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.”
