Jo Lynne Jones and the OKC Ballet

When Oklahoma City Ballet’s John Kirkpatrick Executive Director Jo Jones takes visitors on a tour through the Susan E. Brackett Dance Center, it is with the delicious glee of a little kid showing you her super-cool secret hideout. No doubt she’s led hundreds of tours through the space, but you wouldn’t know it. “I just love it. I mean, it's literally a dream come true, getting to work here,” she says, in between pointing out various rehearsal spaces in the massive, hangar-shaped building on N. Classen.

Prior to joining OKC Ballet, Jones’ career was focused largely in two areas, television news and direct-service nonprofit. There was a dab of retail shopkeeping in the middle, followed by nearly 17 years at Infant Crisis Services, where she was the director of development and communications. Viewers may remember Jones from her years at the news desks of local CBS and PBS affiliates: She was OETA’s evening anchor and the morning anchor for KWTV. Toward the end of her television career, she opened a children’s clothing shop, The Bean Stalk, on N. Western Ave.

Jones had kept weekend shifts at KWTV to help with cash flow while The Bean Stalk took root. One day she did a story on a fledgling nonprofit run by its founder (and current executive director) Miki Farris. Jones began volunteering for Farris, and a couple of years later after shuttering her shop and spending a summer staying home with her son, Jones reached out to Farris for help finding a public relations gig. And just like that, Jones had a job that would one day lead her back to the barre.

Back, you say? Indeed. Turns out, Jones dreamed of becoming a ballerina as a girl and took years of dance classes. “I took ballet and contemporary from about first grade through my senior year of high school; I took them from Betty Stockard School of Dance on May Ave.,” she says. “I was terrible at ballet. Terrible. So once I realized that ballet was not my in future as a dancer, I was going to have my own dance school. That was my next dream.”

Four and a half years into the OKC Ballet job, Jones allows that it hasn’t exactly been all curtain calls and catching bouquets of roses. “It was like two fabulous years and two terrible years. I had landed here in my dream job and felt like I was making a real difference in helping the organization move forward. And we were doing all the right things for two years: We finished the remodel on this building and got the administrative staff moved in and so we were all under one roof. We were making all these strides in moving this organization forward, and we were putting on the first-ever production in this building called ‘Future Voices.’”

Dear reader, no doubt you know precisely where this is going. She continues, “And we were going to do a five-show run over a weekend in March when the pandemic hit. We opened on Thursday night, and we closed the production on Friday. We got to do one show.”

Suffice it to say that the next two years were tough. Jones recounts tales of working from home, patching together grants like the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, CARES Act employee retention program, PPP funds and anything else she could find to keep the dancers in pointe shoes and her team employed. The Ballet’s donors and patrons were incredible, Jones said. Every single person said to keep their ticket money to try to help. Still, those days were among the hardest in Jones’ career.

Her husband, Tom Mullen, would come into her office in the evenings and lure her away from the computer with wine and barbecue potato chips, telling her she’d done enough for the day. The team took furlough time — some a week, some, like her, a month — and as hard as it was, Jones said it was also galvanizing. OKC Ballet paid its staff for the furlough as soon as it was feasible, and now things are back on an uptick. She and her team are thrilled.

These days, Jones’ job is, as she puts it, about “everything except the ballet.” She oversees the business end of the nonprofit while acting artistic director Ryan Jolicoer-Nye takes care of the creative side of things.

OKC Ballet’s 2022-23 is an exciting mix of the familiar and the new. The production of Val Caniparoli’s Lady of the Camellias will be staged Oct. 21-23 at the Civic Center Music Hall. As OKC Ballet describes it: “a powerful tale of forbidden love between a wealthy Parisian courtesan and a provincial bourgeois gentleman, Lady of the Camellias is a deeply romantic and tragic story of self-sacrifice and class divides.” Not tantalizing enough? This ballet also includes “mature themes.” See you there.