Dance For All: Meet Hong Kong Ballet Artistic Director Septime Webre

Artistic director of the Hong Kong Ballet since 2017, Septime Webre aims to make the art more accessible by shaping the company’s repertoire to reflect this city’s character and culture.

As the seventh son in a large Cuban- American family, I was expected to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, not a dancer. When I was 12, I followed my sister to ballet class – and that’s how it all started. She ended up becoming a lawyer, and I became a dancer. Storytelling and performance came naturally to me, and I’ve been fortunate to make a career from it.

When I joined the Hong Kong Ballet in 2017 after 17 years as The Washington Ballet’s artistic director, I wanted the company to evolve, and I wanted to make ballet more accessible to everyone.I believe that art is at its most powerful when people can see themselves reflected in the art and connect to what they see on stage. The energy of the company needs to feel as if it’s reflective of the energy of the city in which it lives.

We started developing new works that reflect Hong Kong’s unique character and culture, and works that present women in a more complex, modern way. In my first couple of seasons at Hong Kong Ballet, I staged some work that I’d already done in the US, so the dancers could get used to my style, and I could get used to my style, and I could get to know them better. Since then, we’ve done my ALICE (in wonderland), The Great Gatsby, Peter Pan, a new production of The Nutcracker set in early 20th-century Hong Kong, and Romeo + Juliet, let in 1960s Hong Kong, and Sam and her Amazing Book of Dinosaurs, set on contemporary Hong Kong.

I also wanted to take ballet out of the theatre and change its reputation as an elitist art form, so we performed outside for free at many Hong Kong landmarks. We paired fashion designers with choreographers, created large-scale site-specific works about climate change and presented projects with a Hong Kong backstory. We wanted to make ballet-goers of ordinary people in Hong Kong- so if they happened to pass by and see 10 minutes of a performance, they could now be considered a ballet-goer!

When the curtains rises, you see our beautiful dancers, but we hope up also see yourself. The stories they tell reflect the world we live in, with characters who are as complex and flawed as we are. We hope audiences see their own stories in our works and feel connected to what they see.