A baseball player and championship boxer in college, Edward Villella of Bayside, Queens became a member of the New York City Ballet in 1957, rising quickly to soloist in 1958 and principal dancer in 1960. Among his most noteworthy performances in George Balanchine’s ballets were as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tarantella, Rubies, and the title role in Prodigal Son.
Villella was the first American male dancer to appear with the Royal Danish Ballet and the only American ever asked to dance an encore at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. He danced at Kennedy’s inaugural and performed for Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. He danced in televised versions of The Nutcracker, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Brigadoon and won an Emmy Award in 1975 for his production of Harlequinade for CBS. During the 1960s he and his dancing partner Patricia McBride appeared often on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1983, Villella guest-starred on the soap opera Guiding Light.
After retirement as a performer, Villella was the artistic coordinator of the Eglevsky Ballet from 1979-84 and the director of the Oklahoma Ballet from 1983-85. He founded the Miami City Ballet in 1986 and still serves as its Artistic Director and CEO.
Villella received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1997 and was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. Miami City Ballet performs next weekend at the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University.
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Hi Edward, this is Zac Whittenburg, I’m calling you from Chicago. How are you?
Well, I just got off a plane so I’m a bit, I’m a little punchy.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. This is going to be Miami City Ballet’s first visit to Chicago — is this the first time the company has arranged a tour here or have you made previous attempts to visit that have fallen through for some reason?
No, no, we had many years ago performed at Ravinia, but that’s as close as we got to Chicago — we’re very excited and happy to be going to Chicago proper.
You’re part of a big season for the Auditorium and you’re opening it up for them — it should be quite exciting next weekend.
Yeah, I have fond memories of that place. I was with the New York City Ballet when it reopened, that theater, many many years ago, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Oh really?
Yeah.
You must’ve been dancing Oberon.
Yes, I was.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about the program you’re bringing here. First of all, you’ve got Symphony in Three Movements. It’s been said that the ballet was inspired by World War Two in addition to Stravinsky’s score. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that means for you and whether this attribution, or this idea, comes into play in how you have restaged the piece.
Well, first of all, I had the pleasure of being in the premiere: I was the original Protagonist in the pas de deux lo these many years ago. It’s based on Stravinsky’s score, which was written in the mid-1940s from his reminiscences of the Second World War. Of course, Stravinsky and Balanchine were major collaborators and Balanchine eventually addressed that piece and gave us physicalization of the Stravinsky music and Balanchine, in his inimitable style and manner, reduced the obvious in — how can I put this — a neoclassical sense of taking a major idea and extracting it, which is sort of the basis of Balanchine’s neoclassicism: taking a very large idea and reducing it to its essence and, thereby, approaching poetry. As Balanchine was fond of saying, “dance is poetry of gesture.” So it was obvious that the basis of that work would follow the Stravinsky score and thus his reminiscences of the war. Read More…
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