A pause allongé for the Ballets Classiques de Richmond
career.
Ballet is very physically demanding, and dancers work as hard to stay in shape as any professional or Olympic-class athlete. Just like athletes, ballerinas occasionally sustain injuries.
“You learn to live with them,” said Cynthia. “You dance through them. They build character.”
Still, injuries can be serious.
“When I was 21,” she recalled, “in the middle of a performance of the Nutcracker, I tore my psoas muscle, which connects your hip to your lower back and which you use to lift your leg. It took me a full year to recover enough to allow me to dance again.”
It was a year during which she ended up doing a lot of sewing.
“I first started sewing and designing clothing in my teens,” she said. “If I hadn’t been a ballerina, I would probably have become a designer and seamstress. Either that or a teacher. I think I would have enjoyed teaching French.”
She continues to put her manual skills to good use. The year she opened her ballet school in Richmond she designed and made costumes for all 17 of the young dancers who performed in Peter and the Wolf, the first production mounted by the Ballets Classiques de Richmond. She still makes costumes for her shows, although now that she has 120 performers on stage who need costumes, she enlists the help of several volunteer parents with sewing skills.
She began teaching dance in 2003 at the École de Ballet Dorval and the Lauren Hill Academy in Montreal. She taught at a number of institutions, including a dance school in Massachusetts, and most recently the College St. Bernard in Drummondville, before taking a big leap and opening her own ballet school in Richmond.
“It was my husband’s chalet in Cleveland that led me to start a ballet school in Richmond,” she said.
She never expected the school would be so successful. Her students range in age from two to 70.
“The two –year olds are accompanied by their mothers,” she said, “but they’re surprising. After four or five weeks the two-year olds are able to follow a series of simple steps. I’m also happy to see adults signing up, and among my two dozen adult students I have people coming from Sherbrooke, two massotherapists, and a few retirees.”
“I’m especially pleased to have as many boys as I have enrolled,” she continued, noting that ballet, possibly more in North America than in other parts of the world, is seen more often as a feminine pursuit. “Of my 120 students, 19 are boys,” she pointed out. “Compared to other ballet schools, I have an enviable percentage of boys.”
One male dancer she lost last year was her eldest son, Daniel.
“He wanted to pursue his studies in dance and, in 2018, he began studying at the National Ballet School in Toronto. He was only 12 but he wanted to study in Toronto because it would give him a chance to improve his English. For an aspiring dancer, it’s the best ballet school in the country, so it was a great opportunity for him to have been accepted. He took to it like a fish to water; for me, his mother, it was a lot harder. Right now, with the country on lockdown, he is back home with us.”
The large number of students that Cynthia Pigeon has managed to attract has also made for more work than she can handle.
“Until Covid-19 closed everything,” she said, “the dance school was taking 70 to 80 hours a week of my time. I was teaching Wednesday mornings—a class of adult women for whom that was a good time slot—and four evenings a week, from 5:00 to 9:00 as well as Saturdays from 8:45 to 4:15.”
In addition to teaching (and sewing), her fledgling enterprise requires a certain amount of administrative work.
Over and above that is the preparation needed to mount her productions. Her shows are all choreographed by her, and produced by her. This entails, among other things, booking the theatre, contacting invited artists (The Nutcracker last December featured French dancer, Nicolas Zemmour), coordinating with musicians (the same show involved the 30-piece Orchestre philarmonique des musiciens de Montreal directed by Philippe Ménard) designing the set, the costumes, and the lighting.
“I’m hoping to find one or two teachers to help me out,” she said, “and I’m optimistic. Nicolas Zemmour has expressed an interest in working with me and so has Jade Moisan.”
Remarkably, Cynthia Pigeon is looking even further ahead. “I don’t know what will come of it,” she finished, “but I’m looking into following a Master’s Degree program in ballet offered by the Université de Québec à Montréal.”
For the time being, because of the Covid-19 shutdown, almost everything is on hold for Cynthia Pigeon, as for so many others.