What we love most in art is the beauty it brings to our lives and the dreams and ideas it inspires. It's the music that we listen to intently, it's the paintings and sculptures we look at intensely and it's the human form amazing us with it's bends and turns as it leaps across an empty stage.
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Pat George Mitchell, founder of the Longview Ballet Theatre
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Pat watches her dancers during a dress rehearsal.
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Associate Artistic Director Amanda Edge poses with Pat.
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The Longview arts organizations and their directors should receive a standing ovation for the work that they do, and Charm wants to spotlight our third director in the series, Longview Ballet Theatre director and founder Pat George Mitchell.
Q: To what extent were you involved in the arts as a child, and how has that shaped your approach to the organization you work for?
A: I was an only child, and my mom enrolled me in a ballet class at age two. I started with a local teacher and kept adding classes of all sorts of dance to my venue. I walked to dance class from my elementary school on a daily basis. Later, I started working at the desk and answering the phones to pay for extra lessons. Eventually I became an assistant to the teacher and demonstrator.
During high school I was involved in musicals. I would attend Civic Music series which would bring in professional and world famous pianists, vocalists and opera stars.?
MY parents always had all sorts of music playing at our house, and I developed a taste for all the classics and great blues singers. I was exposed to such great music!
When I began teaching I was sure I wanted my students to have a varied background in music and dance, and exposure to lots of professionals and classical structure. Being involved with community theatre, Fort Worth Ballet and TCU Dance Department summer intensives gave me great legends to work with and inspire me, and I took all of that and brought it home so I could make my profession an honorable one.
Q: What "least-known" fact about your organization would surprise most people, and why?
A: The least-known fact about Longview Ballet Theatre is that I just went and started it. After teaching three years and buying a studio, I got great advice from my mentors and teachers at TCU and got a non-profit status, and I just started the ballet from funds made at bake sales, raising $2,000 to produce those first productions. Who would have thought a bake sale would have now produced a ballet like Cinderella for over $150,000 today.
Q: What is the most difficult part of your job?
A: The most difficult part of my job is my job, but if you are in love with every part of it, then it's not a job, but a passion. There is nothing about it that is easy, yet it's precisely because it's not easy that it's challenging. It's demanding, disciplined, tiring,
exhausting at times, frustrating, yet I get to be surrounded by the beauty of ballet on a daily basis.
Q: What is the easiest part of your job?
A: The easiest part of my job is that, when the time readies itself, I can just sit back and watch the fruits of my labor. Opening night, I just sit back in amazement and forget all the rehearsals and get a glimpse at the finished product.
Q: What will the arts look like in Longview in five or 10 years from now?
A: I hope the arts are still around. They have survived this long and our whole world is about the arts \— the rain dancing, the sky painted, the music moving all people to feel good or sad or excited. I pray we continue to have the general public want to keep up the support to continue the productions of all the needed live concerts. I pray more and more information and features will keep art alive. Time wll tell. I would love for families to be able to go to tons of sidewalk art and live entertainment events and feel what artists have always felt and known all along.
Q: If you weren't the executive director of your organization, you would be...
A: Before seven years ago I was the executive, artistic director and chief cook and bottle washer of LBT, but I now have the luxury of having an executive director, so that I can just concentrate on the dancing and my love and not on the business at hand. I am a very proud founder and artistic director who knows she has done something right because of so many wonderful people believing in my work, my kids and the art of classical dance.
Q: What's the primary mission of your organization?
A: Our primary mission is to promote and produce the best in professional dance productions for the public of all denominations, creeds and races, to encourage careers for talented and gifted students and to provide a way for all those seniors, children and mentors of so many people to be able to attend performances of dance that they would never hope to see outside of this community.
We also try to introduce dance to as many people as possible by bringing top-rate professionals here to be ambassadors for dance. It is thrilling to expose as many people as possible to theatre at its grandest and ballet at its finest. We at LBT want to inspire greatness and encouragement to move and dance in life.
Q: Who is your audience?
A: Our audience is made up of all people, young and old alike. Boys and girls, men and women.
Q: What do you find most fulfilling about your job?
A:The most fullfilling part in 40 years is to realize I have done the dream, and my dream has expanded into more dreams. I have found that the book I have just finished working on is not finished at all. I think I'm still writing the final chapter and have answered my question and title to the book, "Why Dance?", in such an unexpected place. I keep dancing because it has become the extended family I have always wanted as an only child! Your life becomes about the people you collect in it, not about the career! The career, however, becomes the network that connects all of us together.
Q: What aspect of the arts do you believe is lacking in our area? What would you like to see added or expanded to improve the artistic environment?
A: I think publicity for all the arts by our local media is essential during the entire year. I feel we have waited far too long to build arts complexes as others around us have. We need facilities to bring in more productions and to surround people with performance and color. We need more visuality of all the arts in windows and store fronts and art spaces so it is a constant reminder of the human spirit put to canvas or music or voice or movement.
Q: In your spare time, what is your artistic or creative outlet?
A: In my spare time, I love to design costumes and photograph anything. I love to pot and plant and make things beautiful around me in my sanctuary called "home" to me and my mom and special friends. My home is my castle and my Camelot, and I am blessed to have it be my piece of art in life. Your nest and those you keep close are what your life should be about.
