanted to train like that.”

After a divorce 12 years ago, Donna Bontrager and her two little daughters went westward to be with family. She started Ballet Fantastique in Eugene as a personal endeavor – the school would allow her artistic freedom and technical accuracy in teaching the Vaganova Method she so admired, while properly training her two young daughters in the art she longed to participate in as a child. Donna decided her daughters would be ballet dancers before they were born. “I know there sort of a danger in that,” she says, “but I also know that for someone to become a professional ballet dancer and a beautiful artist on stage it’s something where you really need a mentor, you need someone early.” Donna has a fragility and gentle nature in the way she talks about her children.

Hannah’s childhood immersion in dance informed the rest of her life. She remembers having tutus strewn across the house, and forcing Ashley and the neighborhood kids into doing living room ballet performances. She was an organizer from the start, designing make-shift sets and cheap costumes. Hannah says she made many sacrifices to fulfill her mother’s dream and make it her own, but that she can’t imagine another life for herself. “Dance has been this driving force in my life that makes me know why I’m doing what I’m doing.” Her younger sister Ashley, the more sensitive and subdued of the two, recalls growing up as servant to the queen, patient to the doctor, in all their games. “She’s very, I don’t know if burly is the right word, but she does more than anybody else I know I know.”

Her sister Ashley tells me she’s not sure where Hannah gets it. But she has a hunch: After the three Bontrager women moved to Oregon, Hannah felt she needed to step up and drive the family like a father figure. Her mother Donna has a very artistic and gentle demeanor – even speaking seems to cause her discomfort, as if she’s a wounded child. Ashley says Hannah knew she would have to step up and start making serious decisions about the studio, because Ashley had doubts about dancing ballet even as a child. Donna says today that Ashley is the more artistic, gifted dancer, but Hannah succeeds by exerting a surprising amount of self-discipline into perfecting her style and athleticism. She recognizes her physical strength as an asset but insists that ballet must go beyond hard training. “Ballet isn’t just a sport – that would be too easy,” says Hannah. “There’s a gift that you’re giving on stage every night.”

The Bontrager family living room has gotten much bigger, and tonight at the Hult Center the professional chamber company and the studio’s student dancers will put on Ballet Fantastique’s most challenging performance to date. Danse en Rouge exemplifies how the Company brings together a community through artistic collaboration. The Russian string and accordion trio play stage right, backed by enormous projections of art provided by local galleries. Donna and her team of seamstresses have sewn costumes of impressive detail. Moms backstage get the younger dancers in order. “The sweat the tears, the blood, all of that is worth it when you can create something beautiful,” Hannah says. “Hopefully we’re creating art that makes people think.”

The audience chatter quiets down and the dancers scurry to put final touches on their make up backstage. The curtains open. A wash of color and movement follows as the first act, Carnival of the Animals, unveils the artistry, the athleticism and concentration of the dancers. Ashley moves with a subtle sensuality and artistry that defines itself from Hannah’s athleticism and immense glow. She glides and twirls with a smoothness, almost leisurely to watch. “Ashley just kind of feels things and then she can just express herself,” says Donna. “She can be very sensitive on stage.”

Ashley didn’t always want to plunge into the family business the way her older sister did. “For a year or two I absolutely hated it I would just go to class and sit. I would space out when my mom would say the combinations and not pay attention. It was when I started college that I realized that I kind of have something a lot of people don’t have.” Ashley graduated winter of 2009 from the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, where for years she studied and danced professionally, working on the side as a waitress. The bright-eyed, slender dancer, a lover of Jane Austen, has an adventurous spirit but a strong attachment to home. Ashley has plate of options in front of her as a recent graduate. She may even move overseas to be with her German boyfriend. Hannah says she’ll be broken hearted if her sister moves away, but that she’s certain Ashley will take Ballet Fantastique with her. “No matter where I go I’m always going to do ballet until I can’t walk anymore,” says Ashley.

