I Am YEG Arts: Sheri Somerville

As Executive Director of Ballet Edmonton, Sheri Somerville gives back to the very community that nourished her budding performing arts career years ago. Her incredible multi-disciplinary career in theatre and music has taken her around the world and back again to Edmonton. In this week’s I Am YEG Arts feature, Sheri gives us a sneak peek at Ballet Edmonton’s new season launching on October 13 with the world première of Ethan Colangelo’s performance, Ouvrir. She also shares some career highlights and how it’s all come full circle for her. 

Tell us a little bit about what makes Ballet Edmonton special to you and the city.

What makes it special to me is the amazing company of artists we have. We have ten company dancers and our amazing Artistic Director, Wen Wei Wang. It’s a very special environment, and the organizational culture is amazing. The Board is supportive, my coworkers are wonderful and warm, and we are a strong team. Everybody brings their strengths to the table, and we all support the idea of getting these amazing artists on stage to share this kind of dance with Edmonton. 

Since Alberta Ballet moved to Calgary in 1990, Edmonton hasn’t had its own ballet company that lives and builds work in Edmonton. It’s wonderful that the board saw fit to fill that void and have our own ballet company. Every city and region, of course, creates their own unique form of art, and that’s what Ballet Edmonton does for Edmonton and now for Canada. 

Tell us about how Ballet Edmonton took shape into what it is today.

It launched in 2012. When I came on board in 2015, we became fully professional and upped everybody’s salaries to reasonable standards. And in 2018, we changed the name to Ballet Edmonton (it was Citie Ballet) and brought Wen Wei Wang on board as the Artistic Director, and that’s when it really took hold. By that time, we had defined our mandate and mission as being contemporary ballet, original work, and a mixed program format. 

We were lucky because we made some decisions during the pandemic to keep the company together, fully masked, functioning as a very closed cohort. The company all lived in the same arts building, and we decided that we would all isolate with each other and keep our artists employed. By the time the pandemic was over, we had created a bunch of new work and had a national tour lined up. It was really exciting to come out of those two years and head to the National Arts Centre and other Canadian cities. It was just such a gift after a very hard two years.

Tell us about the work Ballet Edmonton is doing to advance the work of female and diverse creators. Why is this important work?

When people think of ballet, they tend to have sort of traditional ways of thinking about it. But this company does not adhere to a lot of those things. We have a great diversity of body shapes and heights. We have dancers from five countries, and that means there are five languages in the studio. Our leader Wen Wei, was a newcomer to Canada at one time and is part of the LGBTQ+ community, and it’s very important to him that artists be seen for what they bring artistically — and that’s the priority. From the inception, that has been our criteria. It doesn’t matter how tall you are, what colour your skin is, or what gender you are, if you’re exceptional, passionate and a good fit for what we do, you’re welcome in our company. 

When people come to see a contemporary ballet, we want them to see themselves. We’re telling stories that are reflective of what’s happening in the world right now. It’s important that the people on the stage look like they’re from the community. 

And in terms of advancing the female voice, ballet has lots of female bodies in it and fewer male bodies, and yet a lot of the leadership in ballet is still male. We want to make sure that we are part of the evolution of women taking leadership, both administratively and creatively in ballet, so we make sure that there are always female creators when we program our season. And as a female administrative leader, I get to help shape and set the tone of the culture of our organization. Our new Managing Director is a woman, and so is our Board Chair, so we have a lot of female strength and energy. 

Ballet Edmonton’s 2023/24 season launches soon. What are you most looking forward to this season?

I’m looking forward to the premieres of new works that we’re going to create. We have so many great artists, some we’ve worked with before like Gioconda Barbuto. She has reimagined and reworked a piece she built for us four years ago. And we have a world première of a piece by Ethan Colangelo, he’s a very exciting young voice and contemporary ballet. Wen Wei has completely rebuilt a piece he first created for us in 2018 called Thousand Memories. He has such an amazing capacity for new creation, I always look forward to his work. We will have James Gregg — now living in the United States create a world première, as will Canadian dancer/​creator Kirsten Wicklund, who is currently living in Belgium and used to be a principal dancer with Ballet BC. So, we’ve got these three world premieres and people with very different methods and processes for building new work.

I’m also really looking forward to working with the Edmonton Symphony, we’re going to be doing a show with them. Wen Wei is going to be building a new work set to the music of composer John Estacio for our May show. There’s just so much to look forward to. We have a tour in Atlantic Canada and I can’t wait for our dancers to go there because it’s a stunningly beautiful, warm and welcoming part of this country. It will be very exciting for us all to meet those Canadians and share the work of Ballet Edmonton with them. 

Tell us about how you got your start in the arts, and how your performing arts career complements your role at Ballet Edmonton.

