What does a Modern Dancer Look Like?
DanceDC is The Washington Ballet's (the nation's capital, not the state) interdisciplinary dance and language arts outreach program located out of the THEARC (Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Center), the two-year-old multi-million dollar community center shared by nine partner organizations in southeast DC. The teachers of DanceDC, of whom I am proud to count myself, teach primarily in Ward 8 elementary schools, and with the help of a few dedicated teachers at each, bring ballet into the school day of first and second graders each week, one semester at a time. The program concludes with a "Culminating Event" where students perform for their classmates, teachers and parents. Through movement--both traditional ballet arm and leg positions and creative movement developed from the chosen texts--the students demonstrate what they have been kinesthetically learning from The Washington Ballet.
Katrina Toews, pronounced "Taves," has been the director of The Washington Ballet @ THEARC for less than a year. She was the interim director while the ballet searched for a permanent director. Why was she not offered the job? Katrina answers simply, "I was everything the position was not." But I beg to differ. And so does the community THEARC most serves. At a meeting between the directors of The Washington Ballet and the parents of THEARC, discussion of a permanent director inevitably surfaced. Katrina, who was present at the meeting witnessed a parent raise her hand and say firmly, "We want her." As Katrina tells me this, she is momentarily overwhelmed with emotion. "I can only do things I truly believe in." I believe her when she says this to me. Like the DanceDC program that Katrina entered into nearly seven years ago, her rise to the Director of the Washington Ballet @ THEARC has been the culminating event of her professional life and experiences.
It is difficult to believe that Katrina has only been working full-time at The Washington Ballet since 2004. She is such an integral part of the organization--she remains the lead teacher both at THEARC school and in the DanceDC program. To be fair, Katrina began with The Washington Ballet in 1999. After interviewing with Mary Day, the founder, Katrina was hired as a ballet technique teacher for the lower-school. Then she began adding contemporary dance technique classes and DanceDC classes to her weekly allotment. Even when she was offered an adjunct teaching position at James Madison University--which she took from 2001 to 2003--Katrina continued to work between Virginia and DC. In this context, "I was everything the position was not" seems rather ironic, especially as the school at THEARC is a satellite school, a model of The Washington School of Ballet in NW, the school for which the founder personally hired her to teach ballet. Still, if becoming the director of The Washington Ballet @ THEARC really is the necessary and inevitable end that her life has been leading to, how did she get there?
"I realize that I think I always go back to my story being my parents' story." Her father, a band leader, and her mother, an English and communication arts teacher bought an old farmhouse and eight acres of land in Goessel, Kansas, a close-knit Mennonite community of 500 people where Katrina spent her childhood. Her parents still live in the same house. There was only one school in Goessel, and Katrina's graduating class totaled sixteen. Though Katrina says that not many people in DC can relate to growing up in a small town, she does not suffer any lack of understanding in reverse. In fact, it seems that growing up in a small town allowed her more opportunity to become open-minded and certainly well-rounded. "You know, when you grow up in a small school you do everything. Because there is nothing else to do. There's nothing in your home town. You get involved in extracurricular activities. So I did all the sports and all the arts."
Perhaps coincidental, embedded within Katrina's last name, "Toews" is "twos"--precisely what her life seems to come in. Her mother gave Katrina, at age five, the choice of gymnastics or ballet. The family could not afford both. Katrina chose ballet. Was there a moment of revelation that led her to her decision? The "Heaven's didn't open up or anything" she assures me. She does remember "going into the studio and hearing the music and seeing the dancers and that was just so appealing." Katrina herself reveals, perhaps unconsciously, her own duality when she confesses, "I'm musical, but I'm also kinesthetic, so those--the combination of the music and the dance together was really perfect." When she went to college, she not only majored in elementary education, she also majored in fine arts. In fact, she essentially attended two colleges: full-time at the private, Mennonite, liberal arts Bethel College and part-time at neighboring Wichita State University. So driven was she to get back into the dance world after a hiatus of about five years--from the time she decided to be a three-sport athlete in junior high to the time she entered college as a freshman and took a Ballet I and then a Ballet II class, the highest class offered at Bethel College--that she divided her time between the two.
Though, as she says, being a part of a small close-knit religious community where "everybody knows you" places her, as she emphasizes, "on the periphery of the society," Katrina had no problem adjusting to Washington DC when she moved there for a two-year graduate program in dance at American University. There, she not only began teaching at The Washington Ballet while in her final year, but she also worked at Dance Place, a leading hub of dance in NE, and the Davis Center, a performing arts venue in NW. Each of these experiences provided her with a unique vision; each guided her through a different model, and though The Washington Ballet seems to have offered her the most of both, she appreciates what the others gave her. "The dance community is quite small, and to work with the leaders of the dance community I think is really important, because they have had so much to offer me in terms of what their experiences are and how they have gotten to where they were." Just being a part of the community and seeing the successes and challenges of each gave her "a great start."
And though more of her life these days is spent teaching than dancing, Katrina is first and foremost an artist. Consequently, she is the artistic director of her own dance ensemble, aptly named, K2 Dance Company. Her mission statement reads, "K2 Dance Company is devoted to finely crafted choreography and authentic performance. K2 seeks to provide thought-provoking and emotionally laced performances that require the audience to respond to the ideas expressed, making it more than movement for movement sake" (my emphasis). Katrina Toews is more than. Katrina Toews: city/country, artist/teacher, intellectual/physical all wrapped up in the most naturally bright smile I think I have ever seen.
She herself cannot connect all the dots to her rise to the Director of The Washington Ballet @ THEARC, though she suggests it is due to the eternal optimist in her. I daily observe otherwise. Growing up in a small town of only 500 seems only to have honed Katrina's drive toward a well-rounded, open-minded life; and her upbringing in a close-knit Mennonite community seems to have tuned her perspective precisely to that frequency of those she serves in her newfound leadership position. Pacifism and community service are two pieces of the Mennonite faith, and Katrina's place as a leader serving those in need of a stable community allows her to make both a reality.
Katrina Toews sees her current position as the Director of The Washington Ballet @ THEARC as a point she has not yet fully achieved. That is, there is a lot of work still to do. And "as a woman, you know, trying to initiate leadership in a positive way" she will "continue growing as a leader in the community....in a, in a thoughtful, an honest and, you know, real way so that my leadership can help other women feel like they can do that; because I know for me it, it only took a few role models to really interest me and make me feel like I can do it." I couldn't agree more.