Learn About Austin's 'Culture of Creativity' from Ballet's Austin's Cookie Ruiz

By Michele Schwartz

This month we are pleased to host Cookie Ruiz, C.F.R.E. the Executive Director of Ballet Austin as our guest for the February AWC Austin luncheon. On February 15th we will hear from Cookie as she talks about about the challenges of leading a special project called The CreateAustin Cultural Master Plan. This project is the result of a two-year process of community engagement undertaken to invigorate Austin’s “culture of creativity” with Cookie leading the way as as the cultural planning process chair. Join us at the UT Club from 11:30- 1 PM.

AWCAustin: What do you consider to be your biggest career achievement?
CR: Career achievements in my life are measured on a scale of team. There’s not a singular accomplishment at Ballet Austin that I could claim as “mine” and I would never want be part of an organization where that would be possible. I treasure those wonderful, extraordinary, exhausting times when all of my colleagues are giving all they have (and more) in order to achieve a specific goal. To borrow from our art form, these are moments in which we are exquisitely executing the choreography (plan), without visible signs of exertion. The creation of Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project is such an example. That experience has changed this organization and the lives of those involved in monumental ways. I remember another time recently that took my breath away. It was at 2 am on the night of our recent Fete/Fete*ish. My entire team was back at Ballet Austin after loading up cars/trucks and hauling everything back to our building. There was a moment when, amid the exhaustion, we all recognized that after months of planning it had been a wonderful event. We were just standing in a big circle laughing and sharing the stories…not quite being able to go home. Building teams…that’s the great stuff.

AWCAustin: What was your biggest challenge in chairing the CreateAustin Cultural Master Plan?
CR: CreateAustin was an extraordinary learning opportunity for me. It was a process during which I realized that, in order to guide a process that stood a chance of being transformational, I had to embrace the fact that I did not have the answer. In fact, in the beginning of the process I would ask those who had joined this planning process with an outcome in mind, to let the opportunity pass…to not engage in the process. Our job was to take a collective journey. It was clear that our community was ready to have an important conversation, and that this conversation would be obstructed by anyone who considered “listening” to be the act of waiting until it was time to speak again. In the end, listening to/learning to so many members of our community was the gift of CreateAustin. The intricacies of the endorsement process by City Council became the challenge… but it was also an opportunity for me to expand my relationship with an under-developed value…patience.

AWCAustin: Tell us about the Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project.
CR: Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project is a full-length contemporary ballet and Holocaust education partnership that promotes the protection of human rights against bigotry and hate through arts, education, and public dialogue. The ballet itself was created by my colleague and friend Stephen Mills, the Artistic Director of Ballet Austin, and is inspired by one Holocaust survivor’s amazing story of survival. Created in Austin in 2005, the work was licensed by Pittsburgh and replicated in that city in 2009. Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project is now back in Austin from Martin Luther King Jr. Day through Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) on April 19 with multi-disciplinary performances/lectures/events/initiatives led by more than 40 collaborative community partners from arts and education to human rights organizations. Performances of Ballet Austin’s production of Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project will take place at The Long Center March 23 & 24 (Friday/Saturday) at 8PM and Sunday March 25th at 3PM.

AWCAustin: Ballet Austin is an example of a nonprofit that has embraced social media for outreach & community building. What led you to invest resources in this?
CR: At a Dance/USA national conference held in 2003, one of the presenters gave an exceptional speech on the growing impact of our increasingly digital world and its impact on dance. The talk was liberally laced with “digital speak,” but was one of the most exciting speeches any of us had ever heard. When we moved into our traditional conference break out groups, my cohort was comprised of the managers of the largest professional dance companies in the US ($5M-60M companies). As the door closed and we started our traditional round-robin process of sharing of ideas and updates, a valued colleague said, “Do you all have ANY idea what he was talking about?” To which others began to admit big gaps of knowledge in this new field that was exploding all around us. Another colleague said, “Well, if we have a knowledge deficit, we need to do something about it.” At that point the people in the room began to review the national talent of their Board members (Key executives at Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.) and we developed a special training session that was held six months later in LA. I flew home from L.A. knowing that Ballet Austin was about to become the second ballet company in the US to create a position dedicated solely to digital media (the first was the New York City Ballet). And that is part of “the rest of the story.”

AWCAustin: What is your favorite ballet?
CR: Ballet Austin’s Artistic Director Stephen Mills is one of the nation’s successful producing choreographers. Stephen’s ballets are like Ballet Austin’s children, with comparable gestation periods. I mentioned Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project, but I also think of the elegant beauty of Stephen’s production of Hamlet that has been licensed across the US, or the “I Love Lucy” level of comedy in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Taming of the Shrew, each performed at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC…or his incredible use of shadow puppetry in his newest full-length work The Magic Flute…or the out of this world collaboration with nationally acclaimed visual artist Trenton Doyle Hancock,Cult of Color: Call to Color, with an original score by Graham Reynolds. Each one is a collaborative project…each one a part of all of us.

The moment of neo-classical ballet that I treasure most is the opening moment of theSerenade by George Balanchine. As the curtain goes up, the entire stage is filled with lines of our beautiful dancers (all women in this scene), bathed in blue light; each reaching up with her right hand as if to block the moon’s rays from their faces. A photograph of this exquisite moment is on my wall… I’m looking at it as I type.

…And I will always love the complete wonder on the faces of the children (of all ages) seeing The Nutcracker…always.