Remi Wörtmeyer has big dreams for Columbus. And as he begins his first season as artistic director of BalletMet, he says the power of collaboration will help make those dreams come true.
“For me it’s all about collaboration,” Wörtmeyer said. “I think that we are greater when we bring our strengths and our capacities together.”
Collaboration was a recurring theme in my recent conversation with Wörtmeyer in the Performance Studio at WOSU’s headquarters. The multi-award-winning dancer, choreographer and visual artist joined me for his first on-camera interview in Columbus to talk about his vision to expand the local and international impact of the Cap City’s premiere dance company.
“The fact is that BalletMet’s in a really good place,” Wörtmeyer said. “We have exceptional dancers, and we have an exceptional team who’s extremely passionate about dance, not only internationally, but with a real focus on the community here in Columbus.”
Fresh to Columbus from Amsterdam, where he served as a principal dancer and choreographer with the Dutch National Ballet, Wörtmeyer has also performed with the Australian Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet.
Watch the video of our conversation for more about Wörtmeyer’s background, including the unusual early inspiration that set his dance career in motion. Also, learn about how Wörtmeyer plans to take BalletMet to the next level internationally and how and when you can catch some of his choreography during BalletMet’s 2024-25 season.
Interview Transcript
Jennifer Hambrick: I’m Jennifer Hambrick, and I’m speaking with Remi Wörtmeyer, who is just about to begin his first season as artistic director of BalletMet here in Columbus. He is a multi-award-winning dancer and choreographer who has danced around the world, including with the Australian Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, and the Dutch National Ballet, where he served as a principal dancer and also as a choreographer. We’re going to get to know Remi Wörtmeyer a bit, find out what he has in store for BalletMet and for the Columbus culture scene, and maybe also talk about some his other talents in the visual arts, including sculpting, jewelry design, fashion design, and costume design. Remi it’s my pleasure to have you here with me in the Performance Studio at the WOSU Public Media headquarters. Thanks for joining us today.
Remi Wörtmeyer: Thank you for having me.
Jennifer Hambrick: It’s really my pleasure. So, I imagine you’re settling into Columbus these days. How are you finding the city to be?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, I mean, it’s great. It’s definitely like a very intense period of getting to know the company and the city. I like Columbus very much. The people are so nice, so inviting, so friendly, so warm. I’m actually living in German Village at the moment, which is great. Because it’s a little bit of Europe in Columbus.
Jennifer Hambrick: Right, right, exactly. It’s a gem here in Columbus. Now, you had been dancing in Amsterdam with the Dutch National Ballet. How did this most recent move to the United States all come about?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, well, I mean, coming from Australia, and then I did briefly dance with the American Ballet Theater in New York, so I have worked in America before. And then I went to Europe, and a big chunk of my professional career was in Europe. And then once I retired from the stage, I was redeveloping towards being an artistic director. And then the position at BalletMet came available and they reached out to me, and I thought what a wonderful company. So I already knew of the company. It has a great reputation internationally, and we’re looking to build on that. But it has a great reputation as a choreographic company with new works and new creations, so as a choreographer myself, I thought this could be a great fit.
Jennifer Hambrick: And of course, we’ll talk more about your vision for keeping the reputation of BalletMet ever growing. We here in Columbus are some distance away from your home turf. You’re a native of Adelaide, Australia. That’s where your dance career began, tell us, if you would, how it began. What inspired you to start dancing in the first place?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Well, what inspired me to start dancing was a television show. I was two and a half years old, and there was a dancing Fat Cat – it was his name, Fat Cat. It was a television program where there was ultimately a man in a suit, a fat cat suit, and he would dance. And I would dance in front of the TV. And my mother and my grandmother thought, hmm, maybe we could take him to ballet class. Maybe we could have a little bit of someone else babysitting during ballet class while they had a lovely coffee at the local café. So that’s how it started.
Jennifer Hambrick: That’s how it started. It’s not uncommon for a dancer to add choreography to his or her skills set. I gather that your passion for choreography, goes way back and that, from a very young age, you were inclined to make dances as much as to dance. Do dancing and choreography go hand in hand or foot in foot with you?
Remi Wörtmeyer: With me they do. I don’t know if it’s with everyone. I think everyone has their different path and their different ways of seeing art and being an artist. But for me, the natural movement from being a dancer to being a choreographer felt like a natural fit for me.
Jennifer Hambrick: It almost feels like, given the story that you just mentioned about kind of dancing around to the television, it almost sounds like you were a choreographer before you were a dancer, in a way.
Remi Wörtmeyer: Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. Well, I don’t know that there was an audience for what I was doing. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s like with my sculpture work and my artwork and how I used to be as a dancer, it’s about creating a shape, creating a sculpture, a moving sculpture. Same with choreography – balancing bodies onstage and patterns. And then with costume design – it’s all for me one image, it’s how to mold and shape and create beauty and express an emotion and a feeling to the audience. So yeah, for me it felt like the organic way forward.
