Former Royal Winnipeg Ballet prima ballerina Evelyn Hart has achieved everything a dancer could dream of: within three years of graduating from the RWB’s Professional Division Ballet Academic Program, she became Principal Dancer at the RWB by age 23, in 1979. 

She’s an inductee on Canada’s Walk of Fame (2000), recipient of a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement (2001), and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. 

Very surprising for a woman who didn’t start dance until age 11, multiple classes until age 14, and all-week training until age 17. 

"So, it was a late start for me,” she said on the phone when I spoke to her at the end of the winter, “but I was very lucky to have teachers that instilled in me the whole thing about work ethic. No matter what anybody else said or decreed, [my teachers] believed in me. And I couldn't be more grateful than that beginning." 

In her teens, she auditioned for ballet school and was rejected three times before she made it. However, she credits that rejection for motivating her more. It clearly paid off: with only 13 years’ training, she won gold for best female soloist at the Varna International Ballet Competition at Varna, Bulgaria, at age 24, and was the first Western dancer to do so since the competition’s founding in 1964. 

Although her meteoric rise to ballet stardom sounds like a dream, it came with a price. After that competition win, Hart became fully aware that people were coming to the theatre to see Evelyn Hart, and the expectations she believed audiences had of her began to weigh her down, so much so that she sought out therapy. 

“Going onstage, knowing that it's nowhere near what you know it could be or dream that it should be can be very stressful,” she said. 

Hart doesn’t recommend a fast rise to stardom. She thinks it's easier if you start as a member of the corps de ballet and build yourself up so you can gain more confidence. She can see all of that now, 12 years after retirement. But “when you're in it, it's much more difficult,” she admitted. 

For Hart, studio and stage were two different experiences. In the studio, she could work on perfecting her performance, but onstage, she could live in the performance.  

She preferred the rehearsal process "because it was far less nerve-wracking and I always felt I could come much closer to my goals and my ideals in rehearsal than I could when I perform. Because there was always that element of anxiety." 

Because of her intense rehearsal process, she could let go in her performance and give herself over to the power of the stage; otherwise, she would have had to be in her head too much. 

“You have to be in your head in the one sense,” she explained, “but I also think you have to know it so well that you are able to let it be. In a way, what needs to be said then becomes an unconscious thing." 

She describes performing as a "powerful, huge, energetic current that goes through you. You disappear, and you just feel that you're a conduit, and nothing can touch that.” 

When Hart retired in 2005, she missed that feeling: “That's what I think the grieving process is for: for losing that sense for being able to live in that space." 

She retired in part because roles for her were diminishing and also because of the constant work needed to keep up her level of performance: “There was no way that I could keep the level that I expected without continual work and continual eyes and coaching and assistance that way,” she said. 

But that doesn’t mean she’s sitting at home watching television all day now. She still does barre every morning and teaches. She hasn’t stopped performing, either; she just goes about it differently. She has experimented with acting, working in partnership with two musician friends of hers, and she feels that’s gone well. 

In March, she performed in Love, Sex & Brahms, a piece by former National Ballet of Canada AD James Kudelka. She was at first concerned she couldn’t meet his expectations, because she had already retired. But when he described the dancing she would do as “heartfelt walking,” she immediately accepted. (For the record, it was definitely more than heartfelt walking.) 

Is she happy her life took the path it did? 

"I still think there's no life like being able to be an artist, but boy oh boy, you have to be prepared for it,” she said, “because it's not an easy life. But I never thought about it as being a difficult life. I knew that - now in perspective - when things are finished, I realized that there were a lot of heartaches. But if you're doing something that you truly love, it doesn't feel like that." 

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“A lot of my kids, I think, are so anxious and want to be professional right now, that they pull themselves down because they're not where they think they should be. And actually they're exactly where they are as long as they continue to work. The thing is to not be fearful of that work and recognizing that it's going to be a lot of work. But each little thing that you accomplish is another drop in the bucket. And some things will come fast and some things will go slowly. But I really think it is loving the learning and loving the work. Because that's where you're going to spend all of your time. You're going to be onstage, yes, but if that's what you're doing it for, is to be onstage – only – that really isn't going to work. You need to really enjoy the learning and coming back and doing it again and doing it again and doing it again. And doing it again. Again! And recognizing that those moments are really why you're doing it. And be inside yourself and recognize that there's always going to be somebody better and somebody worse. But focus on what it is that you want to accomplish, not what somebody else will accomplish. Because in the end it isn't about what somebody else accomplishes, it's only about what you accomplish." 

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“I have a feeling that my greater purpose is to communicate. And I don't think that's ever going to change."