It was quite a scene in the lobby of the Hult Center for the Performing Arts after the Eugene Ballet’s matinee performance of Carmen on a Sunday afternoon in February, three-quarters of the way through the company’s 2024-25 season.

Eugene Ballet Academy students, still in costume and full of pep, gave an encore performance. One small boy pretended to be a bullfighter, rushing at his mother; a slightly larger girl was stomping her feet, flamenco style, while departing adults, including instrument-toting musicians from Orchestra Next, dodged them, smiling indulgently.

Dressed modestly in black, Toni Pimble — artistic director of the Eugene Ballet for the past 46 years, and choreographer of Carmen and 60-plus other ballets for the company — stood beside one of the Silva Concert Hall exits, quietly receiving compliments from audience members as they left, greeting the people she knew, and thanking us for coming.

The mood was celebratory — appropriately so, since this was Pimble’s last season as artistic director of the company that she and Riley Grannan founded in 1978. The season concluded on May 16 with performances of Pimble’s Silk and Steel, which contains an homage to modern dancer Loie Fuller, and Pimble’s very English version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

That’s not surprising. Pimble was born in Surrey, England, in 1953, and trained at the Elmhurst Ballet School, where daily classes were grounded in the Royal Academy of Dance syllabus. “It was a very sound base covering all the technical needs, vocabulary and musicality for a young dancer,” Pimble said. Students were also exposed to jazz training, character dance, Martha Graham technique, classical Indian dance, and tap.

“This kind of all-round education was invaluable when creating full-length story ballets,” she added.

She should know: For the Eugene Ballet, she has made 13 full evening story ballets, including her own versions of such repertory staples as The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Romeo and Juliet, Coppelia, and not one but two Nutcrackers. In recent years, she has collaborated with Portland composer Kenji Bunch to make Mowgli, a multimedia, multigenre ballet with a libretto derived from tales in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book; and The Snow Queen, based on a Danish fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen.    

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We saw Pimble’s Cinderella in Portland in the late 1980s, when the Eugene Ballet and Ballet Oregon, a precursor of Oregon Ballet Theatre, pooled their resources and had joint seasons in both cities. Those collaborative seasons unfortunately ended in 1988, when Ballet Oregon merged with Pacific Ballet Theatre to become Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Most of Pimble’s story ballets contain roles for children, and for good reason. Over the years, she says, she has learned that “the personal touch has the most power to reach people. We are lucky that so much of our work is geared to families, because children are the audience of the future.” 

The Eugene Ballet and its audience are also lucky that Pimble is a storytelling choreographer, and a collaborative one. She is that rare dancemaker whose visual sense and musical sense are equally acute; moreover, her interests are wide-ranging. Over the years she has made ballets of varying length inspired by literature, music, folk tales, Native American legends, visual arts, film, current events, and politics, specifically feminist politics.  

In 1992, a banner year for her, she programmed the first Festival of the Uncommon Woman, an evening of ballets choreographed by women, danced to music by women composers. Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead the Baltimore Symphony, and at that time director of the Eugene Symphony Orchestra, was the conductor.

I asked Pimble how she happened to come up with the idea. “It was a response to the lack of performance support for woman choreographers and composers,” she replied. “Marin Alsop said that if she read one more article headlined ‘Woman conducts orchestra’ she would change [the headline] to ‘Crocodile conducts symphony’.”

Pimble’s own contribution to the festival, Columba Aspexit, was set to a score of the same name by Hildegard von Bingen. In five minutes of emotionally contained neoclassical dancing in a cathedral created with lights by designer Lloyd Sobel, she made a powerful statement about the traditional church’s view of women as either saints or sinners, with nothing in between. I’d like to see Columba Aspexit revived, along with the 1997 Still Falls the Rain, which was Pimble’s gut-wrenching response to a news report of the Taliban stoning to death an adulterous woman. Patricia Van Ness, one of the Festival of the Uncommon Woman composers, provided the music.

Dace Dindonis, Beth Corning, Lisa de Ribere, and Jill Eathorne-Bahr, all of whom were to become established choreographers, were the other participants in the  Festival. Bahr, now based in Jackson, Florida, has work in the repertories of ballet companies all over the country, many of them evening-length stories. Of Pimble’s role in support of women artists, she has this to say: “[Her] commitment to showcasing work created exclusively by women set to scores composed by female artists was truly ahead of its time. I extend my deepest gratitude to Pimble, whose dedication to elevating women’s voices in ballet has shaped countless careers, including my own.”

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That’s certainly true of the careers of Jennifer Martin and Suzanne Haag, who are now in charge of the Eugene Ballet, Martin as artistic director and Haag as associate artistic director and resident choreographer.   

Martin, who grew up in Long Beach, California, and received most of her training there, joined the company in 1994, following a stint with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Among her favorite roles, she lists the title role in Carmen and the Unchosen One in Pimble’s Rite of Spring.  I reviewed Rite for Dance Magazine when it premiered and said of her performance, “As the Unchosen One, Jennifer Martin, whose attack and musicality in such roles as Aurora and Odette-Odile, not to mention her sparkling Kitri, are a joy to see, abandoned decorum, placement, and line in a heart-stopping expression of vulnerability and fear.”