Jennifer Hambrick: You are obviously trained in classical ballet, but there are so many forms and styles of dance today, all the way to and including breakdancing, which just made an appearance at the Paris summer Olympic Games. As a choreographer, you make new dances, so there’s an element of innovation there. So, could you talk about innovation as an ingredient in your choreography – how you conceive of mixing new ideas into your work, and how innovation manifests in your dances?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, well, I think for me it’s all about collaboration. I think that we are greater when we bring our strengths and our capacities together. So, I love to bring my visual art and my choreography and my dance history into my work. But then I also love working with musicians who have different capacities. I’ve created a couple of pieces for the Dutch National Ballet where it involved a violinist who is also a mover, and she actually does even circus performing and fire eating – all sorts of really interesting things for that project. And so, I love when people bring their own different talents and we collaborate to build on something, to actually create a new medium of dance, something exciting and all-encompassing.
Jennifer Hambrick: You mentioned a few minutes ago in this conversation your kind of fire for innovation. We’ve just talked a little bit about innovation here a moment ago. Could you talk about your artistic vision for BalletMet? I know you want to keep the company growing, if you will, and presumably innovation will play a role in that, but don’t let me put words into your mouth. What do you envision for us here?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, well, I feel that – the fact is that BalletMet’s in a really good place. We have exceptional dancers, and we have an exceptional team who’s extremely passionate about dance not only internationally, but with a real focus on the community here in Columbus. So that’s our journey. And building upon that in ways we can, which is collaboration, working with different organizations within the community and getting our work further into the community. But then also with a real focus on that international aspect of bring an international audience to us, so that we’re not only building for the community, but we’re building for our community and taking that image, that homegrown aesthetic capacity out into the world to kind of say, “this is what we’re doing in Columbus, this is what Columbus is about,” and being proud of that.
Jennifer Hambrick: How do you plan to bring that international audience to us?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, well, I mean, fortunately, I have worked a lot in many different capacities all over the world, and I do have some connections that I will be knocking on their doors and finding ways that we can collaborate internationally. When we talk about, like, BalletMet 2, for example – it’s our younger company, and we’re looking to build upon that, build upon its reputation so that it can collaborate with other trainee companies around the world and to access that international circuit of young performers.
Jennifer Hambrick: Now, let me dig a little deeper, if I may. Are you sort of envision or dreaming about or planning, even, overseas tours? I mean, really, how does this international thing look?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, well, that’s the ambition, for sure. We have to get there, and there’s a journey that that will take. So it won’t be straightaway we just, boom, we do a big international tour. But we will look at how we can start collaborating, coproducing productions internationally, and then having some of our dancers perform in different festivals and things like this is the ultimate goal, building our international reputation and then getting invited as a whole company to those locations.
Jennifer Hambrick: Okay, alright. Some exciting dreams ahead. We’ll look to see what materializes. That’s exciting. As we mentioned near the start of this conversation, you also have side careers in the visual arts. You’ve painted, you’ve designed jewelry, you’re designed costumes, you’ve served as a runway director at Paris Fashion Week. How did your work in the visual arts come about?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Well, actually, funny enough, it was more just a form of meditation. That’s how I started, really. I was painting originally. I started with painting as a form of meditation/ at the end of the day, work as a principal dancer of a ballet company is very stressful, there’s lots of demands on you. You are literally the prince onstage, and you have to perform at an extremely high level every night. And I love that, but at the same time, it created a bit of stress. And my way of meditating and to kind of calm down was to paint and to use my hands and my eyes to create something that I would hope to be beautiful. And then that led on from there. People started to see the work, and then I got invited to do a solo exhibition, and then things just kind of built form there.
Jennifer Hambrick: Since you spoke earlier in this conversation about how dance, for you, is very much like sculpture, very much like putting together something visual but in three dimensions onstage using human forms. I mean, have you always been drawn to the visual arts, or was this really kind of a certain point in your career you just decided, you know, I need an outlet?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Well, a little bit of both. I’ve definitely always been drawn to the visual arts, and I’ve always really enjoyed working with my hands and building things. So the sculpture was really the next level that really felt like an incredible fit. I really enjoy sculpture. Yeah, so that kind of came across – came along, I should say, from needing to meditate. But the sculpture actually came during COVID. During COVID we had all this time on our hands, so I thought, let’s use these hands. And I started sculpting these masks which represented all the audience we were not longer performing to. So during that time, I think we had two months locked down. And I did one a day to kind of meditate on that day. And at the end of that two months, I had around sixty sculptures, which I put into a work. And from there I got a solo exhibition and had to do a lot more. And then got a gallery and an art agent and things like this.
Jennifer Hambrick: Yeah, interesting. It’s so interesting the innovation and creativity and originally that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. So interesting. Just worldwide.
Remi Wörtmeyer: Very true.
Jennifer Hambrick: So, I gather you’ve done some work as a fashion designed, and that includes designing ballet costumes. So, are we going to have a change here in Columbus to see some of your costume designs?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Oh, one hundred percent, yeah.
