About Doug Fullington
Seattle, WA
Doug Fullington (CBA ’17) is the Audience Education Manager and Assistant to Artistic Director Peter Boal at Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB). He is responsible for developing PNB’s audience education programs and is also on the consulting staff of PNB School as dance historian. Doug is a musicologist and fluent reader of Stepanov choreographic notation. He has contributed reconstructed dances to The Daughter of Pharoh for the Bolshoi Ballet (2001); Le jardin animé from Le Corsaire for PNB School (2004); Le Corsaire for the Bavarian State Ballet (2007); Giselle with Marian Smith and Peter Boal for PNB (2011), and Paquita with Alexei Ratmansky and Marian Smith for the Bavarian State Ballet (2014). In 2016, he staged a streamlined reconstruction of Le Corsaire for PNB School. Fullington’s writings on Stepanov notation have been published in Ballet Alert!, Ballet Review, Dance View, and Dancing Times. He has also presented several lecture-demonstrations about Stepanov notation for the Guggenheim Museum’s Works and Process series.
From Manuscript to Stage: Four Nineteenth-Century Ballets, a collaboration between Marian Smith and Doug Fullington
Surprisingly, tucked away in various archives, there exist dozens of hand-written documents offering very detailed information about how most of the classic nineteenth-century story ballets were originally performed. At The Center, Fullington and Smith wrote two chapters of their forthcoming book about these manuscripts, which disclose that the old ballets, when first performed, were full of variety, humor, strong characterizations, playfulness, musical savoir faire, and endlessly inventive choreography. Fullington and Smith’s premise is that new productions of these old ballets can benefit greatly if the knowledge imparted in these astonishing manuscripts is brought to bear; in short, that ballet can move forward by looking back.
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