FROM KENT STOWELL & FRANCIA RUSSELL:

May 31, 2009

Dear Friends,

As all of you know, our son, Christopher Stowell, has been doing a stellar job as Artistic Director of Oregon Ballet Theatre. During the past five and a half years he has developed an exciting and wide-ranging repertoire, a magnificent company of dancers and highly-respected and productive school and outreach programs. Because of this artistic success, he has dramatically increased the size of OBT’s audience and raised ticket revenue by over 50%. Sadly, the downturn in the economy has hit Portland particularly hard and OBT is currently experiencing such difficulty with fund-raising that they now find themselves struggling to survive.

On June 12th Oregon Ballet Theatre will be presenting a gala benefit performance, entitled DANCE UNITED, featuring leading dancers from virtually every major company in North America, including of course Pacific Northwest Ballet. Christopher’s calls to fellow artistic directors elicited immediate and enthusiastic responses and dancers will soon be flying to Portland to perform with OBT as a gift to their colleagues. It promises to be a heart-stoppingly thrilling and emotional evening of dance – artists uniting to support artists.

We realize this is very short notice but this event has come together very fast and we hope you will want to be part of it. It would be great to see you in the audience and at the reception afterward where all of us, artists and observers, will join together to preserve a very worthy dance institution. Please visit the Oregon Ballet Theatre web site: DANCE UNITED for all the details and please share this information with anyone you know who may be interested.

As always, many thanks for your friendship,

Kent and Francia

Just wanted to clarify that the post-performance reception they’re referring to is a separately ticketed fundraiser that is available at an additional cost of $500. OBT would not want you to be disappointed to discover, the evening of the show, that your performance tickets will only get you into the show.

While it's important to keep donations and pledges coming, it's been reported to me that since the plea went out for assistance, about $250K has been raised through pledges, donations, and ticket sales.