Lauren Post has a busy month ahead of her.
This week, Post, a dancer in the American Ballet Theatre’s corps de ballet, is performing in “Romeo and Juliet” at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City; last week, “Swan Lake,” and next week, “Like Water for Chocolate.”
Four days after that show closes, she and her family are moving to the Twin Cities.
And in mid-August, Post takes over as Minnesota Dance Theatre & School’s school director, now the top role in the organization previously known just as Minnesota Dance Theatre.
MDT was started in 1962 by choreographer Loyce Houlton. Her daughter Lise Houlton ran the organization from her mother’s death in 1995 until last fall, when her own daughter Kaitlyn Gilliland briefly took over in an interim capacity. Elayna Waxse has led the organization since January.
In early 2024, MDT announced it was winding down its long-running professional performance company to focus solely on education. (Around the same time, another local dance staple, the Cowles Center for Dance and the Performing Arts, also announced the end of its regular performance schedule.)
Post, who grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, joined the renowned American Ballet Theatre in 2008. Since 2018, in addition to performing with ABT, she has also run CoLab Dance, a dance company she founded to commission and perform new work during professional theaters’ off-seasons.
Her husband grew up in Minnesota, she said, and they had already been planning to move from New York to the Twin Cities with their two young kids. When she saw MDT was searching for a director, it felt serendipitous, she said: Post has previously taken classes at MDT to stay in shape while visiting her husband’s family here, and had also danced alongside Gilliland in New York.
During a break between afternoon and evening performances of “Romeo and Juliet,” we caught up with Post by phone to discuss why she thinks the Twin Cities are “ripe for a dance explosion.”
(This conversation has been edited and condensed.)
Q: At this point, you’re performing in a ballet this week that’s different from the ones last week and next week, packing up your house, taking care of kids — that’s a lot!
A: It is! It is a lot. I knew it was going to be stressful going into it, so I’m trying to embrace it as much as I can and try to avoid too much heartache in the process. They’re all very exciting things, but it’s also bittersweet to be leaving my home and my company for the past 16 and a half years.
Q: In recent years, alongside performing with ABT, you also launched CoLab Dance, started a family, have been recovering from an injury. How have all these things happening at once influenced your approach to dance?
A: I’m energized by it all. Ballet has been the cornerstone of my life, and I love to dance. CoLab came about [when] my peers and I were all on layoff for seven, eight weeks every summer, and everyone just wanted to keep creating and performing. I said, let’s just put something together and see where it goes. It just grew very organically from there, and I really enjoyed being on the other side of it.
I had kids in the midst of that — and Covid happened. My injury happened before all of that, my knee injury; in 2016, I tore my ACL onstage at the opera house. I went through a very extensive surgery and recovery, and that’s when I really learned a lot about the value of cross-training. And then during Covid, I decided to get my personal training certificate and started working with private clients in the gym.
It’s hugely important … to diversify your training. I think, sometimes, kids just want to dance all the time. Which is great, but that can sometimes lead to overuse injuries. It’s important to move in many different ways. It makes you a more well-rounded dancer and athlete.
Q: In the Twin Cities dance scene more broadly, this feels like a time of change, especially as long-running organizations like MDT and the Cowles Center have stopped performing in recent months. How would you make the pitch for continuing to prioritize dance as a component of a thriving local arts scene?
A: From my own experience, in my own life, ballet has been my education. It’s what led me to travel the world, learn about different cultures, experience different ways of living. For me, personally, coming from Mississippi, dance was the vehicle for me to expand my horizons, as cheesy as that sounds. I think it has the capacity to do that for other children.
And for an audience member, it’s just so transformative. I think it can be really healing and emotional and just very moving when it’s done right. I think Minneapolis — I’m not a local yet, so I have a lot to learn — but there’s a huge arts scene and culture is well-respected, which makes me excited about the opportunity with MDT and for dance as a whole.
Q: With the Minnesota Dance Theatre specifically, are there plans to resume performing as a company? Or are you coming into an organization that sees itself strictly as an educational institution going forward?
A: [Performance] is definitely on the table for the future. At the moment, the plan is to invest in the school, which I think is wise. But absolutely, I think everyone would love to see MDT come back as a professional company when the time is right. There’s no reason why that couldn’t happen — that Minneapolis could be a destination for classical ballet training, and potentially even for a strong local company.
Q: So being at a point where the strength of our local professional dance scene seems more uncertain than it once was — or at least at a transitional moment, if that’s a better way to phrase it — what do you think it would take to get us to a point where we are seen as a destination for ballet?
A: I know what you mean, and I wish I had all the answers. I think that’s something that, hopefully, can be uncovered in the next few years. Getting stronger financial support is always what’s necessary for an arts organization to thrive, whether that’s through grants or private donations or corporate sponsorships or city.
But I think it’s important, at this juncture, to focus in on the educational component of the school to develop really strong dancers. Hopefully, with exposure to wonderful teachers and performance opportunities, drawing in students from all over the country would be a really wonderful place for MDT to be in a couple of years. Really making MDT a destination for young dancers to seek excellent training in classical ballet.
