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An Artist's Journey: Julie Tobiason and Seattle Dance Project by Victoria Jacobs

Dancer Julie Tobiason has a stunning stage presence. She’s soft and feminine, and at the same time strong and muscular, able to extend her limbs into seemingly endless lines. She is poised and self-assured, with a friendly bearing and a lovely, open heart-shaped face. She has a rare unpretentiousness for a performer, and looking out at the audience she appears as congenial as if she were sitting and chatting with an old friend. Maybe I just feel that way because I recently had a chance to sit down with her to chat, about her life and about her lifelong love affair with dance.

Tobiason is equally striking offstage. As she strolled into one of my favorite cafés in the University District, I recognized right away from her confident, graceful movement that she was a dancer, and so did a woman seated at the next table.

This is not surprising. She was a principal dancer at Pacific Northwest Ballet for 16 years, toe-dancing and leaping through story ballets and Balanchine choreographies, costumed as a peasant girl and a bird and all things in between. “I love it there,” she says of the company, “but it’s also a machine of dance, and I mean that in a good way, too … when you’re in that machine, you sort of need to fit in to what’s being done as far as repertory — physically and emotionally and technically.”

Over time, though, fitting in with that machine became too confining for her changing life, and a desire to shift direction led her to her current position as artistic director of Seattle Dance Project. The Project, which she co-founded with Timothy Lynch, is a modern dance repertory company that commissions works from local and international choreographers.

It’s made up of lifelong professional ballet dancers, both locals and transplants, who are moving into a new phase in their careers. The Seattle Dance Project fills a unique role in Seattle’s growing dance scene, she says. “In Seattle, you have a lot of choreographers, but you don’t have a lot of other companies that you could consider maybe performing with, that do a lot of different work ... so if you want to savor and taste different things, you sort of have to put that together yourself.” The company is finishing its second successful season, having produced Project Orpheus with ACT Theatre, and repertory shows Project One and Project Two.

Tobiason began dancing at the age of four at Miss Kathy’s School of Dance, in blue-collar New Jersey. Her father was a carpenter and her mother stayed at home. As she says, “The whole ballet thing was never this kind of elitist feeling to me. I just loved to dance.” Her parents supported her interests in all things physical: gymnastics, dance, running. When she was 16, she auditioned for the Chicago City Ballet, which was directed by Maria Tallchief, who had been principal dancer under choreographer George Balanchine at the New York City Ballet. Julie was accepted into the company, and with her mom’s blessing, she headed west.

The famous Tallchief, ‘America’s first prima ballerina,’ was a character: maternal and exacting, an insomniac and a precise technician. “When you were looking over your hand in arabesque, she would say, ‘you need to look one foot above your wrist.’ It had to be one foot. She would go around and she would measure that you were looking one foot above your wrist,” Tobiason says. Tallchief would “stay up all night watching the Nature Channel, and would come to class telling her dancers, ‘When the birds would fly, they would press in and their abdomens would come up...and that is what you have to do to jump.’” Her methods for achieving clear pathways were eccentric and a bit extreme, but they gave Julie a deep knowledge of technical structure.

After four years with Tallchief in Chicago, Tobiason auditioned for the fairly young PNB, and continued her westward migration. She found a happy home in Seattle, which has steadily grown into a very busy metropolitan center since she’s been here. Though, she notes, the beaches are a bit too cold for her liking.

She married a fellow PNB dancer, who retired from ballet after an injury and went on to become a mechanical engineer. As she tells me with a laugh, their points of view about dance are wildly different. For him, she says, “ballet was really like math: the counts, the architectural lines you make, and your crossed fifth position right in line. I’m more of the kind of ethereal type of dancer, like, ‘They didn’t really do a nice fifth, but look how beautiful they looked,’ or ‘They were smiling.’ ... So it’s interesting, even though we were both in the company together, sometimes we can’t really talk about dance because we just have such different views on what’s good and what’s not.”

After 16 years, one child, and a second on the way, Tobiason chose to leave PNB; 40 hours a week and 40 weeks a year is a lot to ask from a body. But before long, the creative drive began to propel her forward, to found this new company — one more compatible with the full, balanced plate of a mother, mature dancer and teacher. One of the long-term goals of SDP is to “house all those people who want to create balance in their lives... because so many people want to teach and offer up what they’ve learned their whole lives.”

Tobiason’s first run-in with modern dance was pretty awkward, she says, when she auditioned for Paul Taylor’s Roses at PNB. She was completely turned off by the movement. “My bun was very tight, and I loved it. I was like, ‘I’ve got my red lipstick, I’ve got my tight bun, I’ve got my short skirt, and I am not doing that,’” she laughs. She was cut at the audition because she ran in the lifted, flighty manner of a ballerina rather than in the less hurried style of a modern dancer. “Then about two days later, Lila York, who was the one setting it, was watching company class. So after, she came up to me and was like, ‘I’m going to call you to Roses, because I really need someone who can jump,’ and my face was — I was petrified.” The rehearsal process, Tobiason recalls, “was like she was breaking me like a horse.” But, as ballet dancers have to be, she was a glutton for punishment. Gradually she began to understand what was being asked of her technically in the alternative movements, like rolling on the floor or a turned-in leg, of modern dance.

We talked about modern dance, and modern art, and how in its attempt to establish itself as something different, it seems to have lost some of the practicality of the old structures. So Julie has brought with her much of what she learned about organization at PNB, while discarding conventions not useful to her. All of the large modern dance organizations in the city have rallied to support her new effort, offering space, time and advice. “That in itself has been a really wonderful, enlightening experience. And it’s really been an effort by the whole dance community, even though it’s us doing it. All of that adds up, both financially and also, emotionally. Then you feel like you’re tied in with everybody, and they feel like they’re tied in with you,” she says.

I got to see Project Two at ACT Theatre downtown (the informal home of SDP), and I was struck by the quality of the dancers’ movements. Their deeply trained muscular and willowy bodies, matured by years of technical practice, moved through arching classical lines and squiggled on the floor in slouchy, gestural movements. Each of the commissioned works is very different and, for the most part, the choreography is interesting and thought-provoking, as well as beautiful. In the audience, one feels very aware of the dancers’ training and their process of meeting new challenges: how they both use and put aside their classical background, and bring their whole, mature selves onto the stage. It was very moving to see older dancers coming into a new kind of prime, dancing with a deeper honesty and presence than a younger dancer is capable of.

Julie Tobiason and Seattle Dance Project are on an artistic journey — from classical training to new, unknown territory — bringing the best of themselves to their destination. Don’t miss their next project; it’s sure to be a fascinating one.

Victoria Jacobs is a regular contributor to Seattle Woman, as well as a dancer and teacher. Her groups, Barrio Flamenco and Dar Sirena, perform regularly in the Seattle area.

©2009 Caliope Publishing Company