The first time Dennyse Sewell walked into the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts—the gold, geodesic “turtle” building in downtown Reno—she was 10.
She watched a Reno Philharmonic concert with her music class. The teacher asked the students to write a one-page essay about the experience.
“I went margin to margin … front and back for multiple pages,” Sewell said.
The other kids razzed her for being teacher’s pet. “I was genuinely so affected by it that I wanted to try to describe all of the feelings and thoughts and emotions, and all the colors I could see in my brain while the music was playing,” she said. “I never in a thousand lifetimes thought, ‘Oh, that’s going to be my life.’”
A few months ago, Sewell celebrated her 20th anniversary working at the Pioneer Center, where, for the last six years, she has been the executive director.
A ‘quarter-life crisis’ and a big leap
As a University of Nevada, Reno, student, Sewell began working at the Pioneer as a ticket seller in 2003. She graduated with a degree in conservation biology and watched most of her peers move on to grad school.
“I just wasn’t sure that was my calling,” she said, describing her post-graduation quandary as a “quarter-life crisis,” during which she had no idea which path to take.
The Pioneer moved her to an administrative assistant job, where she had a particularly encouraging supervisor—Willis Allen, then the executive director, the type of boss who would say things like: “Hey, Dennyse, do you want to learn how to write grants?” “Do you want to learn how to do the outreach programs?” “Attend this meeting with me?” “Pinch hit as box office manager while we look for our next candidate?”
Sewell soon became a supervisor and mentor herself. “You get an opportunity, and you say yes,” she said, “and then you figure out how to make good on the thing you just said yes to.”
Early in 2019, Sewell was promoted to the executive director position. “You go home Dec. 31 as their co-worker; you come back Jan. 1 as their boss,” she said. It felt like a big leap.
“It is a really strange internal metamorphosis,” she said. “My original goal, when I stepped into the leadership role, was to really assess—how’s the rest of the team doing? How can I support them? The change was hard for me and also probably a little bit weird for them.”
She tried hard to remain accessible and genuine to the former peers who were now her employees. Meanwhile, her longstanding relationships with resident companies, rental clients, volunteers and board members all had to change in scope. The immense trust the organization had placed in her felt like a lot of pressure.
That first year, Sewell got to work on one of her big goals—expanding the Broadway Comes to Reno series.
A blow to the performing arts industry
On the first day of 2020, Sewell wrote herself a note: “Wow, going into work this morning wasn’t quite as scary as the first day in 2019. Yay, one year under my belt as the leader!”
In March 2020, the city of Reno and the state of Nevada issued shutdown orders, hoping to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“Lo and behold, we were not legally allowed to gather people together in an enclosed space—and that’s what we do for a living,” Sewell said.
According to National Endowment for the Arts data, the value of the performing arts industry nationwide fell 73% that year. An Americans for the Arts report estimated a loss of 557 million ticketed admissions at U.S. venues due to the pandemic shutdowns.
There were, Sewell said, “a lot of really dark nights of the soul during the pandemic, of, ‘How do I ensure that this legacy cultural institution doesn’t go bust under my watch?’
“So many really valuable, really significant cultural anchors in cities all around the world are gone post-pandemic,” Sewell said. “It was a very real risk—that any one of us could literally not survive it. There’s no way to overstate how terrifying that was. The only sort of weird cold comfort was that I was very keenly aware, in that moment, that I wasn’t alone.”
The Pioneer sent its staff home, canceled shows and refunded tickets, including the credit-card fees.
“We have to take care of our community first and foremost,” Sewell said. “If we lose the confidence of our friends and neighbors, there’s no point.”
The staff remained employed and fully paid. Her rationale: “We don’t know when we’re going to get green-lit to reopen, and I can’t reopen a performing arts center by myself. And these people have such a specific skillset. You can’t just find, on any street corner, somebody who can be a theatrical stagehand to the level that my team is.”
The weekly staff meetings, held on Zoom, were sad and strange. Sewell tried to be inspiring. She quoted Brené Brown. The staffers recommend Netflix standup comedy specials to each other.
When the shutdown rules eased up a bit, some theaters experimented with things like spraying disinfectant on employees or considering hazmat-like suits. As Sewell watched other venues experiment, she thought, “We’re going to sit tight and see how this shakes out.”
Because the Pioneer gathers large crowds—up to 1,500 people at a time—she figured they’d be among the last to open.
“We didn’t end up buying a bunch of strange gizmos or implementing a bunch of bizarre policies that weren’t actually proven or helpful,” she said. “We got to dodge a lot of those kind-of experimental curveballs that other industries were having to do.”
The staff worked remotely from February 2020 through the summer of 2021. Sewell credits the Pioneer’s survival largely to Willis Allen, her predecessor, who she called “a very, very, very careful steward of nonprofits assets.” He had left the theater with ample financial reserves.
Emerging stronger
In fall 2021, the Broadway series resumed with a run of Hamilton. To comply with government regulations, everyone wore masks. The staff sanitized their hands. Patrons stood in longer lines and showed their vaccination cards.
“We had probably nine or 10 of us staff members to wrangle two sold-out weeks of people who didn’t quite remember how to gather together in public—tense times with big feelings and lots of conflict,” Sewell said. “But we were back. We were finally back. … That feeling of finally being able to celebrate being alive on the other side of it was so meaningful for our staff, and I know it was for the people who came to the show, too.”
Sewell said the Pioneer is now a stronger organization than it was before the pandemic. “We now have more than doubled the number of team members from when we hosted Hamilton,” she said. “We were so hungry to get to do those fun things again that we had previously taken for granted.”
After a year and a half of no Pioneer events, audiences seemed to have heightened enthusiasm for A.V.A. Ballet Theatre’s The Nutcracker, the Reno Philharmonic and the Broadway series. Sewell has observed that tastes have changed, too: “People want to see the things they’ve seen before that they love, that bring back all of their positive memories. I think there’s no revival that could be too dusty for anyone at this point. We’re like, ‘Yes, I want to see that again!’”
It’s not just the big hit shows that keep the fires of Sewell’s enthusiasm stoked. Her voice lights up when she talks about her role in making sure that as many children as possible get to visit the Pioneer for a concert. Through the Pioneer Center Youth Programs, she and the team also send performing artists to elementary schools, public libraries and community centers.
But will every fifth-grader end up steering an arts organization? “Maybe it’ll light them up; maybe it won’t, and that’s OK,” Sewell said. “Why not let everyone have that opportunity, and just see?”