A homegrown ballet success story: Jared Sutton
Hope sports a pencil-thin mustache.
It stands 6 feet 2 inches tall, tips the scales at 147 pounds and knows it needs to put on some weight to hoist ballerinas on a daily basis.
It has a soft voice, a pragmatic attitude rare for an 18-year-old and a name: Jared Sutton.
If you attended “The Nutcracker” in December, you saw his long-limbed leaps in the Chinese section of Act 2. He wasn’t supposed to get that solo. But, as so often happens in the ballet world, another dancer’s minor injury put him in the spotlight.
If you go to “Peter Pan” this month, you’ll watch him buckle a swash as a pirate and belly along the ground as the crocodile — a genial rather than a scary one, as befits his personality.
But you really have the key to that personality if you saw an Innovative Works concert this winter and sat in the hall through intermission. Charlotte Ballet projected photos of dancers on a screen next to quotes about their dance philosophies. All but one of them spoke about beauty and inspiration and dreams. Sutton said this:
“I always tell myself I just need to put my best foot forward today and every other day beyond that.”
Remind him of this down-to-Earth dogma at an uptown coffee shop, and he reaffirms it: “I never knew whether I would be hired here. All I could do was work to my own potential. It takes a long time to get things right, and I’m still not where I want to be. But I want to be better tomorrow than I was this morning.”
He entered Reach exactly half his lifetime ago, in the first group of students to sign up at recreation centers around the city. He has been airborne since: in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, at the dance academy run by Charlotte Ballet, briefly at UNC School of the Arts, in Charlotte Ballet’s unpaid pre-professional program, and finally as a professional in Charlotte Ballet II, where he’s now in his first season.
But the urge to move came over him before any of that.
“Saturdays and Sundays were chore days, and I hated to get out of bed,” he says. “My dad would be blasting his music – he listened to a lot of OutKast – and I’d hear him and mom dancing in the kitchen. I’d end up mopping the floors to those rhythms.”
This story is part of an Observer underwriting project with the Thrive Campaign for the Arts, supporting arts journalism in Charlotte.
Peter Pan
WHEN: March 8-17 at 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.
WHERE: Knight Theater, 430 S. Tryon St.
TICKETS: $25-$85.
DETAILS: 704-372-1000 or charlotteballet.org.
This story was originally published February 28, 2019 at 1:46 PM.