The Aspen Santa Fe Ballet is kicking off its 20th season this weekend. For the group’s founders it has been a wild ride. Through it all, they are still handling details you wouldn’t expect someone with “director” in their title to do.
Jean-Phillippe Malaty is the executive director of the company. He’s been at the helm since the start of the company 20 years ago. That’s after Malaty’s own career in dance. It’s a long time to be in the same position, and Malaty says the job is more stressful now than it was then.
“I miss those years," says Malaty. "There weren’t (sic) forty people on the payroll each week. There was no national touring of 20 cities or more. There was no international touring. There was not much money to begin with, so there was not much stress about money. Just the pure excitement of starting something new.”
Now that’s gone, Malaty says. The stress of managing all of the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet schools, running the company out of two different cities. Plus, he has to manage that payroll like he was talking about… But along with his colleague they have been keeping the train moving.
The company was founded twenty years ago when Bebe Schweppe asked Malaty and Tom Mossbrucker to create a ballet company in the Valley. No one in the ballet community was paying attention to what they were doing. They were in full creative control. Here’s Mossbrucker.
“We really didn’t set out to do anything in particular, except to do a really great job of what we were doing," says Mossbrucker. "Do it at a high level. Bring in choreographers that interested us.”
Mossbrucker says that it’s always been about the art. When it came time to decide what to do for their 20th anniversary, they didn’t want to do what other companies have done for anniversaries.
Choreographers Fernando Melo and Cayetano Soto return to produce pieces for the company. That’s what the company is working on right now.
The journey they have taken is one that has allowed them to stay true to their “ do-it-all” roots. Even before this rehearsal, Malaty and Mossbrucker are unwrapping costumes from their packaging as they arrive in the mail. It is something that would be done by an intern at another company.
That’s intentional. Malaty has been feeling pressure to do things the right way for two decades, but he wouldn’t have done anything differently.
“We took this privilege very seriously, and made sure not to make too many mistakes," says Malaty. "I think that’s the reason why we don’t have regrets or things we would change, because every step along the way when we built this organization was thought out.
Malaty and Mossbrucker have been so focused on keeping the company going that they haven’t had time to worry about the future or what will happen if something goes wrong. Part of the success they’ve had, Mossbrucker says, is because they were sticking to their identity. They were keeping the same work ethic they had all along.
