Emily Molnar, the triple threat Canadian ballet desperately needs

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Emily Molnar rarely has time to answer the phone in her office on Vancouver's Davie Street.

This week, office time has all but been usurped by studio time as Ballet BC prepares to launch its 2016-17 season on Nov. 3. But then Molnar has the appetite and energy for clocking 15-hour workdays – it's a speed of life she has to embrace in her three-headed career as the company's artistic director, Banff Centre for the Arts' artistic director of dance and a choreographer averaging a major new creation every year.

So it was happily atypical that, one afternoon last spring, she happened to be at her desk when the Order of Canada called with some unexpected news.

"I picked up the phone and the lovely woman on the other end went so quickly that my first thought was, 'Oh, she wants me to be a part of the nomination committee,' " Molnar says. "I thought, 'That'd be great!' " She chuckles warmly. "I totally didn't process it."

Molnar, 43, had been appointed to the rank of Member of the Order of Canada in recognition of her contribution to dance in the country. The honour comes seven years into her tenure at Ballet BC's helm. Her leadership has made for the kind of success story that seems bespoke for dance annals: In 2009, she took over a company on the brink of financial collapse and transformed it into an important (and solvent) force in Canadian art.

But the real thrust of Molnar's achievement is that she came by it as a risk-taking artist rather than a circumspect businesswoman set on balancing accounts. Instead of turning Ballet BC's fate around with safe, mainstream programming that could expect a good box-office return, Molnar had a clear creative vision that she wouldn't budge on. She wanted something that didn't exist in Canada.

What she wanted was a non-hierarchical, contemporary ballet ensemble that would push artistic boundaries, tour internationally, create new and intelligent discourse with the Vancouver community and, hopefully, play a role in influencing the form.

Despite her lack of down time, I managed to get Molnar on the phone for more than an hour in between rehearsals for Program 1 (Ballet BC's three-part Vancouver season is unostentatiously titled Program 1, 2 and 3). Molnar has so much to say that I rarely need to prompt her with a question; her sentences seem barely able to keep up with the momentum of her thoughts. It's an exuberance that feels connected to her confidence in what she does – a confidence that has stood up to a lot of introspective questioning over the course of her career. Molnar is someone who's always thinking about the personal and the political, trying to find ways that art can be meaningful as product, process and community outreach. The answers she's come up with can account for Ballet BC's success today.

Born in Regina in 1973, Molnar fell in love with ballet when she was 6 and, as a determined 10-year-old, moved to study and board at the National Ballet School in Toronto. The school isn't exactly known for encouraging renegade creativity, but Molnar insists she felt more supported than stifled in the traditional environment, and that her classical training was a crucial building block for her artistry.

Artemis Gordon, now the director of Arts Umbrella – the official feeder school of Ballet BC – met Molnar at the school in the late 1980s when Molnar was in Grade 9 (Gordon was completing the teacher-training program). "Emily was such an extraordinary presence at such a young age. I always said that she was 12 years younger than me and 40 years older," Gordon says with a laugh. "We immediately connected with ideas of life and art – the rigour, passion and commitment of a life in dance. And I think the National Ballet School was so smart with her – they recognized right away who she was and gave her so many opportunities to develop into the artist she needed to be."

At 16, Molnar joined the National Ballet of Canada as an apprentice, but she was promoted to the corps in a matter of months at the express request of an important guest. William Forsythe, then director of the Frankfurt Ballet, wanted Molnar cast in the second detail, the new work he was creating for the company. The second detail was the beginning of a professional relationship that would see the American choreographer invite Molnar to join his company in 1994.

At the Frankfurt Ballet, the 21-year-old Molnar was immersed in a methodology of dance-making that required more from her, both creatively and intellectually, than anything she'd known. Her first project was an eight-week studio process that involved using 60 of Forsythe's "improv modalities" to build a ballet that would consist entirely of improvised steps. "I could not have been thrown into deeper water. I remember sometimes waking up in the morning and thinking, 'I don't even know where front is,' " Molnar says, laughing.

