Pas de Deux

Mona Sewell wants to climb up on that pony. It’s a miniature pony, more accessible than a regular-sized horse for the seven-year-old, who is small for her age—a trait inherited from her parents, petite physical powerhouses Sally Rousse and James Sewell, the forces behind Minneapolis-based James Sewell Ballet. Mona turns away from the pony and clings to her father, climbing up his side like a monkey and wrapping herself around his neck and chest.

Her two-year-old brother, Oliver, reaches for the shaggy, brown-and-white horse and squeals as his father sets him on its back. Oliver’s chubby legs, which aren’t long enough to curve around the pony’s belly, stick out straight at the sides. The pony shifts its weight and starts to amble toward a patch of clover. “James!” cries Rousse. “Hold Oliver!”

That sparks Mona’s protective older-sister instincts, and she consents to being placed behind Oliver so she can hold on tight to her chortling brother. “Well, I’m finally on the horse,” she says. The cartoon-covered Band-Aid on her forearm—a souvenir from blood tests she had at Children’s Hospital–Minneapolis that morning—starts to peel back from her skin. Frowning, she reaches around Oliver and pats the Band-Aid back down.

“You’re very brave,” her father says to her.

“Mona, see the baby pony down in the pasture?” asks a friend. But Mona probably can’t.

In May 2003, when Mona was four years old, she was diagnosed with cancer. Doctors found three low-grade tumors on her optic nerves that are inoperable because of their location and their spidery, amorphous shapes. Surgery and radiation could harm other brain tissue, so rounds of chemotherapy are used to keep the tumors in check and damage to a minimum. “We’re looking at some vision loss now,” says Rousse. “But in brain surgery, they’d be touching on things that ought not to be touched. We could be talking about bigger losses: processing, cognitive stuff, speech, thinking. Just imagining it drives me crazy.”

The tumors dim Mona’s vision and render it indistinct. Reading is challenging and schoolwork frustrating and difficult. “Imagine squinting your eyes and your eyelashes making everything blurry, and then seeing only a severe darkness and blurriness after a few feet,” says Rousse. “That’s how doctors have described it to me.” But Mona has vision enough to enjoy this visit to an orchard and pony farm, to wave a strip of newly acquired Barbie stickers at her mother in delight, and to take ballet classes this summer. “I like dance, but not in summer,” she says. “My mom is making me.”

Mona’s diagnosis devastated her parents, who had been married ten years and were newly pregnant with Oliver at the time. Rousse temporarily stopped dancing—a move that for some dancers could be career-ending—because she was pregnant, but it also allowed her time to stay by Mona’s side during doctor appointments and weekly chemotherapy treatments at the hospital. Sewell shared chemo duty, as well, and both of them relentlessly researched the disease and its alternative treatments, launched a website to keep friends and family apprised of Mona’s condition, and worked hard to make life seem as normal as possible for her.

Still, no matter how many toys and cozy blankets are stocked in the hospital room and no matter how kind the nurses are, chemo just doesn’t feel good. Rousse has worked out routines so that Mona can feel as if she has some power. On one hospital visit, she says to Mona, “You tell the nurse when it’s OK to do the needle stick.” Rousse looks like a miniature fairy princess, and the nurse thinks she can be swayed.

That is a mistake.

Rousse’s athletic strength as a dancer is matched by her maternal fierceness, cranked up to a Vesuvian degree by her daughter’s illness. The nurse reconsiders. And agrees to wait until Mona says it’s time.

For the first fourteen months following her diagnosis, Mona underwent intense chemo treatments weekly, with a two-week break every six weeks. “Then we had seven months off,” says Rousse, “and we thought, ‘Woo-hoo! We can do anything, like cheer and yell and pierce our ears [Mona’s postchemo treat] and go to the dentist without antibiotics.’” Then an MRI in March 2005 showed frustrating results. “It looked like the tumors moved or grew, but the doctors said they couldn’t say how much,” says Rousse. “What do you mean you can’t calculate how much they changed? It seems lame that they can’t get exact measurements. And how do they know the slices [of MRI images] are the exact same slices they saw before?”

