Boston Ballet

The Boston Ballet is an American professional classical ballet company based in Boston, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1963 by E. Virginia Williams and Sydney Leonard, and was the first professional repertory ballet company in New England. It has been led by Violette Verdy (1980–1984), Bruce Marks (1985–1997), and Anna-Marie Holmes (1997–2000). Mikko Nissinen has been artistic director of Boston Ballet since 2001. Nissinen leads the company in partnership with Executive Director Ming Min Hui.

In 1956, E. Virginia Williams moved the ballet school she founded from a studio in Back Bay to 186 Massachusetts Avenue, across from the Loew's State Theatre in Boston. At this point in time, the school offered classes starting at a children's level all the way to a professional division.

In 1958, out of her Boston School of Ballet (which was sometimes called The New England School of Ballet), E. Virginia Williams formed a small dance group named The New England Civic Ballet. The group primarily performed at small local festivals and venues around New England.

From 1958 to 1962, the New England Civic Ballet performed regionally, dancing various pieces such as a three-act Nutcracker, Les Sylphides, and repertory works by E. Virginia Williams, Sydney Leonard, Lev Ianov, and Jean Paige.

In August 1962, the New England Civic Ballet performed as part of the 30th year of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. At this point, the New England Civic Ballet was considered a semi-professional company and began calling themselves the Boston Ballet.

In December 1963, The Boston Globe reported that a Ford Foundation grant of US$144,000 to the Boston Ballet School had given birth to Boston's first and only professional ballet company. The total Ford Grant was $7,756,000, the largest private subsidy made to a single art form at the time. In part, based on the recommendations of George Balanchine and W. McNeil Lowry, the grant provided for the formation of several professional ballet companies. This included the Boston Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, and Washington Ballet. Balanchine was a strong supporter of this initiative. He was Boston Ballet's artistic advisor for several years and gave the new company several of his works.

In 1979, Boston Ballet opened the Nervi Festival in Italy, and in 1980 was the first American dance company to perform in the People's Republic of China. The company made its London premiere in 1981, with a full-length production of Swan Lake. In 1983, Boston Ballet presented Don Quixote on Broadway with Rudolf Nureyev as a guest artist, after touring the United States, Mexico, France, and Italy. Boston Ballet performed Mark Morris's Mort Subite at the PepsiCo Festival in Purchase, New York in 1986, and performed at the BESSIE Dance and Performance award ceremony at New York City Center in 1987.

Boston Ballet made its debut at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, in January 1990. Thay May Natalia Dudinskaya, Konstantin Sergeyev, and assistant artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes staged a new production of Swan Lake with Boston Ballet dancers performing with dancers from the Kirov Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet.^{[citation needed]} In 1991, Boston Ballet moved into their current headquarters at 19 Clarendon Street in Boston's South End, after touring throughout Spain in July.