While most little girls think of Wonder Woman or Xenia Warrior Princess when they think of superheroes, Victoria Watford saw the lithe and graceful ballerina as her Superwoman.
“It was really fun to see this super girly little girl with the pink tutu and the point shoes and the costumes, and also seeing the bigger girls with their beautiful costumes, point shoes and tiaras and all that fun stuff,” said Watford, a South Euclid, Ohio native who has been dancing for 17 years.
When Watford hit her early teen years, her parents asked her if she wanted to dedicate her life to the rigorous regimen that becoming a ballerina required. Watford immediately answered in the affirmative.
“I told them that I loved it, so they talked to my artistic director at the Cleveland School of Dance where I was taking lessons and she said, ‘she needs to be auditioning for summer intensives and going away for the summer,’” Watford recalled. “It turns out I had missed almost all of the auditions except for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. I did that audition and I got in and I came here for the summer and I fell in love!
“It was so different,” Watford said. “Cleveland is so small—especially during the time that I was growing up—it wasn’t much of a city. Pittsburgh was a city and it had a huge ballet company and you could see the company members taking classes, and there were several different teachers and five classes a day. It was so different but I loved it,” she said.
Watford instantly knew she had found a home in the Steel City and returned each summer for five years before joining the Pittsburgh Ballet Graduate Program in 2014. She joined the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre as a Corps de Ballet ballerina this year.
“Victoria is a beautiful girl,” said Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre artistic director Terrence Orr. “She’s a beautiful dancer. We have a very diverse company—dancers from seven different countries at this point. I look for people who are gifted in our art form. Victoria is a new addition from our school and she’s just beautiful.”
Since joining the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre family, Watford has performed in mainstage productions of “The Sleeping Beauty,” “The Nutcracker,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Western Symphony,” “Peter Pan,” and on tour at the 2015 Chicago Dancing Festival in “Sandpaper Ballet.”
But her most exciting times with Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre came when she got the chance to perform with the Dance Theatre of Harlem when it collaborated with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre this past March.
The mixed-repertoire program marked the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s first-known collaboration with another professional company. Each performance celebrated the diversity, talent and style of American ballet.
“When Arthur Mitchell founded the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969, he really wanted to create a way for people to look at the art form of classical ballet in a new way,” said Dance Theatre of Harlem artistic director Virginia Johnson. “One of the things that he was trying to bring to this art form was the idea of inclusion. From the very beginning, Dance Theatre of Harlem has been a very diverse company with dancers from around the world and also of many different ethnicities. It’s the notion that ballet belongs to everyone.”
With five works in each independent program, audiences got to see dances from choreographers Robert Garland and Glen Tetley and music from Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Pittsburgh’s own Billy Strayhorn. Each company performed signatures from its own collection and collaborated on the mesmerizing “Black Swan Pas de Deux.”
“I knew about Dance Theatre of Harlem. it was always in the back of my mind, ‘oh there’s a company of dancers who look just like me,’ but ever since the 2016-2017 season premiered, all anyone could talk about was the Dance Theatre of Harlem coming here. But it didn’t set in for me that there were going to be all these dancers around who look like me until we had our first class together,” Watford said. “I was blown away and I was like, ‘I want to spend as much time as possible with all of you.’”
Watford will perform in productions like “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake” during the Theatre’s 2017-2018 season. For a complete list of upcoming Theatre events, visit www.pbt.org.
Watford said she learned many valuable lessons from the Dance Theatre of Harlem dancers.
“I learned that there’s so much out there and the way they dance is so beautiful and fluid,” she said. “I also learned that this—the city of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre—is my place. When they were leaving, they told me, ‘you belong here. This is great for you.’ It was like reassurance that I’m where I need to be.”
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