But there was a more troubling worry. “There’s a thing called ‘enhancement’—how alive the tumors seem, how energetic,” says Rousse. “The new MRI said the tumor enhancement had improved. That blew our world apart. We redoubled our efforts and started doing qi gong [a Chinese healing technique].” They also began a different chemo at home, under which Mona takes three pills a day, five days a week, of a newly developed drug that Rousse and Sewell have been told is better at targeting cancer cells.

Mona can’t swallow the pills with food to disguise the awful taste, so Rousse keeps her company by swallowing three huge calcium pills along with her. “We sometimes read a chapter in a book between each pill, and I just stay by her side,” says Rousse, who learned the hands-on healing technique of Reiki in order to help Mona metabolize chemo. “I do Reiki an hour before she takes her pills,” says Rousse. “I feel heat and tingling when I do it, and sometimes she says, ‘Ow, this is too much,’ but she usually likes it. I have to be really focused. I can’t have anybody, even James, in the room. It seems to help her body do what it needs to do. I just focus on helping this be a good experience for her, because if she gets sick and throws up, it’s traumatic. She stays home from school and feels bad.”

The couple was as frank as possible with their daughter from the beginning, explaining the treatment and its desired results in language she could understand. As a result, Mona can disconcert adults with her plainspoken accounting of her tumors. “Wellll . . . we’re trying to get them to shrink,” she says. “And I’m very good about taking my pills.”

Though the pills make her sick some days, “she’s doing great,” says Rousse. “It’s not making her hair fall out. She looks healthy and wonderful. She’s taking an active role in her treatment and cure. I had her watch this show on Larry King, with a girl who had brain tumors. She told James that she wanted to meet that girl. She didn’t want that two years ago. She just wanted us.”

Rousse and Sewell are the power couple of Twin Cities dance, with national and international reputations: his for innovative, highly lyrical choreography, hers for sparkling technique and breathtaking bravery as a ballerina. She’s his muse, his dance partner, his artistic director. He’s her choreographer, her collaborator, her husband. They take meetings together, market their dance company together, work with the board of James Sewell Ballet together. And they’ve tackled Mona’s illness and treatments together, just as their life’s work is gaining impressive national attention.
“We are not the traditional regional ballet company,” says executive director Gary Peterson. “We don’t perform the classics. Everybody is trained rigorously in classical technique, but we are a contemporary ballet company. We are seen as cutting edge.” The New York Times’ Anna Kisselgoff labeled Sewell one of American ballet’s best and most inventive choreographers.

In addition to choreographing only for the company, Sewell has collaborated with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Dale Warland Singers, Minnesota Opera, and Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus. He choreographed last summer’s Guthrie Theater hit She Loves Me with a cast of nondancers. “James has a great sense of humor, which shows in his work,” says John Miller-Stephany, who directed the show. “I had an idea of what should happen in a number, how I wanted a scene to work. And he was able to find a choreographic language that took the dramatic moment and moved it. He’s a wonderful collaborator.”

The Minnesota Orchestra has commissioned Sewell to create a new work to perform to Bartók this September. “We’re collaborating with James because his is one of the most interesting and provocative groups in the Twin Cities, and he has a strong musical sensibility,” says orchestra general manager Robert Neu. “[We’ve asked for] a major statement, not a ten-minute curtain raiser. We look forward to what can be created by putting his mind together with Osmo’s.”

This month, the company returns for the second time to the prestigious Joyce Theater in New York City for the city premieres of Guy Noir: The Ballet, a work based on the private eye character in Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, and Anagram, a ballet set to the music of Franz Schubert. Following its New York engagement, the company performs Schoenberg Serenade, set to Arnold Schoenberg’s chamber work, and Awedville, an exploration of vaudeville, at its in-town home, the State Theatre. Next month, it tours in Iceland.

Sewell and Rousse are devoted to one another and to one another’s professional achievements. “I always fight for James,” she says. “I’m always constantly fighting for him, for more money for projects, for more respect and attention for the company.”

Says Sewell, “It wasn’t a company until Sally got here.”

