BBT at 40

Dear BBT community members,

Next year BBT will celebrate our 40th Anniversary!

As our 40th Season unfolds, we’ll be sharing stories, interviews, photographs, and more to commemorate BBT’s milestone anniversary. You’ll be able to follow along and share your own memories with the community through our online journal, social media scrapbook, and alumni events.

Before we can look forward, we feel it is best to start at the beginning, in 1981, when BBT was known as the Classical Ballet Center. In short order, it would be taken over by Artistic Director Emerita Sally Streets to develop a place with rigorous and supportive ballet training and a professional company and gain the name of Berkeley Ballet Theater. Those of you who know Ms. Sally will know that "Theater" was an important addition to the name as it provided a clear reminder that ballet training is intended to be performed. This remains a BBT value today, even as we look at redefining what "performance" and "Theater" look like in our current world.

By 1983, Sally was joined by Co-Artistic Director, and her late son Robbie Nichols, who further developed the values and vision which would help shape the organization. This vision was memorialized in a Strategic Plan from that time:

Ballet is more than just an art form. In the right circumstances, it becomes a forum and a catalyst for all forms of art and the entire creative community. Ballet is, of necessity, an art which involves collaboration; thus it serves as a natural point of intersection between the many creative worlds. BBT aspires to that high position to be: Forum for the Arts.

BBT performances will evolve to be exciting events where the public can witness the finest in contemporary music, choreography, art, and poetry; and where the ideas and problems that absorb us every day are treated with the humanity, perspective, and recognition of beauty that characterize the best art.

We will carry the respected and ancient traditions of ballet forward into the future. It is one thing to be avant-garde in a form which is, in itself, avant-garde; it is quite another to take a powerful artistic tradition 400 years old and aim it toward the future. This will be the artistic quest of the Berkeley Ballet Theater.

We look forward to sharing this journey with you and transforming the artistic quest laid out by Robbie into a vision for BBT's next decades. We’re grateful for each and every person who has been a part of BBT’s community over the past forty years, and we’re looking forward to celebrating you and this organization that we love in the Season ahead.

Sincerely,

Robert Dekkers
Ali Taylor Lange

AnchorRobin DekkersSeptember 20, 2020