Dorothy Gunther Pugh, 2017 Memphian of the Year

How this Memphian's vision created a world-class ballet company.

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She remembers the conversation vividly. “Adrian said, ‘Dorothy, have you ever thought …’ and I knew he was going to say, ‘… about moving your entire operation?’ And that’s exactly what he said.” 

And that’s exactly what Ballet Memphis has done.

We were sitting in her office, and Dorothy Gunther Pugh was recalling a meeting she had a few years ago, when she sat down with Adrian Ellis of AEA Consulting to discuss creating a satellite location in Midtown for Ballet Memphis. That “satellite location” is now, of course, something much more than that. Ballet Memphis’ magnificent new facility on Madison in Overton Square, a brilliant edifice completed this summer, is a fitting capstone for Pugh’s decades of devotion to the dance arts in this city. Fittingly, Dorothy Gunther Pugh is Memphis magazine’s 2017 “Memphian of the Year.”

That she and Ellis were on the same wavelength was something of a sign for the CEO and founding artistic director of the 31-year-old ballet company. Its home had been since 1998 a 19,500-square-foot building in Cordova, on a piece of property donated by First Tennessee Bank. The company had been squeezed in its previous rental space on Summer Avenue; Ballet Memphis’ home on Trinity Road, built to order after a $3.15 million capital and endowment campaign, was a godsend.

But as the twenty-first century brought with it an urban redevelopment wave all across America, Pugh began to consider that Ballet Memphis just might be better located closer to the heart of Memphis. And when Bob Loeb began his redevelopment of Overton Square in 2012 — turning a run-down 1980s entertainment district into a dynamic arts neighborhood, with new facilities like Playhouse on the Square and Hattiloo Theatre, she began to take notice. 

“I had been reading and watching about this urban renaissance that was taking place across a lot of cities,” Pugh says. “It got to the point where I felt like we were being rendered invisible and obsolete out here in big-box land, where people weren’t trying to have an experience with other people sharing something that’s stimulating and transformative. It was time to move.”

Suddenly, a secondary presence in Midtown didn’t seem quite enough. “We needed to be where people want to gather and are curious,” Pugh says. In regular contact with her long-time friends Ekundayo Bandele, founder and CEO of Hattiloo, and Jackie Nichols, founder and executive producer of the Playhouse organization, she came to the conclusion that “it felt like this is probably the place we need to try to be.”

Initially, the northeast corner of Madison and Cooper was not under consideration. “We looked at seven or eight pieces of property,” says Pugh. “Then that corner became available, and we realized it was time to move and move quickly.” The site was that of the old French Quarter Inn, empty for years. The property had gotten some nibbles from prospective buyers, but in the summer of 2015, it looked like it would finally be acquired by NCE Realty & Capital Group, which was going to demolish the structure and build a 75,000-square-foot hotel with 137 rooms.

But suddenly, all changed. LeeAnne Cox, an attorney with Burch, Porter & Johnson and president of the Ballet Memphis board, was in the thick of the process. “We realized it might be a good spot for us,” Cox says, “because it would give us more room, we could have our parking, and it just might give us more autonomy to be on that corner. It just kind of felt right. So we signed a contract, and that took everybody by surprise. Some people were like, ‘What?’”

Cox believes that “this is really the result of Dorothy having a vision 15 years ago that we needed to be in the heart of the city. Then, years later, we commissioned [AEA Consulting] to work with us and we did a very thorough job of investigating what was right for the organization. So we felt very comfortable that this was the right move to make.”

(Tennessee Shakespeare Company has since acquired the facility on Trinity Road, giving that organization its first permanent home since it was founded in 2007).

A Memphis native, Dorothy Gunther grew up in East Memphis;  her father became an executive with Mid-South Chemical Company after retiring from the Navy. “My mother was a very beautiful, fierce, determined woman with a fiery artistic temperament,” she told The Downtowner magazine in a 2011 interview. “She set an example for me in leadership.”

