SELECTED BIOGRAPHIES

from House Programme - Frame by Frame

VINCENT

Hope Muir is an acclaimed dancer, teacher and director whose 33-year career spans two continents and a range of classical and contemporary styles. Born in Toronto, she is one of the first graduates of Peter Schaufuss’ London Festival Ballet School and a former dancer at English National Ballet, Rambert Dance Company and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. In 2009, Hope assisted Crystal Pite with the creation of Emergence for The National Ballet of Canada and has since helped to stage the work internationally. She has assisted numerous choreographers in this capacity, staging work by Christopher Bruce, Javier De Frutos and Helen Pickett, among others. Hope is the former Assistant Artistic Director of Scottish Ballet and in 2017, she was appointed Artistic Director of Charlotte Ballet in North Carolina, where she expanded the repertoire and established the highly successful Choreographic Lab. She assumed the role of Joan and Jerry Lozinski Artistic Director of The National Ballet of Canada on January 1, 2022.

Barry Hughson Executive Director

Barry Hughson joined The National Ballet of Canada in 2014. Since that time, the company has accelerated its trajectory of artistic growth, fiscal responsibility, community engagement and international acclaim. In 1988, Barry began his professional career as a dancer with The Washington Ballet, performing at the Kennedy Center and internationally. As an arts executive, he has led a variety of arts institutions in the US, including The Warner Theatre, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, American Repertory Ballet, Atlanta Ballet and Boston Ballet. For nine years, he served on the board of Dance/USA, North America’s largest service organization for professional dance. In partnership with Dance/USA and The Royal Ballet, Barry spearheaded the first meeting of international executive dance leadership in 2015. In Canada, Barry was a member of the Coordinating Committee for Respectful Workplaces in the Arts, where he chaired the working group responsible for the development of a nationwide Code of Conduct for the Live Performing Arts. He currently serves as a member of the Steering Committee for the Canadian Arts Coalition and as a member of the Advancement Committee for the International Society of Performing Arts.

David Briskin is recognized as one of contemporary ballet’s most accomplished conductors and has served as Music Director and Principal Conductor since 2006. David lived and worked for 23 years as a conductor in New York City in opera, ballet and in concert. He conducted for seven years with American Ballet Theatre and was a seasonal conductor for three years with New York City Ballet. He served for 13 years as conductor for The Juilliard School’s Dance Division and has appeared with nearly all the major North American ballet companies. Internationally, he has appeared with The Royal Ballet, The Royal Swedish Ballet, The Royal Danish Ballet and Hamburg Ballet. Earlier this season, he served as Music Director for the Nureyev Legend and Legacy Gala in London which was filmed for Marquee TV and screened in cinemas across Japan. David recently led an all-star cast, including Cynthia Dale and Eric McCormack, in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music at Koerner Hall. He has appeared with orchestras and opera companies in North America and abroad including Pittsburgh, Detroit, Baltimore and Shanghai Symphony Orchestras, as well as Calgary, Manitoba, and Opera Carolina, among others.

Steve Blanchet Creative Director & Designer

Multidisciplinary artist, Robert Lepage is an actor, a director, a playwright and a stage director. Hailed by international critics, his original, contemporary and unusual works, inspired by recent history, transcend borders and challenge the standards of scenic writing, particularly through the use of new technologies. His most significant works include plays The Seven Streams of the River Ota and The Dragons’ Trilogy; solos The Far Side of the Moon and 887; operas The Damnation of Faust and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle; multimedia works The Image Mill and The Library at Night; Peter Gabriel’s The Secret World Tour and The Growing Up Tour; and Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ and TOTEM. Robert’s most important awards include Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur, Stanislavsky Award, Prix Europa, Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Glenn Gould Prize and he was made Compagnon des Arts et des lettres du Québec.

Principal Dancer and Choreographic Associate of The National Ballet of Canada, Guillaume Côté is a choreographer of unique vision and talent. His work for the National Ballet includes Frame by Frame, Le Petit Prince, Being and Nothingness, Venom and the short film Lulu, which won Best International Short Film at the 2020 Milan International Film Festival. Other work includes Fractals: a pattern of chaos for ProArteDanza (2011) and PHI for Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet (2021). He choreographed the short films Lost in Motion and Lost in Motion II, that have garnered over 8.3 million views online. Guillaume founded his own company Côté Danse in 2021. For Côté Danse, he created Touch, an immersive experience that incorporated projections, technology and dance and Crypto, which has toured across Canada. He is Artistic Director of Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, one of the largest summer dance festivals in the country. In 2021, Guillaume was appointed a Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Québec for his significant contribution to the arts in Québec.

