When Kirsten Wicklund walks me through Ballet Edmonton’s O-day’min headquarters, the dance studios are silent and dark. With only natural light sneaking through the front windows, wall-sized mirrors reflect well-worn floors waiting to be danced on again. A piano in the corner has a sign reading DO NOT MOVE. Soon it will be the only stationary thing in sight.
But we don’t dally. Wicklund quickly takes me to her back office where we talk across her Post-it-note-laden desk. She’s just finished a meeting, and will have to push her next one after our interview goes a few minutes long. Wearing a dark blazer over a floral blouse, Ballet Edmonton’s new artistic director is in full-on business mode, a few weeks away from first rehearsals, when she’ll slip into a more comfortable leotard.
“I really just got here last week,” she says. “I’ve been anticipating this moment for many months. So I’m very excited for the dancers to arrive from around the country and for the studio to be full of moving bodies.”
Wicklund didn’t grow up in a family of dancers, but, like many future performers, she made all the family living room a stage. Her parents enrolled her in ballet as a child, but at first it didn’t take. “I didn’t want to wear the tutu, or I wanted to kind of wear it my way, so I was a little bit more free spirited as a child.”
She returned to dance at age 12, taking tap dance lessons and some musical theatre, but by then, “everyone else my age had been doing it since they were two or three, and I was just starting, so I had no idea how to do what they were doing. I remember being laughed at a lot, but there was something about it that made me get really serious, and really driven to figure out what they were doing, and what this form was.”
With a career that’s taken Wicklund from her Vancouver home at 18 (she finished high school online), then to stages across Canada, in the United States and Europe, it’s safe to say she’s figured it out — and kept her free spirit intact. “Alongside dancing within institutions, I do my own independent work as well, meaning that outside of those structures, I like to do what I want.”
Her independence is something Wen Wai Wang — who as the previous artistic director turned Ballet Edmonton into a nationally known company — recognized when he first met Wicklund in British Columbia. “I was teaching an open class for professionals, and she was a freelance dancer,” he says. “I thought she was really special and really beautiful, the way she moved in class. She had a strong technique and strong personality.”
The hiring process started in 2023, when Wang invited Wicklund to create a work for Ballet Edmonton. “That was a test for me to see how she reacts and works with the dancers,” says Wang, who knew, at 60, that he would not direct much longer. He asked Wicklund then if she would consider taking over his role, and says she wanted to think about it. Then, in February 2024, he heard she’d returned from Europe for good, and came back to Vancouver as a freelance dancer.
“So I asked her, ‘Would you like to take the job? If you would, I will step down this year.’ I was planning for one more year, to give the [board of directors] time to find a new artist director, or maybe give her time to finish in Europe. But she had already finished before we offered, so that was the opportunity for me to be able to run away… or dance away.”
Speaking from his Vancouver home, Wang politely refuses to compare their directorial styles. “I can’t. We’re all different. You don’t want somebody copying me, putting their feet in my shoes. She has her own shoes, right? And if you wear someone else’s shoes, you might trip.”
Wicklund says Wang was always a “great presence” in the dance community, someone all the dancers looked up to. “And the way he has approached leading the company, I think it’s very beautiful to witness. I was very honoured that he would think of me for this position.”
With a career-length average on par with professional athletes, ballet dancers typically see their final curtain calls in their mid-to-late 30s. Legendary dancer Martha Graham once said that “a dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is more painful.”
But Wicklund, who dances every day, doesn’t see this as any kind of retirement. And she doesn’t view the stage as sacrosanct as some might suspect.
“For me, stage time can be very magical and very transformative. The exchange inside of live performance is like nothing else. But those are kind of icing-on-the-cake moments for me. The real root of what I do is in the studio with the dancers around me, and the growth that happens day to day, week to week, process to process.
“That’s what I think of when I think about what I do. And I think if you don’t love that as an artist, it’s gonna be a slow, painful career.”
Even with her extensive experience, the excitement in Wicklund’s voice sounds like she’s just getting started. All that’s left now is to get moving.
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Edify