Her mother loved dancing, and so did Dorothy. “She encouraged my imagination,” she says. “We staged plays with the neighborhood kids all the time, and I always had to be the director. So ever since I was little, I’ve been ‘on stage’ in one form or another.”

After graduating from Vanderbilt, she took a job teaching at an inner-city junior-high school in Nashville. “I was teaching myself,” she recalled. “I saw myself throwing away years of growing up in a segregated, isolated world; I kept walking into fascinating, brand-new worlds. So I would teach until 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and then I’d dance from 3:30 to 10:30 every night.”

When her husband Robert Pugh — also a native Memphian — finished his graduate work in psychology at Vanderbilt, Dorothy had an offer to dance with the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. But she also had a call from her old ballet teacher in Memphis who was retiring and offered her the job to take over her small ballet school. “Well, I did want to come home,” she told The Downtowner. “And I heard an inner voice saying, ‘You need to be your own boss.’”

In 1985, ArtsMemphis approached Pugh with the idea of her building a ballet company. “Shortly after that meeting, I got a call from Pitt Hyde, asking to meet. Pitt got down to business right away and asked, ‘If I gave you $200,000, what would you do with it?’

“I looked at him and said, ‘I’d probably give most of it back to you because I want to grow slowly.’ Three days later, Pitt and an anonymous donor gave us startup money, and we began to build a ballet company.”

From those beginnings, Ballet Memphis has established an international reputation, recognized by the Ford Foundation as “an exemplary institution” and even “a national treasure.” The company has performed to glowing reviews in New York, Paris, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.  The Heart Foundations has cited the company for its community engagement programs, which are an essential part of Ballet Memphis’ programming. 

 “Memphis has an unusual culture, and I wrestled with that a lot,” she told The Downtowner. “How do we take ballet — a beautiful and inspiring art form — and infuse it with something else? My community needs to see itself reflected on the stage. We have to be knowledgeable, versatile, and not make assumptions but rather be curious, expansive, and inclusive.”

Once the ground was broken in Overton Square, the new Ballet Memphis building — occupying 38,000 square feet — rose so quickly and so majestically that Pugh wonders if folks don’t quite believe what they can plainly see. “I think people still are almost psychologically not used to this corner being active because for so long it was just something you didn’t look at or see,” she says. “Remember, there was a high brick wall around it. The message was that everything was Overton Square, but not that corner, you know?”

But now folks need to get used to it, she says. “We’re here. We’ve transformed the corner, and it’s a beautiful building.”

Planning and teamwork have made all the difference. A key partner in the transition was the design/architecture firm archimania. “They were so great in the whole time we were trying to acquire and study property,” Pugh says. “We didn’t even know if it would be a reality.” And when the acquisition happened so fast, the ideas and layouts they’d been working with had to change fast. “They did it quickly,” she says, “and they have good relationships with the planning and urban development people.”

There were details, so many details. Getting everything all stitched together was a challenge, especially since Ballet Memphis wanted to be essentially functional in the new facility by the time the 2017-2018 season opened. The professional dancers had to work a week or two in the old building before coming over, but the schools were able to get under way on time. 

Ballet Memphis Midtown was formally introduced to the public August 25th with a wide range of opening-night activities. “It couldn’t have been better,” says Pugh, “because it was an iconic demonstration of what this building can be when it’s engaged. There were thousands of people here, children 3 years old, adults in their eighties, all different kinds of people. Every single studio all day had different things going on, and the big studio never was empty. [Company dancer] Rafael Ferreras did the ballet in honor of the construction workers from Grinder, Taber and Grinder who built it. The construction supervisor told me, ‘I’ve been in the construction business for 25 or 30 years and no one has ever done anything like this, created a work of art in our honor.’”

Pugh has scarcely had time to take a moment to breathe since the doors opened. The company had to get rehearsals going for October’s “Take Shape” show at Playhouse on the Square, in addition to everything else. Besides the building’s four studios, there is space for Pilates, Youth Ballet Memphis, and Ballet Memphis School. The costume shop has a window display on Madison where passersby can see some of the imaginative wardrobe creations. The two-story costume shop keeps three decades of costumes (about 10,000 of them) and has a wardrobe staff staying on top of it all.

