GLAMOUR AND GRACE Dancer brings home friendly style of ballet
BY Deborah Martin

Celebrated dancer and choreographer brings ballet company home

SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS – Sunday, January 13, 2008

Edward Morgan was in the audience at a joffrey Ballet perfor- mance when a tall, elegant woman walked over and told him he looked like a dancer. She was right. He was (and is) tall, slim and striking — the very picture of a dancer – and he moved with a seemingly innate grace. As it happens, he wanted to be a dancer. But a workshop he had taken with the visiting Joffrey dancers left him demoralized. He simply didn’t have the training to keep up with the professionals. “I only had two steps,” he recalled. Margaret King Stanley, the woman who approached him at the performance, knew a thing or two about dance. As head of the San Antonio Performing Arts Association, she brought the Joffrey to the city every summer: She had watched Morgan in the workshop and saw raw talent that she wanted to help nurture. “Im very spiritual,” he said. “I’m not one of those people that preach “throw your hands up,” but I do believe the flowers come from somewhere, and there’s a reason that Margaret met me.”

Her encouragement, he said, was one of the things that helped steer him toward a career as a professional dancer, including more than 10 years as a principle dancer with the internationally acclaimed Joffrey and the formation of his own respected company, The Edward Morgan Ballet. The company is celebrating its 10th anniversary an occasion that will include its first appearance in San Antonio. Morgan is slated to spend this week in residence at the  Carver Community Cultural Center where he and his company will perform on Saturday: “This is, of course, a big thine to bower. to come home, to his city, with his company, and show what he has achieved. Stanley said His career, she said, illustrates the importance of exposing youngsters to the arts at the highest level.

“I think Edward is just a good story to tell everyone who’s interested in a career (in the arts), because here he was, living in San Antonio, and he’d had local dance (classes), but he hadn’t been exposed to the bigger, wider world except through local performances,” she said. Before he ever saw a live performance, Morgan got his first taste of dance through television. “Carol Burnett had some dancers (on her ‘70s variety show),” he said. “I would dance around the house and bump into things and knock things down. My stepmother said, ‘I’ve got to get him out of the house; he’s breaking things.’ And so, what happened was, she started taking me to different ballet schools to figure out which one was the right one.” At that point, the 17-year old was convinced that no ballet school would be right.“I didn’t want to do ballet; I wanted to do modern and jazz,” he recalled. “It was fun and easy. So when I joined ballet (class), it was so strict, oh my God, and boring — you had to repeat the same thing over and over, and I wanted to move. I hated it at first.” It didn’t help that he was the only boy in the class and his fellow students giggled a lot when he was around. “I thought they were making fun of me, but later on, I found out that they thought I was cute,” he said. “At the time, it didn’t seem that way. ”He soon got past his initial dislike of ballet, won over by the glamour and the discipline the form demands. And, after seeing the Joffrey in action, he made dancing with that company his oal. He grabbed every opportunity he could find to hone his skills. He choreographed a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” for his fellow Sam Houston High School students (“I turned the drama department into a dance department for a little while”), did some things for his church and worked on a piece performed with the San Antonio Symphony for an event honoring Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. “It was hard work and fun at the same time,” he said. After honing his skills with a few Dallas companies, he made his way to New York, where he auditioned for the Joffrey Ballet School. He did well enough to be shipped back to San Antonio to study at the Joffrey Workshop TX.  Robert Joffrey, the ballet company’s co-founder, “used this (workshop) as a testing ground to work with dancers that he was interested in,” said Susan Treviño, who has run the workshop with her husband, Buddy, for 30 years. “(Joffrey) would invite them to be at the workshop, and that gave him two or three weeks to work with them and get to know them. He could spot talent right away. (The workshop) gave him time, and sometimes other company people would come down and confer, and he was able to get someone on their way.”
Treviño remembers Morgan’s spin through the workshop. “He was very talented, and (I remember) his good energy,” she said. From the San Antonio workshop, Morgan went on to study more intensively with the Joffrey and eventually became a principle dancer with the company, a big step that once again led him right back to San Antonio.

The city and the San Antonio Performing Arts Association had commissioned a ballet from the Joffrey company, and Stanley insisted that Morgan be featured in it. “I was not in ‘Jamboree’ in the beginning,” Morgan recalled. “Margaret called them, and said, ‘Bob, Edward has to be the star of “Jamboree.”’ ”And Joffrey made it so. Stanley confirmed it for herself, Morgan recalled, when the company came to San Antonio. She marched into the first dress rehearsal, he recounted, and demanded to know, “Where is Edward Morgan?” When the ballet master, annoyed by the interruption, ignored her question and tried to kick her out, she cut him off and said, “If Edward is here, you can keep going.” Once she satisfied herself that Morgan was dancing in the piece, she left the dancers to their work.
“Jamboree” — described in a New York Times review as choreographer Gerald Arpino’s “tribute to the city (of San Antonio) and to the American Southwest” — premiered here in 1984, then traveled across the country.

“Edward was the big ‘Jamboree’ star, and he was in ads in every magazine,” Stanley said. “I went to see that production in six different cities. It was not raved over here, but everywhere else, it was. Everywhere it went, they couldn’t get enough of ‘Jamboree,’ and Edward was a big star in that production.” Morgan kept getting starring roles, though he eventually moved mostly behind the scenes, teaching at the Joffrey Ballet School and heading the Joffrey II until he had a falling-out with the company. That led to the formation of the MorganScott ballet,  which he co-founded with Daniel Scott. The company has developed a reputation for its accessible approach to classical ballet. Morgan believes that approach helps distinguish MorganScott from some other companies. In the dance world, “we forget we’re making (ballets) for the audience,” he said. “We’ve gotten away from that.” While he tries to create pieces that are audience friendly, he also tries to restore some of the glamour he feels has ebbed away from
dance and from the performing arts in general. Part of that goes back to the way dancers look — trimand elegant, just the kind of look that got him attention when he was starting out and the kind of look he works hard to maintain.
“Your body has to be a certain way,” he said. “I think you should look like a dancer. They don’t want to see me walking into a courtroom saying ‘I’m a lawyer’ with some tights and leotard.”

LEARNING BY PERFORMING

Edward Morgan has some issues with master classes. ‘They touch your arm and act as if they’ve cured you,’ he said. And that’s why he’s not doing one when he brings his company, MorganScott Ballet, to San Antonio this week. Instead, he’s going to give teenagers a chance to audition for, rehearse and dance a short piece as part of his company’s performance on Saturday. Auditions will be open to middle and high school dancers of every experience
level and in any style. They will be held from 5 to 8p.m. Monday at the Carver Community Cultural Center, 226 N. Hackberry St. Morgan said he doesn’t have a set number of dancers in mind — he’ll work with as many as he can fit onto the stage. The idea is to give young dancers real-world experience. ‘A lot of dance schools have these master
classes, and you go there and you pay money to take a class and you don’t really learn anything,’ he said. ‘This way, you learn by performing first.’ Registration is not required, but dancers should be prompt. Call (210) 207-7211 for more information.

—Deborah Martin