Scenes from an Interview:
Jean Allenby-Weidner
Prima Ballerina, Sarasota Ballet Founder &
Designing Women Boutique Co-Founder
By Gus Mollasis
Her lines are straight, both on the ballet stage or from the heart when she passionately
speaks on a variety of subjects such as great music, dancers, causes
and ways to make Sarasota a better town. This is one former prima ballerina that
enjoys every step of her life’s dance. Wherever you find Jean Allenby-Weidner,
whether it be at Designing Woman Boutique, which she co-founded, or backstage
at Sarasota Ballet, which she also founded, one thing is sure about this
striking beauty from South Africa. When you look in her eyes, make sure you
pause and take a look all the way down to the wonderful arches that support
her dancer’s frame. Of course you will swear that she is much taller. After all,
she is, as she says, used to standing on the shoulders of giants and pointing
her toes while reaching for all of her life’s dreams. Recently I sat down with her
and we took a look at some of the scenes from an interview of her life.

Where were you born?
Rhodesia, South Africa, which was a British colony and is now
Zimbabwe.

Describe your childhood.
I had a marvelous childhood. Very open and free. I hardly think
I wore shoes until I was twelve. I was always running around. I
was part of a big family of six children. We spent every weekend
together camping and climbing rocks, generally having a marvelous
time as children.

If your childhood was a dance, what kind of dance would it be?
Isadora Duncan. Free. Open. No rules.
I was a middle child, naughtier than you can imagine – an extreme
tom-boy. I loved my father. He was handsome and beautiful
and a professional soccer player before the war. He met my
mother when he was sent to Rhodesia to train with the troops
and never, ever returned to England.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Absolutely a ballerina! I knew from day one that is what I
wanted to be. I started off doing a couple classes a week.
Because my dad was a professional athlete, he understood
how the body worked. He said if you’re going to
do it you have to train the body correctly. I remember my
father sitting outside the hall in which I practiced waiting
for me to finish my lessons.

Where did you get your formal training?
I was trained in Rhodesia at the Royal Academy. You train
in ballet, tap, musical comedy, Greek, Spanish – in every
style – and entered fabulous competitions as we traveled
and competed all over Africa. That’s what taught me to be
an actress and not merely a tactician which helped me get
my first job at Stuttgart. There came a time when I had to
make a choice between whether I went to college or if I
would become a professional dancer. My mother started
my sister and I dancing at about age four and I had a
lovely dancing teacher who I trained with for 19 years. In
essence, she gave me my career. I was asked to join the
Cape Town Ballet Company. We had four large ballet companies
and they did a lot of touring. My mother was very
concerned about all the touring and wanted to make sure
that I had something to fall back on. So after going to night school
for business and economics, the first job I had was at a newspaper, as
a news editor’s secretary.

When did you know that you could dance and that you “had”
to dance?
At four years of age before I went to school. By the second year,
I started to see that I could do something better than others
because Mom and Dad used to rehearse me at home. We had
a little veranda around the house and they would sit and watch
us go through our routines.

Was there one person who said, “Hey, you could do this” and
helped push you onto the stage?
My mother was the one that absolutely wanted us to dance. As
soon as we could practically walk she encouraged us to dance.
But dad was the one who instilled the discipline and that you get
out of life the amount that you put in. They gave us a wonderful
work ethic.

Can anyone dance?
Yes, but you need to have a certain facility, a natural turn out
in the hips and a good foot. See my foot? They call me “Mc-
Donald” arches. That’s natural. So that gives you a real edge.
And you need a length of leg. Not too high, because remember
a man has to partner you. To me, the ideal height is 5’4”. I’m
slightly taller.

What makes a great dancer?
Discipline. You have to stay focused because every role is different.
Musicality – you have to feel the music. I can tell if a
child has it or not at age three or four. I can tell by how they apply
themselves with their attitude. Being there in the moment,
it’s great therapy. And that’s helped me with everything in my
life. It’s good and bad. Because for me, I can’t do anything
half. If I’m weeding the garden, I have to get every last weed.
I’m a perfectionist. You learn a technique, but then you have
to go above that technique to make it look effortless. That’s
the tough thing and the difference between the talented and
brilliant dancers.

Are dancers born or trained for greatness?
Born. But unless they get the good training, you don’t get the
crispness and the beauty of line. I used to think in the early days
how cruel the Russians were, because children would come
from all over, traveling many miles, and if they were chosen,
they would go into this school and the peasants knew that this
was a way to give their children a better life. They would interview
thousands of children and only take eight or ten because
they would not take and train a dancer who later on would have
problems with ankles, or knees or the back. They knew they
would not make it because the training ahead was so rigorous.
It seemed cruel, but out of that, they produced incredible
dancers that combined the natural ability with the training. The
Russian training was and still is the best.

Sarasota Ballet is 20 years old now. What are the accomplishments
there you most proud of?
The people. In any art form it is the people behind it that make
it a success. We had two wonderful Russian ballet masters that
just dropped in our lap, the older one having trained the younger
one. We had them from the word go so we had a finesse and
expectation that things had to be done in a certain way. We took
the program from my kitchen to our first space. People gave
us space and the possibility to have a profile. Choreographers
gave us their ballets. In the ballet world, there are lovely and
giving people. So when you are starting a venture, they are so
happy to see that art form going further. Iain Webb is doing that
today, taking it to another level. It’s all the people. I feel that I
stand on so many shoulders. People always think it’s the guy at
the top, but there is no way you do it on your own.