Steve Blanchet has been working in the field of Arts and Culture for 25 years. From 1996 to 2013, he served successively as Artistic Director and Creative Director for Cossette Agency. A number of his social campaigns have received both national and international acclaim. He began collaborating with Ex Machina in 2005 with the creation of the largescale outdoor video projection The Image Mill (2008). He followed up as designer of Robert Lepage’s one-man-show 887 and as Creative Director and Co-designer of the virtual reality, immersive exhibition The Library at Night. In recent years, he has worked as Creative Director for various productions including Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at Stratford Festival, Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute at the Québec Opera Festival, Robert Lepage’s one-man-show Courville and, most recently, The Riopelle Project. Various collaborations and numerous short films, shows and publications punctuate his career path.

Antoine Bédard is a composer and sound designer from Montréal whose practice is as diverse as the artistic projects he has contributed to over the years. His works can be found in animation films, documentaries, public art installations, contemporary dance productions, sound walks, circus shows, museums exhibitions, podcasts and more. Antoine has composed original music for over 40 theatre plays across Canada, including Quills (Ex Machina, 2015) and Coriolanus (Stratford Festival, 2018), both directed by Robert Lepage. Since working on Frame by Frame, he has become a regular collaborator of Guillaume Côté’s, creating the score for his works in Touch (Anymotion Productions) and PHI (Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet). Antoine was invited to represent Québec at the 2023 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.

Christian Fontaine finished his stage design studies at the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts of Québec City in 1987. Since then, he has worked with several companies as stage and lighting designer. Recently, he helped create, among others, the set for Waiting for Godot (Théâtre de la Bordée) for which he received the Jacques-Pelletier Award, Magic Flute (Opéra de Quebec), Les Misérables (Le Capitole) and he co-designed the set for Quills (Ex Machina) with Robert Lepage. Since 2009, Christian has taught stage design at the Conservatoire de musique et d'art dramatique du Québec.

Michael Gianfrancesco’s set and costume designs for theatre, musical theatre, opera and dance have been seen across Canada, Europe and the United States. His multifaceted designs include period, contemporary, conceptual and site-specific work. He has worked in repertory with Stratford Festival and Shaw Festival and has designed productions for Canadian Opera Company, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Opera Atelier, Rossini Opera Festival, Canadian Stage Company, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Citadel Theatre, Centaur Theatre, Theatre Calgary, The Grand Theatre and Tarragon Theatre, among others. Recent productions include Jasper at Signature Theatre (Off-Broadway), Chicago at Stratford Festival and Just to Get Married at Shaw Festival. He designed the set for the world premiere of Rufus Wainwright and Daniel McIvor’s opera Hadrian at Canadian Opera Company. In 2015, Michael’s set design for Cabaret at Shaw Festival was featured at the Prague Quadrennial for Performance Design and Space.

Étienne Boucher has designed the lighting of more than 100 theatre, dances, musical and opera productions, constantly reinventing his lighting syntax. He has collaborated on many occasions with the following stage directors: René Richard Cyr, Serge Denoncourt, Dominic Champagne and Brigitte Heantjens. Since 2004, he’s been working with Ex Machina and director Robert Lepage on collaborations which include La Celestina in Spain, Lipsynch on an international tour and The Rake’s Progress, a co-production between five opera houses from around the world. He also created the light design for Le Rossignol, presented in Aix-en-Provence, Lyon and Brooklyn, Cirque du Soleil’s TOTEM and Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. He has also worked on productions such as Robert Lepage’s The Nightingale and Other Short Fables as well as Roger Waters’ Another Brick in The Wall

Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy designed projections for Robert Lepage’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung and Rufus Wainright’s Hadrian, directed by Peter Hinton, both for Canadian Opera Company. He has also worked on Who Is We, directed by Daniel MacIvor for Art of Time Ensemble, Ex Machina’s Sommet Technologique, CBC, The National Ballet of Canada, Canadian Stage Company, The Joffrey Ballet, Carbone 14 and many others, for over 30 years. Laurie-Shawn’s work has been supported by numerous grants and awards from Canada Council, Ontario Ars Council, Toronto Arts Council and Laidlaw Foundation, as well as corporate sponsors since 1985. In 2011, Laurie-Shawn was honoured with the Toronto Culture Champion designation by the Mayor of Toronto, in part for his volunteer work as Chair of UrbanArts Community Arts Council. UrbanArts engages youth and our diverse community in arts programs and leadership skills development.

