“It’s taught me the big picture flow,” she says. “It’s the difference between how music sounds and how it feels to move to music aurally and emotionally. Once you move across a room to music, it takes on a different dimension, one I couldn’t perceive before.”
Jean Hatmaker, from an interview with Marcia Manna, San Diego Union-Tribune
Ballet captured my heart at an unusually late age as a cello major at Indiana University, where I enrolled in beginner ballet to fulfill a music elective credit. Surprisingly undeterred by the necessity to wiggle into tights every morning at 7:30 am, I couldn’t get enough of the simple pleasure of a tendu well extended, of the 8 bar phrases performed by the class pianist, of checking my épaulement in the mirror and ogling the seeming perfection of my teacher’s. I was consumed by love, complicated by the fact that I was at least a decade too late arriving at it.
Or so I thought.
Life has a funny way of unlocking doors for you if you ignore all the stories proclaiming they’re still locked. Little by little I found myself encountering opportunities to dance in my 20’s, be taken seriously in pointe class with all the teenagers, to train my body to stretch for the elegance that entranced me. Always curious about melding my passions, this led to opportunities to drag my quartet into increasingly bizarre circumstances, playing my own arrangements of the Nutcracker while also hopping up from time to time to join my company mates in sautés and piqués across the marley (with a substitute cellist waiting in the wings to cover my cello parts), and sit back down to finish playing in a tutu. We did a handful of productions this way, including an Alice In Wonderland with an original score that I curated, of all string quartet music.
It was heaven.
While the time for dancing has been rather commandeered by other necessities of life, my love hasn’t faded, and I’m always particularly excited when I get to collaborate with dancers. I’ve had the great privilege of collaborating in Chicago with several companies including Hubbard Street Dance, Dupage Dance Academy, and Youth Empowerment Performance Project, and across the country with Malashock Dance in San Diego, Boulder Ballet in Colorado, and some very cool one-off productions such as Carnival of the Animals in the fall of 2024 with Wendy Whelan (a personal hero of mine) at the Harris Theater.
Dance has also led me to explore my voice as a composer, as the compositions I have written have nearly exclusively been destined for choreography. There’s little so stimulating as bringing all these parts of my creative mind together in this way, and as such it is with great excitement that I’m looking forward to the premiere of a new production, the Queen of Hearts, May 2025 with the Boulder Ballet. Featuring a combination score of precomposed and original music by myself, and choreography by Ben Needham-Wood, this production is just the next pas-de-bourée in my life of delightfully twisty-turny choreography.
Jean Hatmaker 