One of the advantages to the larger space is the ability to take on bigger projects.

When Ballet Memphis did Peter Pan at the Orpheum in 2014, it had to rent space in the Northwest Hall of the Cook Convention Center to rehearse, the one room in the city that could handle the high-tech automated flying system that could put five dancers in the air at the same time. When the company mounts the production again this spring, it can rehearse in its new 68-foot by 70-foot Fly Studio with 45 vertical feet available for soaring.

“Our whole art form is about soaring,” Pugh says. “It’s about using the ground to imagine new worlds and places where your spirit lifts and soars. That building now can accommodate five lines of people flying, and we avoid that one step of having to take everything elsewhere and pay for another space before we go to The Orpheum.” And, she says, people will be able to see the soaring dancers rehearsing in the Fly Studio.

It’s more than just showing off for Pugh; it’s a statement of purpose. “The whole theme of imagining and getting off the ground as a metaphor for our spirits is in our creative dreaming,” she says, “but it seems like some people are frightened of it or think it’s subversive. We need it more than ever now. That’s really been the impetus forever in my thinking, even designing the first building.” It’s even in the details: The studios aren’t labeled A, B, C, and D; they’re Fly, Dream, Imagine, and Discover. “It’s because that’s what I want people to be able to do when they participate in our art form with us.”

LeeAnne Cox has been on the board since before the Trinity Road property was acquired, was chair of the building committee during the recent move, and has been board chair since this summer. She knows Pugh just about as well as anyone.

“Dorothy has attributes that I think are uncommon in one person,” Cox says. “She’s a gifted artistic director and the CEO. Those two roles aren’t normally performed at a single institution. She’s got a way of looking at the world that sees beauty where others can’t. It’s part of her training and gifts. She has a desire and gift for developing talent.

“She is also fearless and willing to ask for the impossible. Obviously, she is able to inspire others, because she can elevate what we’re doing and see it beyond just dance performance, to see how it can be transforming, and how it can be inclusive.”

That commitment to inclusivity is why Pugh and Ballet Memphis get the national attention that they do. “That’s not a new development,” Cox says. “That’s been going on for years and it’s a great resonating story for our city, but I think a lot of people just don’t know it. I think they think of Ballet Memphis as sort of the old-time, stodgy ballet, but we’ve been getting attention for seeking to think outside the box and be an innovator and a leader in diversity for many, many years.”

In 2015, Pugh was chair of the Artistic Directors’ Council for Dance/USA, the nation’s largest dance service organization for professional dance companies. “The number-one thing that was my job in this council,” she says, “was to hammer home and bring up that we all have to have our ballet companies look like America.” It’s been the most natural thing in the world for her. She was insisting on diversity years before Misty Copeland made history in 2015 at New York’s American Ballet Theatre as the first African-American woman to be promoted to principal dancer in the organization’s 75-year history.

Besides being the right thing to do, the establishment of diversity and inclusion has brought tangible rewards. In 2015, Ballet Memphis received a $1.2 million pledge from an anonymous donor to expand the company’s efforts on several levels, a direct result of its commitment to build racial and ethnic representation in the nation’s ballet companies.

At Vanderbilt, Pugh majored in English and almost went into the visual-arts program. “I never felt any need to divide anything up into categories ever,” she says. These days she’s also a seasoned tour guide and has been showing people around the new facility since back when everyone had to wear hard hats and step around construction.

Recently she was giving another tour and, even while reciting facts and figures and pointing out the unusual features, she was taking mental notes of what was right, what was not quite right, and what needed to be changed. Pugh met dancers and staff, asked about their health, and joked around. She scowled at an errant piece of tape on a door and straightened the chairs around a table. She chatted up a young girl there for a class. She saw possibilities everywhere.

“We’re still learning things,” Pugh says. “We’re getting the hang of it.”