Pas de Deux

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.