Virginia Ramey – Memphis Flyer

I finally got to see Brandon and Virginia Ramey dance. They performed at the Ballet Memphis production of Cinderella April 15th at the Orpheum and they were spectacular.

The Rameys, longtime members of Ballet Memphis who married in 2014, are now co-directors of the Ballet Memphis School and Youth Ballet Memphis, having retired from dancing after this production.

Virginia performed as Cinderella and Brandon was Prince Charming in the ballet classic that featured music by Sergei Prokofiev.

This was the same Cinderella production the Rameys were supposed to dance to a few years ago, but the 2020 Covid lockdown put an end to that along with public performances of just about everything.

As difficult as the lockdown was for performers, there was no shortage of creativity. I got to know the Rameys after doing stories on their inventive pandemic series of time capsule-worthy videos about life when the world as we knew it basically stopped.

One of their filmed-at-home video shorts was about how people had trouble finding toilet paper because of the shortage. Instead of Prince Charming, Brandon was more of a “Prince Charmin.”

In the video, titled “Commode to Joy,” Brandon is excited to find the rare commodity at a market and is seen running down the street with his toilet paper roll.

“It’s unravelling a little bit over my head as I’m bringing it back to the house,” he says. “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony starts and I do a jump with the toilet paper and just start dancing for joy about how I found toilet paper. And Ginny joins me and she starts dancing. It’s fun outside and a lot of room to move. Very energetic and exciting.

“The next thing you know, we get carried away with all this toilet paper. We’re happily rubbing it on our faces, juggling, letting it roll over us.”

They get even more carried away in the video. “We end up rolling the house. It gets stuck everywhere. It’s a mess.” They did recycle some of that toilet paper, so it wouldn’t go to waste, Brandon says. It was the pandemic, after all.

As far as dancing, Virginia said when they announced their retirement from stage work, “We may make guest appearances here and there, but to do what we’ve been doing at this level will not be possible because we have two kids at home and 300 kids at work. We want to be able to really focus on the school and growing the program.”

The April 16th matinee was the couple’s final performance. I asked the Rameys how it felt being on stage this past weekend, knowing this was their last dance, as it were.

“I think I approached my final performance just as I would any other show because it was too difficult to comprehend how big of a deal this one particular day would be in the grand scheme of my life,” Virginia says. “I wanted our last performance to go really well, so I just stayed focused on the choreography and telling the story.

“I definitely got emotional a couple of times throughout the ballet, mostly while dancing with Brandon,” she says, “but I always had to pull it back together for whatever came next. It hasn’t fully set in that it was my last time on stage because I think I will always feel like a dancer even if I’m not performing. I’m just so excited to focus on the school now and that is keeping me from being very sad. It’s also been a wonderful time to look back over my 20-year career and appreciate all the opportunities I was given to play so many different roles. I’m feeling very grateful right now.”

Brandon says, “It was surreal. There were moments that I would feel myself tearing up on stage, but the choreography is just too challenging to dwell on that kind of feeling. The beauty of the ballet — the music and the choreography working together — kept bringing me back in the moment. It was an unforgettable experience.”

Ballet Memphis dancers Brandon and Virginia Ramey are hanging up their ballet shoes.

“You can’t dance forever,” Brandon says.

“We both are retiring with our final performance as Cinderella in April,” Virginia says.

The production will be held April 14th through 16th at the Orpheum. Virginia and Brandon will dance in the Saturday evening performance and the Sunday matinee.

“The April 16th Sunday matinee will be our last performance on stage,” Virginia says. “Then we start June 1st as co-directors of the Ballet Memphis School and Youth Ballet Memphis.”

“The opportunity was presented to us a couple of years ago,” says Brandon, who, along with his wife, have been assistant Ballet Memphis directors for the past two years.

They weren’t sure what they were going to do next when Gretchen McLennon, CEO and president of Ballet Memphis, asked about their future plans. “At that time, we were going to dance until an opportunity came,” Virginia says. “And it came right on time.”

Janet Parke, former director of Ballet Memphis School, became the new senior artistic associate. “It opened up a space for Brandon and me to step into the school and continue what has been going so well. And make a few changes here and there,” says Virginia. “We have been doing some ongoing training in New York with the American Ballet Theatre national training curriculum. That will be a “little bit of a new curriculum for the school.”

As for dancing, Virginia says, “It takes so much time and energy to dance professionally. And we will now be putting all that time and energy into the school. We may make guest appearances here and there, but to do what we’ve been doing at this level will not be possible because we have two kids at home and 300 kids at work. We want to be able to really focus on the school and growing the program.”

Asked who was at Ballet Memphis first, Brandon says, “Ginny. By a country mile.”

“I grew up here, so I grew up in the Ballet Memphis School since I was five years old,” Virginia says. “I joined the professional company right out of high school and danced with the company over 20 years now.”

Ballet Memphis founding artistic director Dorothy Gunther Pugh brought Brandon to Ballet Memphis in 2009. “They found me going to San Francisco Ballet School,” he says. “I’ve fallen in love with my wife and the city and now the school.”

Asked how he and Virginia met, Brandon says, “We got paired for Nutcracker because we’re both very tall. The degree of chemistry we had surprised everybody.”

They fell for each other “pretty immediately,” Brandon says. “I liked her sense of humor and her feisty attitude.”

As for working together, he says, “Sparks can fly, but she never backs down. She’s got a true north compass sense of how movement and music interact. So, it’s like being in the room with Beethoven and Mozart. ‘Oh, wow. She just knows innately how things are put together.’”

“We immediately got along as friends,” Virginia says. “Rehearsals were really fun that first year. He was very sweet. We were doing some very difficult lifts and we realized that one of the lifts was causing bruises on my leg. So, he brought me a jar of multi-vitamins. Little things like that are the things that stole my heart. … We can argue about how a step is being done without it affecting our ability to work together.”

Asked how many times they’ve danced together in productions, Virginia says, “If I had the time I could count exactly, but the big ballets were Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Giselle, and we’ve done Cinderella. And we’ve gotten to do (George) Balanchine works together. Dracula.”

The upcoming Cinderella will be their second time performing it together. “We actually prepared in 2020,” Virginia says. “We were in the middle of rehearsals that would have happened in April of 2020 when the world shut down and we had to put all the work up. It’s been really interesting watching the rehearsal videos from that time.”

They’re looking forward to the new phase in their lives. “For the past two years we’ve felt a little bit like we’ve been doing two jobs each,” Virginia says. “Now we’ll be able to really really focus on the one job of co-directing the school.”

“It’s such an exciting opportunity” to think about all all of the knowledge and experience that we’re going to pass on to the younger dancers,” Brandon says. “But it’s also bittersweet. We’re closing a chapter in order to begin the next chapter of our life.”