“My sister has an exceptional voice, a natural voice. My other sister has quite a wonderful voice, and my brother had perfect pitch. That’s why I ended up in dance. Everyone else had their particular talents, and I needed to find something of my own.”
She’s a Companion of the Order of Canada, has received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. I inadvertently stepped on her star-shaped leaf on Canada’s Walk of Fame for crying out loud. And, until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t have picked her out of a police line-up. Now, well, now I’d name her as one of Canada’s most beloved and accomplished ballerinas and the perpetrator of some of the most unimaginably beautiful dance anywhere. If you’re looking for another Karen Kain piece, buddy, sorry, you’re at the wrong station.
She’s Evelyn Hart, and she’s a study in grace and beauty, elegance and courage. But a deeper examination reveals a dash of the unconventional and a healthy dollop of stick-to-itiveness.
“It really had nothing to do with dance. At 10 or 11, I watched Veronica Tennant dance in Romeo and Juliet on CBC TV. I’d always been interested in acting. My father was a great musician and we all took music lessons. And all of a sudden, it put everything into perspective. Dancing had drama. It had costumes. It had music. It was gorgeous. I had no idea about it, but I knew at that moment, that was what I wanted to be,” says Evelyn.
Her first audition at the National Ballet School was unsuccessful. They told her something most pre-adolescents wouldn’t be averse to hearing: her body was more normal than abnormal. Where other kids may have packed it in and tried something else, 11-year-old Evelyn couldn’t. She didn’t let being normal, at least in body type, discourage her. She took lessons at the YWCA, where her teacher was a former student of the National Ballet School and encouraged Evelyn to persevere. This time, she was invited to attend their summer school, but after sweating it out there for a couple of months, yet another rejection followed.
The family then moved from Peterborough to Dorchester, just outside of London, Ontario. Evelyn begged her parents to let her train with Dorothy and Vicky Carter. They agreed and, after three months, she was asked to go to the National Ballet School. And she went, as a full-time student.
The school worried Evelyn was getting a little too thin and, eventually, sent her home. At this point, anyone, let alone a child, could be forgiven for not putting much stock in “try, try again.” But Evelyn stubbornly refused to give in and give up. Her teachers thought she might do well in a new program that was being developed in Winnipeg. After completing Grade 12, she went. Toes pointed. Fingers crossed.
“I never looked back. I was there for three years, and then I joined the company in 1976. Four years after that, I was promoted to principal,” says Evelyn.
In 1980, Evelyn and her partner won a bronze medal at the World Ballet Concours in Japan. That was followed by a gold medal in Varna, Bulgaria at the International Ballet Competition. It was there that Evelyn received the rarely awarded Certificate of Exceptional Artistic Achievement.
“That opened a whole new world for me,” she says. “I was jet-setting around the world, guesting while I was continuing my career with the Winnipeg Ballet.”
For Evelyn, it’s all about expression. Technical virtuosity, athletic prowess, unparalleled grace. They’re all wonderful, but fail for Evelyn if they do not elicit a deep human response, something more profound than “wow, did you see how high she kicked her leg?”
“If I see something that is being done beautifully but there is no expression, I’m not taken by it.”
Evelyn feels that these days the pendulum has swung back a little in the direction of the gymnastics element in dance, what with the Cirque de Soleils of the world, but remains philosophical about it. As we privilege and enjoy watching the extremes to which the human body go, we lose something. There is the shirtless rock ‘n’ roll band with their amps turned to 11. And there is the lone folk singer in the coffee house. You can probably guess where Evelyn will be spending the evening.
“I lived my whole life using my body. Isn’t that funny? Even yesterday, I was explaining to my students it is about taking in the music and letting my body become the visual instrument of that. It wasn’t how high can I jump; how many turns could I turn. It was how can I mold my body into an instrument that expressed something. I think that’s what made me unique in my career,” she says.
Today, Evelyn teaches ballet: positions, pirouettes and pliés.
“I teach a small group of very talented and committed young dancers throughout the year. I do a summer program, which I love.”
The students are treated like professionals, dancing for eight hours per day over the five-week program. At the end, they put on a performance applying everything they’ve learned. Most importantly, though, she tries to instill in her students that they must find their own connection to the music and use their bodies, make them conduits for the sound.
“All of a sudden you find somebody who kind of hits the sweet spot, that has enough technique, but is able to express and then you kind of go, ‘oh, that’s what it should be.’”
Modesty prevents Evelyn from saying, “and that’s what I did.” So, I’ll say it. That’s what she did. She took the music and did more than merely interpret the piece; Evelyn became the music, every lilting note and every thundering crescendo. Where other dancers may have been more athletic or technical, Evelyn made a connection with the music and with the story. She amazed audiences around the world and won them over not with a scream but with a whisper.