A proud accomplishment is your involvement in “DANCE-THE
NEXT GENERATION” - a scholarship for at- risk students. Why
is it so important to expose them to an art such as dance?
We’ve seen real revelations. When you learn to train the body,
it’s kind of like Utopia. When you can excel and make your body
do things that are so amazing, what more do you want? It’s
perfection. And then you go out in life and those lessons go
further and further in everything that you do. You see a child
come in unhappy, rebellious, unable to pay attention, whatever
the problems are at home; then you see them two or three years
later taking their position and understanding who they are. You
see their parents knowing that they are special. We always involve
the parents in what the children are doing because it’s no
good going through this if when they go home, the father laughs
at the boy and says things like, “fairy” and worse. I remember
being driven around Newtown by the police chief looking for
where these at-risk children were, not at first believing that they
existed here in Sarasota. I told him that I never saw children in
this city who had nothing. The drive opened my eyes and made
me want to fight for the program even more. In essence, this
program not only trains dancers, but it’s also training an incredible
local audience for tomorrow. It is a program that transforms
families. I saw it at work in Africa. I am extremely proud of this
program and I have a special place in my heart for these at-risk
African-American children.
Is there a favorite ballet that resonates with you?
It has to be a ballet with some meat in it. It has to be a drama like
Romeo and Juliet, for example. Or something with a bit of craziness,
some of Kenneth MacMillan’s plays. For me, Juliet is one of
my favorites to dance because I am a contained and a together
kind of person – almost too controlled. Perfect looking people
are always a bit nervous around me. Letting that go, and trying
to let that innocence come through, for me was a very interesting
adventure. I have to loosen up to actually let people in.

Describe the feeling you get when you’re on stage and “in the
moment” performing a great ballet?
A lot of people think that you are aware and that you are doing
something for the audience. Your mind clicks into that moment
of the present where you are aware of everything that you are
doing. But you have to switch that off and become the character,
or the music or whatever the choreographer is trying to
say to you. And when things are working, when you are on top,
you can’t imagine how it feels. It feels so good that quite often
they would have to have someone catch me as I ran off stage to
return for the curtain call. When I finished I was so thrilled that
I forgot there was an audience out there. It was like an out-ofbody
experience. Often I used to feel like I was dreaming and
dancing across the mountains.

Describe the difference between choreographing a great
dance and dancing a great dance?
Choreographing is creating. That’s taking nothing and molding
it by teaching and coaching and that is a beautiful feeling. To
me, it’s much more rewarding than dancing because you are
giving so many people an opportunity to excel. It is so inventive
and is a fantasy. When I was a child I was always inventing
things. I loved fairies and pixies, very British. I was always
inventing. My Mom would say that whether I was playing in mud
puddles or had flowers from the garden, I was always fluffing
stuff. I’m a fluffer and you have to do a lot of that when you are
building a young company.

What is your advice to dancers and ballerinas who are pursuing
their dreams?
Be honest with yourself. Compete only with yourself and never with
others because that puts a hard edge to your work. Try and enjoy
what’s going on in the moment and not the next ballet. Do research
and learn about the material that can help you round at that role.

What do you hope people take away from a ballet?
I’m seeing that people are taking the experiences that I saw and
saying things like, “I’ve never felt this before. It was so beautiful.
Thank you.” They are so enthused. It’s wonderful.

What do you hope Sarasota Ballet becomes in the next ten to
twenty years?
More good choreography and I think the company needs a permanent
performing home that fits all of its needs. The company
is in good hands with Iain Webb. He is wonderful and so far
ahead of the curve.

You are a founding member of the Designing Women Boutique.
How did that come to be?
Diane Roskamp, Margaret Wise and I were in Philadelphia on
9/11 trapped for four days. We were so shattered. So, to keep
everyone’s mind from sadness, I told them of this idea for an
upscale consignment shop modeled after some special shops I
visited in Paris. The Roskamps helped with the build-outs, which
made it all possible, and Margaret helped with the marketing. She
is a marketing genius. She is a pied piper. That lady can draw
anybody. We knew it would work. We started with $12,000 and
we brought in great, qualified people to volunteer and use all their
expertise to help us. Now, as we start our tenth year, Designing
Women Boutique has supported local arts and human services
with over $1 million in merchandise and grants and these organizations
need our help more than ever.”

Finish the sentence...I love Sarasota because it....
Has a lot of taste. They understand what’s good and therefore
they build a lot of good first class organizations.

You have one piece of music that you can play at your funeral,
what would it be?
Wow. You got me. It would be from Kenneth MacMillan’s, Das
Lied Von der Erde, the Song of the Earth. Go and listen to it. It’s
gorgeous. It’s about farewells.
Finish the sentence... I eat to live. I dance to...
At one point in my life, to survive. It was everything. There was
just nothing else. And I still feel that way.

When the ballet shoes are put away and all the dances have
been danced, how do you want to be remembered?
I guess basically as someone who cared deeply for people. And
I don’t always think it shows with me, but I do care. I can see
character. I can see the stars and I can see the good people.
A nurturer maybe, a creator and a disciplinarian. That’s what I
am, I’m tough.