What’s next for the Sacramento Ballet after new leader takes charge at company
It took about 10 minutes for Kiera Anderson and Jenny de la Vega to place how they knew one another.
Anderson, who started Jan. 5 as Sacramento Ballet’s executive director, met Tuesday with de la Vega, a former professional dancer for the ballet. The women met through Impact100 Greater Sacramento, a philanthropic group, and realized they danced together in “The Nutcracker” for the ballet in the 1990s as children.
“When I remembered who she was, I remembered thinking she was a very good dancer, too,” de la Vega said.
Anderson built a career in the arts and nonprofit work, but there’s a connection going back to her childhood in East Sacramento that’s helped shape what she’s doing now.
That role is a more traditional one for the company, which will no longer have one person serve as both artistic and executive director.
Anthony Krutzkamp, who held both roles after his hiring in 2021, departed the company shortly after being tabbed in August as artistic director of Louisville Ballet.
A search for Sacramento Ballet’s new artistic director is ongoing.
What a ballet executive director does
It has been unusual for one person to serve as both artistic and executive director for Sacramento Ballet, with the former guiding the company’s creative vision and the latter heading up administration for a multimillion dollar nonprofit. The company had $3.75 million in revenue for its most recent publicly available tax year.
Stefan Calka, a former longtime Sacramento Ballet dancer who now serves as one of the company’s two rehearsal directors, said that it was “pretty standard in our industry” for artistic and executive director roles to be separate.
“When they’re combined is more irregular, usually,” Calka said.
Prior to Krutzkamp, former Sacramento Ballet dancer Amy Seiwert was artistic director for about two years before she lost her job due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She is now artistic director for Smuin Contemporary Ballet in San Francisco. Her predecessors, husband and wife Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, served as co-artistic directors of the ballet for roughly 30 years.
Cunningham and Binda helped the company, which was co-founded in 1954 by Barbara Crockett, become established as a professional operation.
When new artistic directors come in, they can bring celebrated careers in dance. Seiwert entered as a rising name for her choreography. Cunningham and Binda had been close with legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev at the Boston Ballet prior to coming to Sacramento.
This isn’t Anderson, nor does she pretend it is. She said that she was involved in the arts during her time attending Saint Francis High School, and that she performed in musical theater professionally for about 15 years . Her husband Bradford Anderson has been a longtime actor on the venerable soap opera “General Hospital.”
Prior to her new job, Anderson worked two years for PRO Youth & Families, serving first as stewardship and donor relations director and then as director of advancement, according to her LinkedIn profile.
This could help the ballet, which aside from ticket sales uses donor giving and its endowment to help make ends meet.
“I want to sustain the organization,” Anderson said. “We have been around for 71 years and I want that legacy in Sacramento to continue so everyone in our community can continue to enjoy the ballet and the high quality product that we have. Our dancers are just unbelievable.”
She isn’t the only member of her family, incidentally, to have performed for the ballet. One of her brothers, Connor Mickiewicz was the narrator in Cunningham’s version of “The Great Gatsby” in 2013.
What’s next for Sacramento Ballet
While Anderson spoke to The Sacramento Bee on Wednesday at the company’s practice space at E. Claire Raley Studios for the Performing Arts, dancers were rehearsing the company’s upcoming show, “Sleeping Beauty.” That show will run Feb. 13-15 at SAFE Credit Union Performing Arts Center in Sacramento.
Anderson said the company’s recent run of “The Nutcracker,” typically a major financial event for ballet companies, was a “tremendous” success.
“I was offered to kind of soft launch and be a part of the ‘Nutcracker’ season if I wanted to be and of course, I did, because it’s so magical,” she said. “So I got to be backstage for one performance and see everything from that perspective, which was really special.”
The company has other current bright spots as well, such as a dance school with approximately 400 students. “We’re bursting at the seams and the school keeps growing,” Calka said.
Anderson said the ballet hoped to announce a new artistic director by the end of the 2025-26 season in May.
