Margaret Severin-Hansen’s Swan Song

It was a fateful September day in New York City that launched then-13-year-old Margaret Severin-Hansen’s career in ballet. 

The Long Island native, who goes by Peggy, had plans to see a show in the city with her mother and some friends following an audition with the School of American Ballet; Severin-Hansen was one of the last dancers to get cut. Her group missed the show, so they had an early dinner in the city and took the train home instead. 

When they arrived back in Long Island, Severin-Hansen’s father informed them that the school had called to say Severin-Hansen had been accepted—and that she started the next day. 

“My parents have always been so supportive,” Severin-Hansen says. Her mother, a lover of the arts, took her to watch a ballet class when she was in kindergarten, and joked that it was the first time she ever sat still. Severin-Hansen enrolled in the Huntington School of Ballet in Long Island before joining the School of American Ballet, where she trained for the next five years. 

“They [my parents] did a lot to get me into the city every day,” she says.

Severin-Hansen, now 44 and a mother herself of a three-and-a-half-year-old, joined Carolina Ballet as an apprentice in 1998 at age 18 and was promoted to principal in 2002. She will dance her final performance for the company this Sunday in Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. After that, Severin-Hansen will continue to work with the company as a ballet mistress, directing, training, and rehearsing the next generation of dancers. She’ll also continue as director of Carolina Ballet’s Ruth S. Shur Summer Intensive and as a teacher at Carolina Ballet’s ballet school. 

At 5’2”, Severin-Hansen says she was too short to be considered for the School of American Ballet’s affiliated company, New York City Ballet. So she began auditioning for others, including the fledgling company in Raleigh headed by Robert Weiss, Carolina Ballet’s founding director and a former principal dancer with New York City Ballet. 

“It was a big cattle-call audition, which means that anybody and everybody can go,” Severin-Hansen recalls. She was again one of the last dancers to get cut and ended up chatting with Weiss.

“The first thing he asked me on the phone when he actually offered me a job was, ‘Wait, how tall are you?’” Severin-Hansen says with a laugh. “And then he had his wife visit. She was a dancer, and he was like, ‘Wait, how tall are you?’ She said, ‘I’m five-two.’ So I was the same height as her.”

Raleigh felt a lot different in 1998 than it does now, and it also felt a lot different from Manhattan, where Severin-Hansen had been living. She says it took about four years to get fully acclimated. One of the first things Severin-Hansen had to do was get a learner’s permit to drive. She remembers downtown Raleigh as a ghost town on performance weekends, with no restaurants open, except for maybe Caffe Luna. The rehearsal studio they used was out in Cary off Kildaire Farm Road, which felt “very rural, very green.”

“I loved the peacefulness of it, don’t get me wrong,” she says. “In New York, it’s very loud, but [here] it was very green then, because there weren’t even very many people.”

The company, like the city, has grown in the quarter century that Severin-Hansen has been dancing, and in 2019, Carolina Ballet hired Zalman “Zali” Rafael as its second artistic director and CEO. What started out as a company of 21—16 dancers and five apprentices—has grown to employ more than 50 professional dancers and has an annual budget of $8.6 million. Severin-Hansen was pleased to find another director with whom she meshed well.

“We do quite a bit of different repertoire than we had been doing in the first half of my career,” she says. “I see the company now going very much into the future, because we have even more diverse and innovative choreographers, Zalman being one of them as the director, but then also the ones that he likes to bring in. He just has a different take on things.”  

The ballet culture more broadly, too, has changed for the better, Severin-Hansen says. 

“They’re [the young dancers are] very supportive of each other,” she says. “I think it’s just kind of the culture of today, too—it’s more supportive than back in the ’90s.”

Carolina Ballet produces nine programs annually, which means Severin-Hansen has had the opportunity to reprise many roles. She is one of the company’s most accomplished dancers, known for her technical skill, artistry, and commanding stage presence. Severin-Hansen loves dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker, Aurora in Sleeping Beauty, and the titular Giselle.

“They have so much emotion tied into them,” she says of the roles. And she calls the experience of dancing onstage—the adrenaline rush, connecting with her dance partners, and feeding off the audience’s energy—“transcendant.” That, for Severin-Hansen, is what performing is about.

“The moments that you can just take to enjoy something that somebody else is giving to you,” she says. “It’s something that’s so irreplaceable, and it takes your mind to a different place every time you experience it .… It brings unity in all areas …. It brings everybody to one big place, and the world without it, I don’t even know what it would be like.”

As ballet mistress, Severin-Hansen is working with Rafael on Swan Lake, the company’s final production of the season, and says she’s looking forward to what the future holds for herself and the company. 

Carolina Ballet is fundraising for a permanent location after raising enough to move from its longtime headquarters on Atlantic Avenue, which housed its studios, school, and administrative offices, to a temporary location on Stony Brook Road. The vision for the permanent location includes, potentially, a performance venue alongside indoor-outdoor spaces where arts organizations, nonprofits, and the community “can come together to create, connect, and experience the arts,” according to Carolina Ballet’s website. 

Coming up to her final performance, Severin-Hansen says she has mixed emotions. 

“I have excitement over the fact that I’ve done it for so long, that I can go out still looking good, I feel like I can [still] bounce around on the stage,” she says. “I don’t feel tired, like my body’s not kicking me for still doing it for so long. I have a little sadness over just letting go of being a dancer on the stage, but then I have comfort in knowing that every single person has to do that. But I can’t ask for anything more than that, how long I’ve done it.”

“I think I’m just …” 

She pauses for a moment to find the right word.

“I think I’m just thankful. I’m thankful.”

A celebration of Severin-Hansen will take place Sunday, April 27, at 4:30 p.m. at Whitaker Atlantic immediately following the final performance of Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. More information here. 

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