Onstage Ashley mixes her sensitivity with the years training, creating an awareness and vulnerability quite artistic in form. Her and Hannah dance together to the Argentine tango Bésame Mucho and the chemistry emanates into the crowd. They vamp the already coquette kicks and elegant black-lace, red-corset costumes with their playful interactions. Hannah charges into her self-choreographed steps with astounding control. Her drive and competitive nature takes stage as if all the rest, the business, the planning, have never taken a moment away from perfecting her form and creating artistic dance choreography. Meanwhile, Ashley works with her arms to mesmerize, playing off her sister’s energy as a source for her own individual grace.

The passion and perfection Hannah dedicates to every facet of her life shows in her toned back muscles, her precise movements and her clear articulation. She pushed Ballet Fantastique to go non-profit three years ago and began receiving grants allowing her to go into Title One schools in the Eugene community, to teach science through dance. “The kids are able to learn about migration and predators all this terminology in this really unique dynamic way that the teachers are just blown away.” Hannah has a way of performing even as she speaks. She’s proved herself. Her success as a dancer sprang to fruition through her mother’s modeling, yet there’s a purpose in her demeanor more natural than cultivated. “I just think that as arts educators we need to stop this narrow focus on ballet just being for the rich pretty kids and find a way to make it more accessible for everyone.”

Hannah has a way of performing even as she speaks. She’s proved herself. Her success as a dancer sprang to fruition through her mother’s modeling, yet there’s a purpose in her demeanor more natural than cultivated. Hannah usually embodies the Public Relations campaigns she does for her studio – artistic and savvy, never faltering and always on cue. Nicknamed “Superwoman” by her administration interns at Ballet Fantastique, Hannah is often caught at board meetings with notes written on her hand about things she can’t forget to do afterward. Even when she admits her flaws, she seems to do so in such a self-aware honesty that she suddenly becomes more likeable. “I am judgmental, proud, critical and competitive,” she says. “I am also my biggest critic.”

When the show ends, the three Bontrager women bow with smiles stretched across their small, bright-eyed faces. It’s uncanny how similar they look, all in red and drenched in exited relief. Together with their company and the community they’ve shared a bold and challenging show. The classes, the rehearsals, the sewing and moving and promoting (the second jobs, the flights, and the exams) have come to a temporary moment of exhale. But the adrenaline of a finished performance that has tested the dancers’ endurance levels and capacity for concentration still courses through their hearts and bodies. “Ballet isn’t just a sport – that would be too easy,” Hannah says. “There’s a gift that you’re giving on stage every night.”

As the three women have watched their studio grow in the community, they’ve kept an emphasis on the intimacy of the chamber company and the originality in how they approach ballet – with a strict, classical training method, but an acceptance and encouragement of personality and versatility. But Ballet Fantastique has by no means peeked in potential. Hannah, who spends the majority of her time dancing on the East Coast, may move back to Oregon in the next few years enabling her to take a more active role in outreach and directing. But Ashley may move where a job or life outside ballet takes her.

Donna says her daughters are irreplaceable in the role they play in the family company. And Hannah says she’d be heartbroken if her sister ends up moving far away. But they want Ballet Fantastique to grow sustainably, not relying so heavily in the exhausting personal investment of their family. “You want it to become strong enough that if you got hit by a car it could run without you, something that community runs by and supported by an entire network of people.” As Hannah spends more time dancing on the East Coast and Ashley decides whether or not professional dance is for her, the Bontragers see their ballet project, their studio, their school, their outreach, face funding and commitment challenges. But certainly, the Bontrager women have invested enough in the community and the art of classical dance to embrace it for the remainder of their lives. “We haven’t totally arrived ever. You never stop learning, you never stop growing,” says Donna. Things keep changing, but being together – that’s so important – working together with people, caring about each other just expands out to other people, too, that whole community and that unit.” With evident belief in her own words, she stops, thinks, then straps black shoes onto her small feet and goes back into the studio where her students await her instruction. The next performance at the Hult Center is only a few days away.