A few years ago, the Oprah show filmed the couple for an inspirational segment on married couples who also work together. Reminded of it, they laugh. “Well, it’s not like our marriage is perfect,” says Rousse. “We have problems like everyone else.” But not everyone else’s husband leaps across the stage to catch her as the music swells and the curtain falls.

“We work together,” says Sewell. “Not everyone does that. I suppose that could look ideal.” He laughs. “Or not.”

Rousse takes daily dance class from Sewell without marital incident. “James is just so kind and funny. No one gets mad at him,” she says. “But it can get tricky with the company. I’m his wife, but there, I am a part of the company. That’s my role.”

Sewell grins. “But we do that pretty well, I think.”

Rousse has also played a pivotal role in how Sewell’s ideas about movement have evolved. “I needed Sally to show me what is the pointe shoe, how it can be used,” he says. Choreographers are usually men, and men don’t dance on pointe, but must choreograph well for it, nonetheless. “She opens up that world for me,” says Sewell. “Sally is freakishly gifted at being able to work on pointe in new ways. She’s like a movement machine. She generates new movement. Put a quarter in her and she goes.”

When Rousse dances, she takes the audience along with her into a passionate solo or a comedic romp. “Sally can make people feel what it feels like to dance,” says Sewell. He brags about her often, sometimes as a proud husband and sometimes as a choreographer.

When Rousse and Sewell dance together, the audience audibly sighs—or laughs, or cries. In Lover, Rousse brandishes a long cigarette holder and slinks across the stage in a sexy red dress, making a tuxedoed, dandified Sewell miserable. In Moving Works, they dance a watery duet of subtle contact. “It’s lovely to do with James,” says Rousse, “because I know him and his body so well and know exactly where his elbow is behind me.”

“They are so clearly made to dance together,” says Penelope Freeh, a twelve-year veteran dancer in the company. “They just fit into each other’s bodies.”

The forty-two-year-old Rousse is an olive-skinned, dark-haired beauty from an Italian-French family in Vermont. Her father, a political journalist, died in a plane crash when Rousse was four years old, leaving her mother to raise her and her six siblings.

As a child, Rousse was a competitive tennis player. She took up ballet “not in a pink tutu way, but in a cool, black leotard way,” she says. “I started at seven and had my first solo concert within a year. I loved it. It was my identity. But it wasn’t until my friend went to the School of American Ballet that I realized that people do this every day.” She talked her mom into letting her live with twelve other girls supervised by one mother in New York City. “Not a good idea,” she says now. “We went to Studio 54 a couple of times, and we were fourteen!” She studied at the prestigious St. Paul’s School, graduated early, moved on to the Joffrey Ballet, and, in 1984, landed her first full-year contract job with the Omaha Ballet.

Sewell, forty-four, is movie-star handsome and criminally young-looking. As a boy, he was a champion gymnast, an accomplished violinist, and an actor with the Children’s Theatre Company, and performed in productions of A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theater. He played music with his father, Fred Sewell, who was assistant concertmaster in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and concertmaster of the Minnesota Opera, and with his sister, Laura Sewell, a Juilliard–trained cellist and founder of the Lark Quartet. His mother, Gloria Sewell, helped found the Minnesota Chorale and sang with the Bach Society.

Gloria describes Sewell as having been a “tricky” little boy, able to handle himself physically, but throwing himself into situations that would make a mother catch her breath—such as executing a handstand on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

At age seventeen, Sewell moved to New York City and began dancing with American Ballet Theater II. In 1988, he met Rousse in a class at David Howard’s studio, where, Rousse remembers, Sewell was “fearless” about trying new moves, not caring if he literally fell on his face. In a cruel irony, Rousse was then nursing her first husband, David (not Howard), through the final stages of a terminal brain tumor. Impressed with her devotion and character, Sewell asked for her input on a ballet he was creating in memory of family friend and cellist Jacqueline Du Pre.

