Veteran dancers John Gardner and Amanda McKerrow, both formerly with the American Ballet Theatre, will be on the OU campus through Friday to stage British choreographer Anthony Tudor’s “Fandango” for the Oklahoma Festival Ballet.

The husband-and-wife team, now retired from dancing, worked closely with Tudor up until his death in 1987.

“He had something different to say than most people did at the time he was choreographing,” Gardner said. “It really is a pleasure carrying it on and we feel like we’re doing something really important with our lives.”

Tudor influenced their careers, helping them land roles and forever coloring the way they approached ballet and dancing, McKerrow said.

“He saw me in an open class and asked me after the class if I wanted to join American Ballet Theatre,” Gardner said. “He took me by the hand to the director and said, ‘This young man wants to join the company. What do you think?’ And that was it.”

They now work for the Anthony Tudor Ballet Trust, the organization responsible for licensing Tudor’s works and supervising staging to maintain stylistic integrity.

“There’s a big concern about his works being lost,” McKerrow said. “We are the last generation of dancers who’ve worked with him. So when we come to these universities to do a Tudor ballet, what’s really interesting to us is that, usually, university dancers become more interested about Anthony Tudor and who he was. That’s what’s going to keep him alive.”

“Fandango” is the pair’s debut work at OU. This is the third time they have staged the piece, with each performance being slightly different than the last.

“Here, we’re able to take it more to the original than I think has been done before,” McKerrow said. “I have to credit the dancers with the opportunity to do this more difficult version.”

Performed by two sets of five women, the ballet depicts a competition between the dancers, each struggling to prove that she is the best.

Senior ballet performance major Allison Rixey plays Conchita, a role she describes as being flighty and giddy with a great deal of quick, accented footwork.

“I love ‘Fandango’ because of the opportunity to develop the atmosphere of the ballet and my character,” Rixey said. “Unlike many ballets where all of the dancers are rehearsed to look the same, each of us can add our own personality in interpreting the steps.”

Rixey said Gardner and McKerrow have inspired her to find a motivation behind the choreography, challenging her in rehearsals and helping her grow as an artist and performer.

She said “Fandango” also opened up a completely new and somewhat nerve-wracking experience for her: singing.

“I had to quickly get over any embarrassment and just project as loudly and confidently as I could because Conchita thinks very highly of her voice, even though the other women taunt her,” Rixey said.

Though Tudor’s choreography is known for its intense psychological style, “Fandango” is a much lighter piece, McKerrow said.

“There’s a lot of humor to it,” she said. “The way they try to top each other makes it funny, and it’s not the quietest ballet, which is unusual. The audiences in the past have really seemed to enjoy it.”