Pas de Deux

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.”