After David’s death, Rousse moved to Ballet Chicago in 1989 and then on to the Royal Ballet of Flanders in Belgium. Sewell courted her from afar, with roses and invitations to help him start his own ballet company. Their separation inspired him to create Loves Remembered, a bittersweet dance about the loss of romantic love. In 1991, Rousse returned to New York, and they began building James Sewell Ballet together. As one of the company’s first dances, Sewell asked Rousse to improvise with a shirt of David’s—to dance with it and see what happened. The piece, called Covery, is Rousse’s solo of a ballerina trying to simultaneously part with and remain wrapped inside her dead lover’s shirt—and is now part of Good Mourning, Sewell’s heartbreaking ballet of death and loss.

Two years later, they moved the company to Minneapolis and married. In New York, theirs was one of many dance companies; in the Twin Cities, James Sewell Ballet could make a major mark. Also, in Minnesota the couple could afford a home with more space than their cramped city apartment in which they stored their dance costumes by hanging them from the ceiling.

In his early work, Sewell says he explored a “movement vocabulary, telling a dramatic story or theme,” which eventually led him to polyrhythmic coordination, or moving different body parts in different rhythms at the same time. Inspired by Rousse’s work with improvisation, he began experimenting with improvisation and polyrhythms, the result of which, he says, led him to discover “movements that no one has done before, things that are beautiful and fresh to the eye.

“The best kind of piece has some kind of emotional content, even if it isn’t telling a literal story; the best stories have movement that can stand on its own without the story. The best pieces have a marriage of both.”

As the couple was dealing with Mona’s cancer, Sewell’s ideas about movement reached fruition in April 2005 with the premiere of Involution, a ballet that incorporates qi gong movements. Rousse, who didn’t immediately like the piece, has come to love it and what it means to Sewell—that his work has been influenced by Mona’s experiences. “It has logged a different kind of work for him,” says Rousse. “He let something that dominated his life come out into his creation, a very brave choice. We didn’t think people would like Involution, and as it turns out, I think it touched a lot of people and has affected them.”

“Everyone has a road map of their future in their mind,” says Sewell. “It doesn’t include things like this, like finding out your child has cancer. That’s a shock. But once you make the emotional shift, once you make it through that shock and you redraw your road map, you find a way through it. Artists process what is going on around them. In that way, one person can help many more. Art helps us move on, helps us understand what happens to us.” Even when it’s as incomprehensible as a child with cancer.

“Doing chemo at home is not what we wanted to do,” says Rousse. “We do not want to be the doctors who give her drugs. We want to be the supportive parents who do not hurt her. I especially wanted to do that, because with taking care of David, I had to be the nurse and give the shots. I didn’t want to do that with Mona. But last May, we were so sick of the hospital, we just decided we would do it at home. This is our disease as a family. It just happens to be in Mona’s head.

“Every day I worry, ‘Am I doing everything I can for Mona?’ I take chunks of time off from dancing to stay with the kids. There have been periods when all I’ve done is research, contacting our doctor friends here, my friends in Harvard Medical School, my brother who’s a doctor, people in Europe, pushed the doctors, telling them, ‘If you hear of something working in Germany, we’ll go!’ But I’m just not like Susan Sarandon in Lorenzo’s Oil, and I feel terrible about that. I’m trying to keep her educated, help her to keep up with her classmates, take her to the tutor, go over reading and word lists with her every week if she lets me. I help foster a different kind of reading for her, describing things in a metaphorical way. I sometimes feel that she should look at everything and describe it so she makes memories. I want to say, ‘Hold onto that memory, Mona, so if you can’t see anymore and I say ‘yellow,’ you’ll know exactly what I mean.”

The little girl rearranging plastic alphabet letters with her toddler brother on the polished wood floor of the family’s kitchen doesn’t look particularly frail. Her hair has grown back from her early chemo and is shoulder-length now. It takes a close look to see that her beautiful, chocolate-colored eyes sometimes look a bit unfocused. In early February, Mona took an eye test, which showed that her vision had improved—good news considering the doctors had hoped her eyesight would remain stable at best—and an upcoming MRI in March will hopefully reveal that the tumors haven’t enlarged.

“It’s surprising she can see, really,” says her mother. Mona’s mother and father want her to trust her body, to test its limits, to feel strong and confident. Her parents do not physically guide her around obstacles and through the world. But someday, they might teach her to dance.

Pamela Hill Nettleton is at work on a new play, The Gospel According to Gladys.