A graduate of the production program at the National Theatre School of Canada, Thomas Payette has been collaborating with numerous creators as a multimedia designer and creative director for many years. He has taken an active role in the creation of works by renowned companies and artists such as Ex Machina, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, The National Ballet of Canada, Robert Lepage, Sylvain Émard, Guillaume Côté, Virginie Brunelle, Martin Messier and Kaiji Moriyama. He has been involved as artistic director and media art curator on large-scale events like LVLUP and Grands Feux du Casino Lac Lemay. In 2015, he co-founded Mirari, a multidisciplinary creative studio that create spaces, installations and works that transform the way people see the world. He is also member of the board of XN Québec and a teacher at the National Theatre School of Canada.

Thomas Payette / Mirari Video Designer

Claudia Gendreau has designed numerous theatrical productions since graduating from the Conservatory of Dramatic Art of Quebec in 1999. She has been a company member of Nuages en pantalon, a Québec City-based company, since 2001. As a creator, she likes to contribute to the development of projects from their genesis, exploring at each step all visual aspects of the production. Many of her designs have been seen at the Theatre du Trident, among them Charbonneau et le chef, which was awarded best scenic design at the Prix d'Excellence in 2010. Other productions include a set design for Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges (2014) for the Opera Festival of Quebec. For Ex Machina, she designed the props for Needles and Opium, Hamlet/ Collage, both created in 2013, as well as The Seven Streams of the Ota River (2019).

Jeff Morris Stage Manager

Born and raised in Toronto, Wellesley Robertson was first bitten by the performance bug when he was very young and has been performing ever since. Wellesley considers himself to be a mover and has a background in acrobatics, physical theatre, breakdance, puppetry, clown and circus arts. An accomplished performer, he has also trained in improv (The Second City Conservatory graduate and Diversity Fellowship participant, The Assembly and Bad Dog Theatre Company). He has performed on stages all over the world, from San Francisco to London, Bahrain to New Zealand and many locations in between. Frame by Frame marked the fourth project that he has worked on with Robert Lepage and Ex Machina, the others being The Tempest (Thomas Adès), Needles and Opium and The Nightingale and Other Short Fables (Canadian Opera Company), and most recently a new project called Courville

Jeff Morris joined The National Ballet of Canada in 1995. Born in Toronto, he studied technical theatre production and administration at Ryerson’s Theatre School. From 1990 to 1995, he was Production Stage Manager for Toronto Dance Theatre. Since joining the National Ballet, Jeff has stage-managed a wide range of the company’s unique classical and contemporary repertoire, including the world premieres of The Four Seasons, Cinderella and An Italian Straw Hat (Kudelka), Emergence and Angels’ Atlas (Pite), Le Petit Prince (Côté) and Frame by Frame (Côté/Lepage). Company premieres include The Seagull, A Streetcar Named Desire, Nijinsky and Anna Karenina (Neumeier), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale (Wheeldon). He is an adjunct faculty member at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre, a board member of SMArts, and Festival Co-Director for dance:made in Canada/fait au Canada

Liliane Stilwell joined The National Ballet of Canada in 2015 and has stage managed The Merry Widow, Onegin, Giselle, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and Pinocchio. Previously she served as stage manager for the Canadian Opera Company for 22 years. Highlights include Don Quixote, Barber of Seville, Lucia di Lammermore, La Cenerentola, Otello, Marriage of Figaro, Götterdämmerung (complete Ring Cycle), Macbeth, La Bohème, Eugene Onegin, Madama Butterfly and was part of the team that took Oedipus Rex to the Edinburgh International Festival. Liliane was production stage manager for Grease and stage manager for Robin Hood and Cinderella at the Elgin Theatre, Dirty Dancing at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and Hairspray at the Princess of Wales Theatre. Other credits include Tom Jones, Speed-The-Plow, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Big River, Carousel, Me and My Girl and Roar of the Greasepaint – Smell of the Crowd. Liliane has stage managed several industrial shows in Canada and the US.

