The De mille working group

Anderson Ferrell, Director

Anderson Ferrell, Executive Director of The De Mille Working Group, which oversees the licensing and production of the choreographic works of Agnes de Mille. Mr. Ferrell has supervised productions of Rodeo and Fall River Legend as well as de Mille’s musical theater works for American Ballet Theatre, Paris Opera Ballet, Alabama Ballet, and the New York Theatre Ballet. He is the author of Dance/Speak: The Life of Agnes de Mille, a play featuring Agnes de Mille’s dances for the theater and concert stage. Mr. Ferrell has participated in various panels and conferences regarding Agnes de Mille and her work. Mr. Ferrell is also an author of three critically acclaimed novels. 

Anderson Ferrell was a dancer, performing in musical theater on Broadway and in several national tours, as well as in the ballet company of New York City Opera. Mr. Ferrell first danced with Agnes de Mille in the Broadway revival of Oklahoma! at the Palace Theatre, and had a featured role in de Mille’s ballet Texas Fourth, for which de Mille chose him for the performance where she was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in the arts. 

Following his dance career, Mr. Ferrell became a novelist whose first novel, Where She Was, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1986.  The work was called "a stunning debut" by the New York Times and won wide critical acclaim throughout the United States and received the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Literature.  His second novel, Home for the Day, was published by Knopf in 1994.  It was selected as one of the year's best by New York Magazine, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the Mrs. Giles Whiting Writer's Award for fiction in 1996. Have You Heard, his third work was published by Bloomsbury in 2004 and received wide critical acclaim.  He has published short stories in The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, and Men on Men.   Mr. Ferrell's essay on the Steiner Master's Cycladic Female Figure was published in The Store of Joys, a collection of essays by prominent writers commissioned for The North Carolina Museum of Art in celebration of its 50th anniversary.  He has contributed a number of articles to The Social Register Observer, on a variety of subjects including the theater, sports and movie making. In addition, he wrote the narration for the documentary “American Tongues”, shown widely in the United States on public television.

Diana Gonzalez-Duclert, Associate Director and Repetiteur

Diana Gonzalez-Duclert, PhD, former rehearsal assistant to Agnes de Mille, presently Associate Director and repetiteur for The De Mille Working Group. Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert was chosen by de Mille as a repetiteur of her musical theater works. She most recently assisted Paul Sutherland in the staging of Fall River Legend for the Paris Opera Ballet, as well as working on de Mille’s musical theater dances for New York Theatre Ballet’s collaboration with the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall. Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert has also staged the pas de deux from de Mille’s ballet The Other for Ballet Arkansas and for the Lake Tahoe Dance Festival with guest artists Abi Stafford and Stephen Hanna. Currently, she is filming the teaching process of de Mille’s Rodeo with repetiteur Paul Sutherland and the New York Theatre Ballet.

Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert received her ballet training as a scholarship recipient at the School of American Ballet in New York. She began her professional dance career in musical theater, among her credits are: the Broadway national tours of On Your Toes with Natalia Makarova and Leslie Caron, directed by George Abbott; Camelot, directed by and starring Richard Harris; and the principal role of “Meg” in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, national tour and Broadway companies, directed by Hal Prince, among other productions.

Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert began her association with Agnes de Mille as a rehearsal dancer and assistant. She was Ms. de Mille’s last assistant working with her from 1987-1993. The two main ballets that Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert assisted Ms. de Mille with were: The Informer (reconstructed dances from the musical Juno) for American Ballet Theatre; and de Mille’s final ballet The Other, also for American Ballet Theatre. Throughout this period up until de Mille’s death in 1993, Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert worked with her on various other projects, including a re-working of the ballet Talley-Ho. As for de Mille’s musical theater works, Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert has predominately staged de Mille’s dances from the musical Brigadoon for various theatres, universities and the New York Theatre Ballet.

After de Mille’s death, Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert co-directed with the late dance historian Barbara Barker and de Mille’s longtime assistant and muse, Gemze de Lappe, “The De Mille Project Workshop,” a reconstruction project with the original dancers of the musicals One Touch of Venus, Allegro, and the ballet A Rose for Miss Emily. This project was awarded an honorable mention by the NEA’s National Initiation to Preserve America’s Dance (“NIPAD”). Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert received a bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude from Columbia University, and a master’s and PhD in sociology and film from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France. In addition to working with The De Mille Working Group, Ms. Gonzalez-Duclert is an adjunct professor in Political Humanities at the French university, Sciences Po, in Paris.

Paul Sutherland, Principal Repetiteur

Paul Sutherland, Principal Repetiteur for the De Mille Working Group. Mr. Sutherland was one of the repetiteurs chosen by Agnes de Mille to stage her ballets, principally Fall River Legend and Rodeo, of which he has staged over 50 times in the U.S. and abroad. Major company productions have included American Ballet Theatre, Royal Winnipeg Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, Alabama Ballet and Oklahoma City Ballet. Mr. Sutherland recently staged Fall River Legend for the Paris Opera Ballet in 2014.

