Courtney Lyon, Artistic Director
Courtney Lyon has been creating innovative, elegant, humorous, and provocative works for Ballet Quad Cities as Artistic Director since 2009. Ms. Lyon’s full-length ballets include original interpretations of Cinderella (2011, 2013), Rite of Spring (2014), The Nutcracker (2014), Romeo + Juliet (2015), The Sleeping Beauty (2012, 2015), The Firebird (2016), Billy the Kid (2017), Alice in Wonderland (2018, 2022), and Carmen (2023) many of which premiered in partnership with Orchestra Iowa.
Ms. Lyon’s notable repertoire premieres include Our Will to Live (2022), presented as part of Out of Darkness: Holocaust Messages for today; The Soldier’s Tale and Benny’s Gig with Quad City Symphony Orchestra (2021); Dumbarton Oaks with Orchestra Iowa (2020); and several celebrated collaborations with the Figge Art Museum: “Sporting Fashion: Outdoor Girls 1800-1960” (2023), “For America” (2021), Paris en Pointe, which premiered in conjunction with the Figge Art Museum’s “French Moderns: Monet to Matisse, 1850-1950,” Glassworks (2019), inspired by “Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Dreihaus Collection,” and “The Dark Fiddler” (2016)
Ms. Lyon’s Dance “Four” Piano (2018), commissioned by Orchestra Iowa, was performed alongside Grammy-winning pianist Emanuel Ax at the Golden Key Gala in Cedar Rapids, IA. Her mesmerizing and hypnotic Bolero, set to Ravel’s piano arrangement for four hands, was invited to close the 2015 Crème de La Crème at the Gallagher Bluedorn Performing Arts Center and has subsequently become a perennial audience favorite. Her The Nutcracker received the 2014 Argpatch award for Best Live Action in Entertainment.
Ms. Lyon has created curriculum and content for BQC’s community outreach programs including The Ugly Duckling: A Message of Acceptance Told Through Dance, Dance Me a Story: Exploring Literature Through Ballet, The Nutcracker, and the DREAMS program. As a principal faculty member of BQC School of Dance, she has created and implemented a comprehensive syllabus for beginning through pre-professional ballet students. To support her teaching of classical ballet technique, Ms. Lyon has completed two pedagogy courses centered on the years 1-5 of the Vaganova syllabus with John White, an authority of the Vaganova teaching method and former dancer and Ballet master of the National Ballet of Cuba, as well as intensive training exploring the bio-mechanics of movement with the late physicist Kenneth Laws and master coach Arleen Sugano. She attended Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet’s Teacher Intensive workshop with Marcia Dale Weary and participated repeatedly as a choreographer at the Glenda Brown Choreography Project.
She is a requested keynote speaker for civic groups throughout the Quad Cities area, has been a guest speaker on several local arts related radio programs and podcasts, and has been invited to sit on area grant panels. Ms. Lyon is a recipient of an Iowa Arts & Cultural Emergency Relief Grant for an individual artist.