Born in Włocławek, Poland, Michael Lewandowski studied technical theatre production at York University, Toronto. His work for The National Ballet of Canada includes The Nutcracker, The Winter’s Tale, New York tours of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Winter’s Tale and the Washington tour of The Winter’s Tale Other dance credits include Fall for Dance North. Theatre work includes the world premiere and UK tour of ‘da kink in my hair (Toronto Fringe Festival & Hackney Empire), The Pillowman (Canadian Stage Theatre) and Drystreak (Grand Theatre). Select past opera credits include War & Peace, Death in Venice, Carmen, La Bohème, Elektra, Il Trovatore, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Dialogues des Carmélites, Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, La Serva Padrona & The Nightingale and Other Short Fables (Canadian Opera Company). For television, he has been the floor director for Canadian Country Music Awards, and Indspire Awards. Select festival work includes Just for Laughs, Luminato and Westfest.

The National Ballet Orchestra

The National Ballet of Canada is privileged to have its own full Orchestra with over 60 members. The Orchestra has performed in each of the National Ballet’s seasons and is led by Music Director and Principal Conductor David Briskin. The company’s first Music Director was George Crum who, along with Founder Celia Franca, was a pioneer of the company. Crum held the position from the company’s inception in 1951 to 1984, when he was appointed Music Director Emeritus. The Orchestra was led by Ermanno Florio from 1985 to 1990. Ormsby Wilkins was Music Director and Principal Conductor from 1990 to 2006. The National Ballet of Canada Orchestra has toured extensively with the company through Canada, the US and Europe. Over the years, the Orchestra has received much acclaim from audiences and critics alike and has recorded two CDs of Michael Torke’s compositions for The Contract (The Pied Piper) and An Italian Straw Hat. The Orchestra made their concert debut at Koerner Hall on April 3, 2012, in celebration of the company’s 60th anniversary.

Guillaume Côté

Born: Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec

Trained: Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 1998

Principal Dancer since: 2004

Naoya Ebe

Born: Tokyo, Japan

Trained: Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 2007

Principal Dancer since: 2015

Piotr Stanczyk

Born: Poznan, Poland

Trained: State Ballet School of Poznan and Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 1998

Principal Dancer since: 2008

Stephanie Hutchison

Born: Kitchener, Ontario

Trained: Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 1997

Principal Character Artist since: 2015

Rebekah Rimsay

Born: Fort Collins, Colorado

Trained: Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 1990

Principal Character Artist since: 2012

Jack Bertinshaw

Born: Sydney, Australia

Trained: Tanya Pearson Classical Coaching Academy in Australia and the Tanz Akademie Zürich in Switzerland

Joined National Ballet: 2011

First Soloist since: 2018

Sponsored by an anonymous donor

Christopher Gerty

Born: Watford, England

Trained: Newcastle Dance Academy in Australia, New Zealand School of Dance and San Francisco Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 2014

First Soloist since: 2022

Sponsored by Ms. Nancy Viner & Dr. Raymond Stein

Tanya Howard

Born: Uitenhage, South Africa

Trained: The National School of Arts in South Africa and Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 1998

First Soloist since: 2007

Alejandra Perez-Gomez

Born: Toronto, Ontario

Trained: L’École supérieure de danse du Québec, Princess Grace Academy and San Francisco Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 1998

Principal Character Artist since: 2013

Jordana Daumec

Born: New York City, New York

Trained: Studio Maestro in New York and Canada’s National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 2003

First Soloist since: 2015

Jeannine Haller

Born: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan

Trained: Place des Arts in Coquitlam, British Columbia and Canada's National Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 2015

First Soloist since: 2021

Sponsored by an anonymous donor

Chelsy Meiss

Born: Melbourne, Australia

Trained: Karen Curlis School of Dance, Thelma Williams School of Dance, The Victorian College of The Arts in Australia and The Australian Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 2008

First Soloist since: 2015

Sponsored by an anonymous donor

Brenna Flaherty

Born: Boston, Massachusetts

Trained: Boston Ballet School

Joined National Ballet: 2016 Second Soloist since: 2021