Jennifer Hambrick: Yeah? Okay, okay. Great. On the schedule for BalletMet’s 2024-25 season are: opening Oct. 25, Dracula by former BalletMet artist director David Nixon; The Nutcracker, a perennial holiday favorite; West Side Story, in collaboration among BalletMet, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Opera Columbus, and CAPA – the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts; Sleeping Beauty, choreographed by your predecessor at BalletMet, Edwaard Liang; and, in June 2025, Black Voices, which will feature Ulysses Dove’s Red Angels and world premieres by Dwight Rhoden and Jennifer Archibald. Could you talk about what excites you about this line up and how these works all tie together?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Well, I think that Dracula’s so exciting because it’s such a crowd favorite here in Columbus, and it’s been performed in Columbus for over two decades, I think – something like this. So that’ll be really exciting for me to get to see it, as well, because I’ve never seen it live. So I’m very much looking forward to that. Then, of course The Nutcracker’s wonderful and it brings the community together. But I’m really excited about West Side Story because I’ll be choreographing it. So on a personal level that’s really exciting. Nd once again, the collaboration aspect of that performance – there’s so much to work with there, so I’m looking forward to that. And then as we head into Sleeping Beauty, which is a beautiful classical ballet. And then Black voices. It’s such a diverse season. I think everyone is catered to. There’s so much variety in the programming and the performances. A lot of crowd favorites, a lot of new creations. So, yeah, I’m really excited to be leading the company with this first season, which Edwaard did put together, actually.
Jennifer Hambrick: Sure, I was assuming that, and I was actually going to ask, given the timing of your arrival. And as I mentioned, two of the ballets on the upcoming season were created, I’ll say, by David Nixon and Edwaard Liang, who were former BalletMet artistic directors. I was about to say, I’m hoping before long we can add Remi Wörtmeyer to a BalletMet season lineup, but it looks like we’re already there. We’re really just a few weeks away, in a sense. Right around the corner.
Remi Wörtmeyer: Yeah, we are.
Jennifer Hambrick: So by way of a closing question: your Instagram page bears a quote that is attributed to you, and that quote reads: “I believe in the future of ballet.” What do you see for the future of ballet, and as a related question, what do you think the role of dance is in the world today?
Remi Wörtmeyer: Well, what I see with ballet – so, with ballet – when we’re talking classical ballet, we often think it’s a museum, history, it’s dated, it’s old fashioned. We love to go there, it’s beautiful, but it’s old fashioned. And I don’t see that. I thin ballet – the technique of ballet is a series of steps. They’re timeless. It’s how we put them into stories. And yes, it’s wonderful to have classical fairy tales. I think it’s really important, and they’re beautiful and we should be able to escape into a world, into otherworldliness when we go to an opera house and to see a ballet. But I also think we can look towards stories that are relevant to today and telling our stories that really impact us as human beings. And that can also be done throughout fairy tales but with a different approach. So, I think that ballet is not old fashioned. And I believe in the future of ballet because it’s a vehicle to tell stories that relevant to the human being and to the human condition. As far as ballet – what was the second part of your question? I’m sorry.
Jennifer Hambrick: What do you think the role of dance in the world today is?
Remi Wörtmeyer: I think it has many roles. It is escapism from our everyday lives, which can sometimes be burdensome. Is that a word?
Jennifer Hambrick: Let’s make it one, sure.
Remi Wörtmeyer: And it’s a way of escaping that. But it’s also a way to reflect on our lives and to be able to guide our community to be, you know, kind, to be supportive of one another. I think that the beauty of dance has the capacity to heal people and to bring people together.
Jennifer Hambrick: You know, it’s always amazing to me to go to the ballet and see what seem to be superhuman feats of athleticism, but also superhuman feats of just beautiful movement. And I have, in a way, a similar type of experience when I view and incredible sports athlete who has trained and practiced for years in an extremely physical and demanding sport and just has all of the skill and coordination ready to go. And so when you add to that this storytelling dimension that good dancing, I think, brings with it, then you get something that really is just kind of a powerhouse, right? You get something that is virtuosically exhilarating but also very, very relatable because humans relate to each other through their stories.
Remi Wörtmeyer: Definitely. Well, I think my Mum used to always say – she was always interested in any kind of sports or dance or theater at an elite level. Because to get to an elite level in any sprot, in art, in dance – whatever it may be – it takes so much determination, so much passion, and I think that’s really inspiring. I think that’s what’s beautiful. I get to work with these inspiring dancers on a daily basis who are pushing to be their very best selves. I mean, what more could you want? It's wonderful. And then to bring that to an audience, it’s exciting. And I’m so grateful to be a part of it.
Jennifer Hambrick: Well, we have a gem here in Columbus with BalletMet. It’s a company that has some rich and venerable traditions, and now we are in the Remi Wörtmeyer era, and it will all be very, very interesting to see what comes forward. Once again, I’m Jennifer Hambrick, and I’ve been speaking with Remi Wörtmeyer, who is the incoming artistic director of BalletMet here in Columbus. Remi, thank you so much, again, for your time today. It’s been a pleasure.
Remi Wörtmeyer: Thank you so much.