Mr. Sutherland had an illustrious, international career as a principal ballet dancer, which spanned over 23 years. He was a former soloist with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet. During his career, he danced the Head Wrangler in Rodeo, as well as numerous classical and dramatic principal roles, working with such choreographers as Agnes de Mille, Anthony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, Robert Joffrey, Gerard Arpino, Alvin Ailey, Glen Tetley and George Balanchine. He has danced throughout North and South America, Europe, Russia, Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. He has been a Ballet Master with Joffrey Ballet, Feld Ballet, Milwaukee Ballet and New Jersey Ballet. In addition to Mr. Sutherland’s dance career, he was a marathon runner and an avid climber, having ascended Mt. Rainier and Mt. McKinley and having hiked hundreds of miles on the Appalachian Trail.

Mr. Sutherland was often assisted for his stagings by his wife, Brunilda Ruiz who was a founding member and principal dancer of both the Joffrey Ballet and Harkness Ballet and worked with Mr. Sutherland as Ballet Mistress with Milwaukee Ballet.

Gemze de Lappe, Principal Repetiteur, in Memoriam

Gemze de Lappe, Principal repetiteur for The De Mille Working Group. For over 70 years, until the time of her death at age 95 on November 11, 2017, Ms. de Lappe was one of the artists most closely associated with Agnes de Mille’s work and its reconstruction. She was a disciple of de Mille and worked as both assistant and muse for many of de Mille’s works beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s, and continuing until the last ballet Ms. de Mille created on Ms. de Lappe, A Rose for Miss Emily, in 1971. Afterwards, Ms. de Lappe continued to stage de Mille’s principal musical theatre works, Oklahoma!, Carousel, and Brigadoon, well into her 90s, including productions for Lyric Opera of Chicago, New York City Opera and St. Louis MUNY theatre. In addition, she continued to be called upon by major companies such as American Ballet Theatre to coach dancers in principal roles of de Mille’s ballets.

Ms. de Lappe received her early dance training by Irma Duncan, a disciple and foster daughter of Isadora Duncan, and Michel Fokine, the renown Russian dancer and choreographer. Ms. de Lappe began her professional career in Fokine’s company. She later was featured in musical theatre productions, beginning with the first national tour of Oklahoma! and later as “Dream Laurey” in its original West End production. This began her close association with Agnes de Mille. Ms. de Lappe later also worked with Jerome Robbins dancing the role of “Simon of Legree” in the original Broadway production and film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. Ms. de Lappe later created the role of “Yvonne” in the original Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon, choreographed by de Mille. Ms. de Lappe’s performance won her a Donaldson Award (pre-cursor to the Tony Awards) for best female dancer.

Ms. de Lappe also continued concert work by touring nationally with de Mille’s company Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre and internationally as a guest artist with American Ballet Theatre dancing the principal roles in Rodeo, Fall River Legend and A Rose for Miss Emily. In addition to her performing career, Ms. de Lappe was a professor of dance at Smith College during the 1980s and early 1990s while still continuing to restage Isadora Duncun’s work, Robbins’ King and I and principally, the major works of Agnes de Mille around the country. Ms. de Lappe collaborated with the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to create a “teaching” video for de Mille’s work in Carousel. Ms. de Lappe also worked closely with Richmond Ballet (staging A Rose for Miss Emily), North Carolina School of the Arts (recreating the original version of Oklahoma!), and with New York Theatre Ballet (staging de Mille’s musical theater dances). In 2007, Ms. de Lappe won the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre.

Licenses for thE works of Agnes de Mille

Ballets

Requests for licenses, staging and performances of Agnes de Mille’s ballets are administered by the Director, Anderson Ferrell with legal representation of Richard Garmise, PLLC. Certain lesser known ballets, no longer in companies’ repertoires, may possibly be researched and reconstructed, again under the licensing and guidance of Mr. Ferrell with The De Mille Working Group.

Musical Theater Dances

For the better known musical theater dances, De Mille Productions, in cooperation with musical theater estates such as Rodgers & Hammerstein and Lerner & Loewe (whose rights to the original productions hosts these works), has maintained a relationship with The De Mille Working Group, in order to recreate the original de Mille choreography by chosen repetiteurs. For information regarding full productions of the musical and the de Mille dance works, organisations may contact both The De Mille Working Group and the above musical theater estates. For lesser known musical theater works, The De Mille Working Group can oversee possible research and reconstruction of lost choreography.

The De Mille Working Group may also be contacted to assist in staging both known and lesser known dances to be performed on their own as "Suites" or "Dances From..." which can be performed by dance companies on a mixed program.

ReCent and Future productions of De Mille Works

Many of Agnes de Mille’s ballets continue to be performed by ballet companies around the world. De Mille’s musical theater works are also performed either within the full productions of the musicals or as “suites” on mixed programs by dance companies.