She was equally unforgettable in the title role in Dennis Spaight’s Scheherazade, which the Eugene Ballet revived in 1999, infusing her performance with the dramatic power and technical facility that she brought to everything she danced. Martin also has the ballet master’s gimlet eye for detail; she has staged Scheherazade on Oklahoma City Ballet and Oregon Ballet Theatre, as well as the Eugene Ballet, which now holds the extraordinary sets, made by Henk Pander, and the luscious costumes by Ric Young.

Of the 31 years she has spent working closely with Pimble — as dancer, ballet master, and associate artistic director — Martin said she had learned “an incredible amount from her, including her ability to lead with grace, focus, fairness, without drama, with clear purpose, and her collaborative spirit. It is my sincerest wish to continue in her footsteps; to be mindful of the need to continue inspiring, nurturing, and feeding the company artists’ growth, to continue presenting our patrons with productions that motivate and compel them to return for future performances, all while being conscious of the bottom line.”

That’s a tall order, but she won’t be doing this alone. She is married to Josh Neckels, who was appointed Eugene Ballet’s executive director in 2016. Neckels, a graduate of the University of Oregon theater department, has served in many positions with the company, including stage manager, finance manager, and tour director.

In Suzanne Haag — with whom Martin has been working since 2003, when the Connecticut native joined the company as a dancer — Martin has an artistic partner whose passion for ballet began at the age of three, when, she said in an interview for the website Canvas Rebel, her mother put her in a small school in Hartford, Connecticut. She got her professional training at the School of the Hartford Ballet, Boston’s Nutmeg Conservatory of the Arts, and the Joffrey Ballet, and she also holds a bachelor’s degree in dance and arts administration from Butler University in Indiana.

Haag joined the Eugene Ballet as a dancer in 2003, became resident choreographer fifteen years later, in 2018, and associate artistic director this summer. In the past seven years, Haag has made many short ballets for the company, and this fall, the season will open with Dracula, her first evening-length work. There are a number of balletic versions of Bram Stoker’s novel (Oregon Ballet Theatre also opens this fall with Ben Stevenson’s). Haag’s will replace Charles Bennett’s, in which she danced in the corps in the early 2000s. As Pimble often does, Haag is creating a soundtrack using many different composers, including Romanian composers Ciprian Porumbescu and Alexander Balanescu.

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In other ways, Haag’s approach to choreography differs from Pimble’s. While Haag has learned a great deal from her “about how to lead a room, how to collaborate with dancers, and have a sense of curiosity and joy in the process,” she says, “I do think a big difference in how we work in the studio is that Toni begins with a broad rough sketch of what she wants to see and say; she works fast and then goes back and fills in the details. I tend to work more slowly on details from the beginning, and refine as I go.”

Some of Haag’s choreography is informed by 21^st century technological developments. For her version of Petrushka, the highly problematic Stravinsky ballet — Eugene Ballet will revive it next April, paired with Martha Graham’s Dark Meadow — she wrote a new libretto in which AI pulls the strings of the title character, and his puppet mates, wreaking robotic havoc.

She is also responsive to 21^st century societal issues. The Large Rock and the Little Yew, inspired by Springfield author Greg Ahlii’s children’s story of the same name, in which the rock and tree are metaphors for a hostile adult world and the vulnerable children who have to deal with it, Haag addresses that struggle in nonverbal terms. The ballet, which was reviewed positively by Eugene critic and playwright Rachel Carnes when it premiered, will be performed in May with Pimble’s delicious version of Alice in Wonderland. I remain enamored of the corps de ballet for Alice of flamingos, and the masks and costumes, which were designed to look like Charles Tenniel’s illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s book. 

The company will be rehearsing in the state-of-the-art studios at Eugene’s Midtown Arts Center. The Center, which opened in 2021, is home to a number of arts organizations, including the Eugene Ballet,  the Eugene Ballet Academy, and Orchestra Next, which provides live music for Eugene Ballet’s performances.

It was meticulously designed by Pimble’s husband, architect Paul Dustrud, and the details are impressive. There is a small library attached to the Eugene Ballet Academy, where children can do their homework when they’re not in class or rehearsing for performance. One studio is the same size as the stage in the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall; another has the same dimensions as the Hult’s Soreng theater. Storage abounds, including lockers built to hold tutus. Orchestra Next has places to store their instruments, and there are administrative offices and board rooms for the seven arts organizations housed there.

Pimble, who remains on Eugene Ballet’s board, will be attending those meetings and, she said, helping to fund-raise. She will also be working in the studio with the dancers when they are rehearsing her ballets, and she will continue to make costumes. As for new ballets, she has begun to work on a new production of Swan Lake, with a new scenario and Tchaikowsky’s glorious score rearranged to include some lesser-known pieces. This is a joint effort with Martin and Haag, and the plan is to end the company’s 50^th anniversary season with it, in May of 2029.

And that will be something to celebrate!

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