Molnar relished the challenges of Forsythe's risky approach to choreography, and much of what she learned in Frankfurt would have a lasting effect on her later work. But after five years with the company, as she hit her mid-20s, her focus shifted. Social and political questions began to nag at her conscience. "I didn't think I was doing enough to change the world. It wasn't that I didn't think the art form could do it, I just didn't know if I could do it within the art form."

Molnar tossed several ideas around, but when she returned to Canada, and began dancing with Ballet BC under the leadership of John Alleyne, something changed. She started to choreograph, her teaching at Dance Umbrella became more extensive and she became director of the school's apprentice company. She realized that she was capable of creating productive environments for other people where ideas and good discussion thrived.

After five years performing with Ballet BC as a principal, she worked independently as both a dancer and choreographer, making new works on both herself and for companies such as Alberta Ballet and Christopher Wheeldon's Morphoses in New York City. But it wasn't until taking over at Ballet BC that the relentless philosophical interrogation she'd been subjecting herself to – about art, dance, individual responsibility and meaning – started to turn up new ideas.

"What I became curious about is, how do we actually create a culture focused on human potential – so it's not just about great art. Great art also creates purpose and direction; it's transformative in the sheer way that we actually create it."

Molnar revitalized the company by abolishing dancer ranks and commissioning work from prominent international choreographers (Kevin O'Day, Jacopo Godani, Jorma Elo), while investing in Canadian artists (Jose Navas, Crystal Pite, Aszure Barton, Wen Wei Wang). At the same time, she started to develop more ambitious choreography of her own, ranging from the whimsical and jazzy Aniel (2012) to a 40-minute re-imagining of Nijinsky's Rite of Spring set to electronic music (2015). She established a position for a resident artist; it's currently held by Spanish choreographer Cayetano Soto, whose three new short ballets comprise the upcoming Program 1. And she's gotten the company recognized on the international dance circuit, garnering standout attention at prestigious festivals such as Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts, White Bird in Portland, Ore. In June, their first European tour took them to Britain's International Dance Festival in Birmingham and the Joyce Theater in New York City.

Molnar's innovation looks beyond the walls of Ballet BC's studios, too, and part of that means finding ways to cultivate new audiences, encouraging an arts-going public to develop opinions on contemporary dance. The company hosts open rehearsals and talk-backs, so that audiences can build a first-hand understanding of how dancers think, create and rehearse. Molnar says that it's also about embracing failure when it happens, because once the community is invested in an art form, they can be as fascinated by the reasons a ballet works as the reasons why it doesn't. Condescending to Vancouver audiences was never an option for her. "A director who shall remain nameless once suggested the whole getting-bums-in-seats approach. I would never think that way about my audience. I think they're smarter than me."

As a choreographer, Molnar rarely shows up in the studio with a ready-made sequence of steps. Instead, she gives her dancers tasks and surprises them with questions that can generate new material. Company dancer Alexis Fletcher, who has known Molnar for over a decade, tells me about an exercise in which she had to imagine moving through three different layers of textures to inspire unexpected physical effects. Fletcher feels inordinately lucky to have worked so closely, and for so long, with such an intense and visionary artist. "I think what's so great about Emily is those same qualities exist in everything she does – she has that brave, fierce spirit as a director, a friend, a choreographer, a dancer," she says. "That makes it feel very honest – it's not just a hat she wears in the studio, it's really deeply who she is."

Gordon, who's been a friend for almost 30 years now, offers something similar. "If I've heard Emily say it once, I've heard her say it a hundred times: How can we move the art forward? And I think that's at the core of everything Emily's ever done and continues to do. Along the way her skill set has just gotten more refined and more sophisticated to meet the demands of her new roles. But she's very true to the core belief system of who she is as an artist. That's why she is so successful."

Ballet BC's Program 1 plays at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver from Nov. 3-5 (balletbc.com).