At the age of seven, I went to the Sound of Music at our local theatre in Grand Prairie where I was born, and I begged my mom to go back, and we basically went to two showings every day for the whole week it played. Soon after that, I was in singing lessons, entering festivals, entering as many vocal competitions as they would allow. I knew from that day forward I was going to be an artist. By the time I was 10 years old, I used to take the bus seven hours to Edmonton for singing lessons and then back home the next day. When my dad died, when I was 12, my mom immediately moved us to Edmonton to be closer to my teacher. She totally understood I was not going to be deterred and supported that dream of mine.

I went to the Voice Opera Programme at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity when I was 17, and I moved to Toronto right after that to study with the famed Baritone Louis Quilico at Canadian Opera School. About 18 months later, I got cast in a Sondheim musical, and my career went through the roof. I was on an international tour to Asia two years later, then to Paris, and it was just fantastic. I did a bunch of one-woman shows. I recall being on the front page of the arts section in the Globe and Mail and I didn’t really grasp what was happening, I just was having such a brilliant time. Toronto was a fun time because I met so many artists from different sectors who invited me to collaborate in theatre, in jazz and I always just said yes. I had moved away from opera by that time and really embraced everything else.

I got married, and that sort of changed my perspective because it was harder to go away and tour once I had my son. We left Toronto and came back to Alberta to have some family support. Once back, I worked with the Citadel Theatre as part of an ensemble; we got five-year contracts, so it was predictable income. I did some jazz with Tommy Banks and Mike Lent and met all those legends. I became a member of the improv troupe Die-Nasty and part of Stewart Lemoine’s ensemble of actors. Again, I was saying yes, and great opportunities were presenting themselves to me. It was a great way to build a career because if there was nothing interesting happening in theatre, I could go be a musician or sing with the Symphony. I’ve toured around the world with Catalyst Theatre, I’ve sung for the Queen, sang ​“Four Strong Winds” with Ian Tyson, there is not, much left on my bucket list.

I started to transition out of performing when I opened a small wine bar on 124 Street called Somerville Wine Room (and sold it a few years later). At that point, the Board Chair of Citie Ballet invited me to be their Executive Director. At that time I was more interested in building up the Edmonton arts community and being a part of it from a non-performance perspective. It means a lot to me to see young artists have every opportunity that I had. There were so many people who put me on stages, and I am so grateful for all the administrators in the background who raised the money and ran strong organizations to present my work, so now I’m one of them. It feels amazing to do that, and I’m in absolute awe of these incredible artists that I work with.

I’m an Executive Director who gets what it is to be an artist. I get that you need a living wage. I know how to negotiate with other artists. When it comes to funding and writing grant narratives, it’s really easy to tell the story artistically and operationally because I’ve lived in both worlds.

What excites you most about the Edmonton art scene right now?

What excites me is that we are a deeply connected and collaborative community. We are a community that gets together and shares resources and ideas. We’re seeing more diversity come forward. Thank goodness people know to make room and space for new voices, or voices that have been here all along but haven’t been amplified. Also, the people who have been here a long time, who continue to offer the community wonderful things are also exciting. That speaks to the culture and the strength of this Edmonton arts community.

I’m very proud to be an Edmonton-based artist and an arts administrator. And I say that whenever we travel, I tell other communities how great it is to live and create in Edmonton. I’m really grateful to the citizens of Edmonton for maybe not understanding what contemporary ballet is and coming anyway and then becoming the most wonderful, loyal patrons.

I am just in love with Edmonton audiences. They’re the people from the time I was 18 to now, who have constantly come out to things I’ve either been involved with as an artist or now as an administrator with Ballet Edmonton. They keep showing up, and they donate their time and money; they’re just so generous and curious. Edmonton audiences are such a sophisticated, amazing group of people. I can’t say enough about them, they are truly my people.

Tickets are now available for Ballet Edmonton’s 2023/2024 season. Catch their three mainstage productions: ​“Ouvrir” (October 13 & 14), ​“Avancer” (February 9 & 10) and ​“Unir” (May 3 & 4, 2024) at the Triffo Theatre, MacEwan University.

About Sheri Somerville

Sheri joined Ballet Edmonton as its executive director in January 2015.

Prior to her joining the Ballet Edmonton team, she worked as a multi-disciplinary performer in music and theatre and toured internationally. Local audiences may know her from appearances with the Citadel Theatre, Varscona Theatre, Catalyst Theatre, Edmonton Opera, Edmonton Jazz Festival and Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

In her role as the Ballet Edmonton executive director, Sheri supports the vision of the artistic director and the Ballet Edmonton Board to ensure Ballet Edmonton can take its place among Canada’s finest ballet companies.

Sheri’s other community work included serving on the Board of Governors and Senate at the University of Alberta. In addition, she is a past president of the Varscona Theatre and served on the Board of Directors of Edmonton Opera.