Ballet Memphis dancers Brandon and Virginia Ramey are hanging up their ballet shoes.
“You can’t dance forever,” Brandon says.
“We both are retiring with our final performance as Cinderella in April,” Virginia says.
The production will be held April 14th through 16th at the Orpheum. Virginia and Brandon will dance in the Saturday evening performance and the Sunday matinee.
“The April 16th Sunday matinee will be our last performance on stage,” Virginia says. “Then we start June 1st as co-directors of the Ballet Memphis School and Youth Ballet Memphis.”
“The opportunity was presented to us a couple of years ago,” says Brandon, who, along with his wife, have been assistant Ballet Memphis directors for the past two years.
They weren’t sure what they were going to do next when Gretchen McLennon, CEO and president of Ballet Memphis, asked about their future plans. “At that time, we were going to dance until an opportunity came,” Virginia says. “And it came right on time.”
Janet Parke, former director of Ballet Memphis School, became the new senior artistic associate. “It opened up a space for Brandon and me to step into the school and continue what has been going so well. And make a few changes here and there,” says Virginia. “We have been doing some ongoing training in New York with the American Ballet Theatre national training curriculum. That will be a “little bit of a new curriculum for the school.”
As for dancing, Virginia says, “It takes so much time and energy to dance professionally. And we will now be putting all that time and energy into the school. We may make guest appearances here and there, but to do what we’ve been doing at this level will not be possible because we have two kids at home and 300 kids at work. We want to be able to really focus on the school and growing the program.”
Asked who was at Ballet Memphis first, Brandon says, “Ginny. By a country mile.”
“I grew up here, so I grew up in the Ballet Memphis School since I was five years old,” Virginia says. “I joined the professional company right out of high school and danced with the company over 20 years now.”
Ballet Memphis founding artistic director Dorothy Gunther Pugh brought Brandon to Ballet Memphis in 2009. “They found me going to San Francisco Ballet School,” he says. “I’ve fallen in love with my wife and the city and now the school.”
Asked how he and Virginia met, Brandon says, “We got paired for Nutcracker because we’re both very tall. The degree of chemistry we had surprised everybody.”
They fell for each other “pretty immediately,” Brandon says. “I liked her sense of humor and her feisty attitude.”
As for working together, he says, “Sparks can fly, but she never backs down. She’s got a true north compass sense of how movement and music interact. So, it’s like being in the room with Beethoven and Mozart. ‘Oh, wow. She just knows innately how things are put together.’”
“We immediately got along as friends,” Virginia says. “Rehearsals were really fun that first year. He was very sweet. We were doing some very difficult lifts and we realized that one of the lifts was causing bruises on my leg. So, he brought me a jar of multi-vitamins. Little things like that are the things that stole my heart. … We can argue about how a step is being done without it affecting our ability to work together.”
Asked how many times they’ve danced together in productions, Virginia says, “If I had the time I could count exactly, but the big ballets were Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Giselle, and we’ve done Cinderella. And we’ve gotten to do (George) Balanchine works together. Dracula.”
The upcoming Cinderella will be their second time performing it together. “We actually prepared in 2020,” Virginia says. “We were in the middle of rehearsals that would have happened in April of 2020 when the world shut down and we had to put all the work up. It’s been really interesting watching the rehearsal videos from that time.”
They’re looking forward to the new phase in their lives. “For the past two years we’ve felt a little bit like we’ve been doing two jobs each,” Virginia says. “Now we’ll be able to really really focus on the one job of co-directing the school.”
“It’s such an exciting opportunity” to think about all all of the knowledge and experience that we’re going to pass on to the younger dancers,” Brandon says. “But it’s also bittersweet. We’re closing a chapter in order to begin the next chapter of our life.”
