‘The Toni’s’ honor longtime Eugene Ballet artistic director Toni Pimble 

Toni Pimble’s dance journey began in the mid-1950s in Camberley, England. Interest in classical ballet was on the rise, and mothers were enrolling their children in ballet classes. 

“A lot of mothers thought that it would give their children grace, I guess,” Pimble, the longtime artistic director of Eugene Ballet, said in a recent interview.

Pimble’s mother had other plans.

“For my mother, it was about piano lessons,” she said. “I was supposed to be doing piano, like my brother. But I spent most of the time leaping about in the sitting room and not practicing. And so I had a lot — a lot — of energy, and so she decided that maybe ballet classes were what I needed to focus that energy.”

That probably shouldn’t have been a surprise to Pimble’s parents, who listened to classical music. “My brother and I grew up learning to love classical music. And, you know, dancing in the sitting room to it.”

Classical music and dancing: Where could that possibly lead?

For Pimble, now 71, it led to a prestigious private ballet school. That led to a professional career in Germany — where she met Riley Grannan, a dancer from Junction City. It ended with nearly a half-century of artistic leadership at Eugene Ballet. Now, she’s preparing to step down as artistic director at the end of this season.

She will leave behind an impressive resume: Along with her artistic and business partners, she built one of the state’s premier dance companies. She choreographed more than 60 dance pieces, which have been performed worldwide. 

And, perhaps just as impressive, she choreographed her succession plan, mentoring Eugene Ballet’s Jennifer Martin and Suzanne Haag to assume her role as the company’s artistic directors beginning next season.

So Eugene Ballet dubbed its 2024–25 season “Toni’s Tribute Season,” featuring new performances of some of Pimble’s most beloved works. The season includes “The Toni’s,” a Saturday performance you can almost think of as a greatest-hits show — complete with a bonus track: “The Lark Ascending,” a new work.

But it all started with a young girl dancing to classical music in her family’s sitting room.

Physicality and emotion

The young Pimble loved her ballet lessons — “the discipline of ballet and the music, dancing to music. I loved that.” (Even today, disciples like Martin and Haag point to the musicality of Pimble’s work as a defining characteristic.)

Pimble also was lucky: A well-regarded private school, Elmhurst Ballet School, happened to be located in Camberley at the time. She auditioned and was accepted. Her parents managed to scrape together the tuition.

At Elmhurst, Pimble benefited from another break: The English ballet master for a German-based company in Kiel needed a replacement for an injured dancer and came to Elmhurst to audition dancers.

He offered the job to Pimble. “And he said, ‘Do you want it?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Good, because we start next week.’”

She was 18.

“On that next Sunday, I was on a plane with another dancer who was taking care of me, and I had my ‘German in Three Months’ (book), my suitcase, and I went to Kiel.”

Pimble did well in Kiel.

“I liked the challenge, and I loved the physicality of it, and I loved the emotional outlet of it, because dancing to music is emotional,” she said.

It was in Kiel where another dancer caught her eye — but perhaps initially for the wrong reasons. 

Riley Grannan showed up to a class and eventually was invited to join the Kiel company. Pimble’s initial impression was of “a cheeky American who wore pea-green tights.”

The cheeky American from Junction City, who had studied at what was then named Oregon Ballet Classique, and the young English dancer hit it off. They came to Oregon in 1978, when Grannan took over the dance company and renamed it the Eugene School of Ballet. Not long after that, a local musical ensemble asked the two to choreograph Igor Stravinsky’s “Tale of the Soldier.”

Pimble picked up some choreography tips, mostly by watching others, but she and Grannan (with a third dancer, Bobby Hoggard) put together a performance for the 40-minute piece. 

“I think we gained confidence, for sure, but I also think that we were somewhat cluelessly innocent, you know? I mean, we were just doing it and not thinking about, ‘Can we do this?’ We were just like, ‘We’re doing this.’

“It was a start,” Pimble said. “And then from there, we pushed forward.” 

That’s when the two founded Eugene Ballet Company.

As the company and its reputation grew, Pimble found herself moving away from dancing.

“I stopped (dancing) when I was 32,” she said. “We were running the school. We were running the ballet company. I was choreographing, I was dancing, and I couldn’t take care of myself dancing, because there are all of these other things that I need to focus on. I just thought, ‘I can’t do everything,’ and so it was logical to make that choice.”

‘The Toni’s’

Pimble credits Josh Neckels, Eugene Ballet’s executive director, for helping her select the older pieces to be featured in Saturday’s “The Toni’s.”

“He suggested to me that I think about decades and what those decades meant, which helped a lot,” she said.

The first piece on the program, “May Dances,” set to music by Robert Schumann, dates to 1980: “I have very fond memories of it as being one of the earliest pieces that I choreographed,” Pimble said. “I felt a certain freedom. I just felt the music was inspiring to me, and I had all these ideas, and I couldn’t wait to get into the studio with dancers.”

“Two’s Company,” from 1992, was created for the New York City Ballet. The three-dancer piece, set to Dvorak’s American Quartet, “is not only about Eugene Ballet, it’s about the opportunities that Eugene Ballet gave me to do work for other companies at the same time.”

Collaboration is the inspiration for another selection, 2003’s “Concerto for Seven Dancers,” set to Bach’s Concerto for Three Violins and written for the Oregon Bach Festival. “It’s a very joyful piece, and I thought that would be a good piece to represent another decade for the collaborations that we’ve done.”

The concert also includes a pas de deux from Pimble’s 2022 “Taming of the Shrew.”

The new piece, “The Lark Ascending,” brings Pimble back to her English childhood.

Set to music by the very English Ralph Vaughan Williams, the work is inspired by days — “those few days when the sun shone” — when the family would pile into the family car and head for the seaside.

The car would park in a farmer’s field that was filled with larks. 

“I would hear them and I would just think how beautiful their song is. And you would just see them go up and up and up until you couldn’t see them anymore. They would just keep flying up. And I think Vaughan Williams caught that so well with his music.”

Over the past few years, one of Pimble’s priorities has been to ensure she had a transition plan ready for when she decided to step down.

She didn’t want the company to go through a national search for a new artistic director, because she didn’t want to attract someone who would think about the Eugene Ballet job as a stepping stone to a job with a larger company,

Both Haag, Eugene Ballet’s resident choreographer, and Martin, its associate artistic director, have been with the company for years (in fact, both have danced in Pimble pieces). Pimble has emphasized developing them to prepare them taking over.

“I just felt it was important not to hang on, but to make space for these talented people coming up. … I don’t want them to be 70 and me 90, and (me) saying, ‘OK, I think I’ll step aside now.’”

If you go

“The Toni’s” are 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 12, at The Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall, 1 Eugene Center. Tickets range from $18 to $75 and can be purchased at the Eugene Ballet’s website.

One more production remains in “Toni’s Tribute Season” — a show scheduled for May 17 and 18 at The Hult Center will feature two Pimble creations, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Silk & Steel.”