DANCING THROUGH LIFE: MMSt ALUM JOHN DALRYMPLE ON HIS WORK AT CANADA’S NATIONAL BALLET SCHOOL

(Fun)draising | Samantha Summers

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In 2006 while serving as the Director of Development at the Textile Museum of Canada, John Dalrymple attended a ballet in New York City that brought him to tears. He was there on behalf of the Textile Museum on a stewardship trip with donors, and having had nothing but yawn-inducing experiences with the opera and the theatre, he had expected it to be the same. He did not expect to be so touched by this art form. Then again, very little of John’s career has been what he expected.

Fresh out of his undergraduate degree, John had anticipated dedicating his life to archaeology. He found several gigs, first in Ontario and then in Central America, where he spent his days Indiana Jones-ing his way through the jungles of Belize. He loved when tour groups stopped by the ancient structures he was working on and he was able to make a meaningful connection between them and the history he was working with. Turning visitors into learners and onlookers into participants was way more interesting to him than dusting off shards of pottery.

Canada's National Ballet School at 400 Jarvis Street, Toronto. Photo courtesy of Canada's National Ballet School.

The trouble with being a nomadic archaeologist-cum-adventurer, however, is the nomadism. John missed his family back in Canada, and they missed him. He packed up and headed home, keen to find a career in developing that personalized meaning-making and knowledge translation he had a taste of with visitors to his digs. His interests brought him to the University of Toronto, where in the Master of Museum Studies program John studied alongside a small and extremely close class of approximately 15 people. Here he learned much what MMSt students at the University of Toronto learn today: principles of curation, conservation theory, and how museums make meanings. What John didn’t seem to be hearing a lot about was how museums keep the lights on. We talk about government grants, donors, and corporate sponsorships, but who are the people behind these titles? How do we convince them to support our visions and our institutions?

This burgeoning interest in development is what brought John into his current career. He has worked at some of Toronto’s top museums: the ROM, the Gardiner Museum and the Textile Museum of Canada. He was working at the Textile Museum of Canada, just finishing up a stint as Acting Executive Director, when Canada’s National Ballet School (NBS) came calling. A half decade after that ballet had brought John to tears, it had come back into his life to stay.

John Dalrymple dancing during an NBS Sharing Dance community workshop in Calgary. Photo courtesy of Canada's National Ballet School.

“Do you have a history of dance yourself?” I ask as John leads me through the warren-like basement of the Betty Oliphant Theatre on Jarvis Street, which is owned by Canada’s National Ballet School. He laughs, “Only at weddings and bars.” A quick walk and an elevator ride later and we’re in the sparkling upper floors of Canada’s National Ballet School, and John is explaining that his staff group—all 29 of them—get together over their lunches to learn the choreography for Sharing Dance, one of NBS’ many community programs. “I dance a lot now,” he adds.

Everyone here dances a lot. At every stop on the tour of this gorgeous facility dancers are training around me, pushing themselves to Olympian limits. Even the majority of the staff have a history of dance, and many of John’s staff studied dance themselves in their youth. It’s a testament to how passionate people are about this school and its mission to share the power of dance. The problem until recently, however, has been converting the unbelievers.

When John first arrived at Canada’s National Ballet School approximately 90% of their privately donated funds came from what he estimates to be twenty donors. This was a passionate core support group, but having that much support from so few people is ultimately an unstable funding model. John’s job over the past few years has been to increase philanthropic interest in the school from a more diverse donor pool. “You say ‘elite training and performance,’ and people hear ‘elitist,’” John tells me.

Breaking through the barrier posed by that image has involved producing lots of publicly accessible content, dance training, and outreach, and demonstrating that just because ballet is an old dance form it doesn’t have to come with old-fashioned attitudes. Artistic Director and CEO Mavis Staines has been leading the global charge to make ballet more body-positive and health-focused, and her commitment to this goal can be felt in the training programs implemented here at Canada’s National Ballet School. The Pathway Project aims to help young and talented dancers who might have less access to ballet make their way to the school to train. NBS’ REACH provides open-access materials to help public school teachers and community programmers across the country learn how to bring relevant, inclusive dance programming into their spaces from the world-class instructors who teach at Canada’s National Ballet School.

Behind all of these incredible initiatives are dedicated and passionate colleagues that John feels privileged to work with. Laying the foundation for this programming requires them to approach donors and sponsors and explain how Canada’s National Ballet School enriches the fabric of Canada and impacts dance across the globe. Rooted in his love of knowledge translation, first discovered in Belize and then enhanced in the MMSt program, John works to makes ballet and dance meaningful to those who otherwise may have misunderstood its importance.

This is where John Dalrymple’s MMSt has taken him.

Where will yours take you?