ALICE (IN WONDERLAND)

Septime Webre is an internationally recognized ballet director, choreographer, educator, and advocate. He joined Hong Kong Ballet as its Artistic Director in July 2017 after 17 years as Artistic Director of The Washington Ballet in Washington DC from 1999-2016. Previously, he served as Artistic Director of the American Repertory Ballet, based in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1993 to 1999. In addition, Webre has served as the Artistic Director of Halcyon, a Washington DC-based foundation, launching an annual international festival for creativity in June 2018.

As a choreographer, Webre’s works appear in the repertoires of ballet companies throughout North America, including Pacific Northwest Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Colorado Ballet, Ballet West, Atlanta Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, Ballet Austin, Ballet Memphis, Milwaukee Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Ballet Concierto de Puerto Rico, and many others, and he has worked frequently in theatre as well as opera.

As a dancer, Webre was featured in solo and principal roles from the classical repertoire as well as in contemporary works by choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Paul Taylor, and Merce Cunningham. He has served on the juries of a number of international ballet competitions, including those in Varna, Bulgaria, Istanbul, Cape Town, New York, Seoul, and elsewhere. He has served on the board of Dance/USA, and his work has received numerous honors, grants, and awards. He holds a degree in History/Pre-Law from the University of Texas at Austin, and is the seventh son in a large, boisterous Cuban-American family.

Johanna joined Cincinnati Ballet in 1981 and danced for 11 seasons before becoming Ballet Mistress in 1992. Throughout the following 36 years with Cincinnati Ballet, she served as an integral part of the Artistic team, most notably as Associate Artistic Director. She recreated from video the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Movements of Léonide Massine’s Seventh Symphony in conjunction with Frederic Franklin, CBE, which received praise in The New York Times as well as many other national and international dance publications. She has choreographed for Cincinnati Ballet’s New Works, Lumenocity, Cincinnati Opera, and Cincinnati Ballet’s second company. Since leaving Cincinnati Ballet in 2018, she has continued staging ballets for various companies, including Victoria Morgan’s Cinderella for Orlando Ballet, Val Caniparoli’s The Bridge for Sacramento Ballet, Nicolo Fonte’s Carmina Burana for Nevada Ballet Theatre and Cincinnati Ballet, and Septime Webre’s Peter Pan and ALICE (in wonderland). In addition, she teaches the Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis Method at BodyMind Balance in Cincinnati.

Composer and Violinist Matthew Pierce is celebrated for his new classical Scores commissioned and performed by American ballet companies. He studied violin performance with Shirley Givens at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore and moved to New York, where he began writing
music for the theater.

Septime Webre’s ALICE (in wonderland) has been produced by 13 companies with more than 100 performances across the United States and the world, traveling to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Perth, Australia in 2019.

Other dance and theater collaborators include Julia Adam (San Francisco Ballet), Stanton Welch (Houston Ballet), David Palmer (Washington Ballet), Yanis Pikieris (Miami Youth Ballet), Christopher Stowell (National Ballet of Canada), Charles Moulton (Ballpassing), Janice Garrett (Janice Garrett &
Dancers), Matthew Neenan (Ballet Memphis), Robert Dekkers (Post:Ballet), Melissa Barak (School of American Ballet), Brooke Nicholson (Ballet Coeur d’Alene), Janet Stanford & Kathryn Chase Bryer (Imagination Stage), Kristin Marting & Tim Maner (HERE Theater), Ruth Margraff (Opera Projects) and Tanya Barfi eld (P.S. 122).