“It was a way for me to express the feelings that were inside, the things that the music made me feel.”
Dancers are athletes, but you’d have a hard time getting Evelyn to admit that about herself.
“I’m not a physical person at all. My family were all very athletic. I’m the least athletic person you can imagine, but dancing for me was never really about the physicality. It was much more about the spirituality,” she says.
In fact, Evelyn believes the dancers who have a sense of the spiritual are the ones who are more likely to access the singular ability to absorb the music and use their bodies to express it.
“When I look at my students, it’s usually the ones with a spiritual background that are able to connect to something greater, and those that don’t are usually much drier,” says Evelyn.
While she had many associations with ballet companies around the world, Evelyn’s roots grew for 30 years deep into the Manitoba soil before retiring in 2005. “I hung up my pointe shoes August 23, 2006,” she says.
You can take the girl out of dance, but you can’t take dance out of the girl. Performances may be fewer and further between these days, but Evelyn still takes to the stage. She danced in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre this past November. In the spring of 2019, she will dance in an original production for two dancers called Four Old Legs. She playfully refers to it as heart-felt walking.
“It’s moving with intent. I don’t feel like I’m not dancing because for me dancing was always about expressing myself and using my body, but I’m not using a balletic vocabulary anymore. But, of course, that’s where I really prefer to be.”
These days Evelyn lives in downtown Toronto above the Eaton Centre, and it’s been more than a dozen years since she’s put her pointe shoes on, but Evelyn enjoys nothing if not a challenge.
“I need to be near a subway station because I don’t drive. Sometimes I think that’s my next project – to learn how to drive,” muses Evelyn.
If she decides to get behind the wheel, Evelyn just may turn that very utilitarian pursuit of getting from A to B into a study in form and beauty. Nah, she’ll probably just drive. But she’d do it with the same enthusiasm she brings to anything worth doing. Her advice for not just young dancers, not just young people, but everyone everywhere is to begin, to throw yourself wholeheartedly into your pursuit.
“To not be afraid to commit fully and wholly, and to throw yourself 100 percent into it because when it’s over, it’s over. While you’re in it, just live it fully. Don’t sit there and worry about what comes after because what comes after will always be fine. My feeling is that some people stand with one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat.”
I’m guilty of having done that and had a pulled groin to show for it.
“Trust that you are going to end up at a dock. It may not be the same dock, but wherever you go, you’re going to have those life experiences that you were meant to have, and hopefully change other people’s lives along the way,” says Evelyn.
Our lives are an expression, one big expression. We seldom have a choice on the score or the choreography but, in every life, there is just one principal dancer. We all choose to express ourselves.
And we all choose a style that is unique to each of us. Everywhere there are shiny bells and whistles tempting us away from what could be our truest essence. Sometimes it is difficult to stay the course, but Evelyn stuck to her guns. She was faithful to her intuition, and anyone who has seen her dance is richer for it. You got a computer? Heard of YouTube? E…v…e…
“It’s always been for me the biggest goal… if you can move someone spiritually, the art is doing what it was intended to do.”
Evelyn uses the story of the sun and the wind. Which one of us, they argued, can force this man to take off his coat. The wind blew and blew, and the more he blew, the more the man kept his coat wrapped around him. And then it was the sun’s turn. Out it came, quietly and softly. And the man removed his coat. That is Evelyn’s art. Working without a hammer, moving without force.
“I think that’s what moves people forward,” she says.
Evelyn seems to be always expressing, moving herself toward something, a goal, a sign post. Learning to drive makes sense for her. There’s the road ahead for what’s next and a rear-view into which she can look back on a long road of dance. Maybe she can hang those pointe shoes from that mirror.
SIDEBAR:
1. If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give her?
“Listen only to the things on the inside. Pay attention to your inner voice and follow it. It’s the driving force, and in the end, it’s you that has to live with you.”
2. Who or what has influenced you the most? And why?
“My parents, my father’s and mother’s spirituality, their sense of humanity, decency, sense of the world and caring for others really fashioned who I am on the inside. So, whatever I do artistically is a product of my inside.”
3. What are you most grateful for?
“I am most grateful for the privilege of being an artist, being able to live creatively and being on the stage sharing what I have… living in an emotional world where the values are about love and expression. Living in a world of intangibles is not easy, but it is fulfilling.”
4. What does success mean to you?
“I have to quote Anna Pavlova. She said, “When I was young, I was rather foolish because I thought that success meant fame and fortune, and now I’ve come to realize it is actually the realization of an ideal.””
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