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Friday, May 17, 2002
By Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
BUDAPEST. The United States seems to be better off than Germany in many ways, dance included. Over here, ballet companies have always seemed to be threatened by closure, compulsory mergers or at least some kind of limitation, whereas new classical ensembles keep on springing up in the United States. The secret of success seems to be enthusiasm combined with private initiatives.
The Carolina Ballet, based in the provincial city of Raleigh, North Carolina, is just three years old. Four percent of its $5 million budget comes from public funding; half of the money paid to the 32 dancers in the ensemble 37 weeks a year comes from takings at the box office, the other half from sponsors. In the long run, ballet director Robert Weiss is hoping that he will be able to add one or two more talents to his young company, made up of American ballerinas and foreign dancers.
At the height of his dancing career, the 53-year-old Weiss was one of the most virtuoso soloists in George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Before he came to Raleigh he spent eight years in charge of the Pennsylvania Ballet, one of the largest provincial companies in the United States. With the Carolina Ballet he is continuing the Balanchine heritage, but relying on younger choreographers like Lynne Taylor-Corbett or Christopher Wheeldon. Over the years, however, Weiss’s most important choreographer has been himself. For its guest performances in the Erkel Theater in Budapest and in the opera house at Györ as part of the Hungarian Ballet Festival, the ensemble recently marked its first appearances in Europe with one of its tours de force: a full evening of choreography set to George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah,” created by Weiss in three stages (and three parts) for 12 female dancers and nine male dancers from his company.
Back home in North Carolina, Weiss makes a point of only allowing this “Messiah” on stage when accompanied by vocal soloists, choir and orchestra. In Hungary, for cost reasons, he presented it for the first time to taped musical accompaniment -- an emergency measure that diminished its effect but was unable to destroy it.
The starting-point of the ballet is the idea of having a group of people meet inside one of the sacred structures created by the great English architect Sir Christopher Wren after the devastating London fire of 1666, to attend a performance of Handel’s famous oratorio, and relive the coming of the Messiah. Set designer Jeff A.R. Jones has created the illusion of a cathedral with several airy-looking drapes -- and later on, when the piece requires the Jews to cross the Red Sea, he uses just a few cloths to conjure up grandiose stage landscapes.
From a melodramatic ceremonial, a religious celebration by notables in heavy, dark cloaks, modeled after certain modern dance pieces (such as those by José Limon) and in more than 50 individual scenes, Weiss has developed a neoclassical ballet containing realistic moments from the life and death of Jesus, everyday scenes of human joy and suffering such as weddings and births, and even abstract war scenes reminiscent of Kurt Jooss’s “Green Table.” The three sections of this sweeping piece are markedly different from each other stylistically. The first -- which is also the longest and most powerful, ending one hour later with the Hallelujah Chorus (brought forward) -- is tensely situated between modern dance and neoclassical ballet, with a great deal of black-and-white contrast.
The second part has the colors of the desert and sand, and concentrates mainly on the tale of the Passion. With ballerinas on flat soles, it primarily makes use of the movement of modern dance. In contrast, the final section -- developed as a ballet blanc -- is neoclassicism in its purest form: a half-hour-long hymn of jubilation celebrating the redemption of the world through Christ, much in the tradition of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco and Serenade. Described in the program as something potentially formalist, it is powerful, suggestive and convincing on stage.
This Messiah choreography bravely has angels or doves of peace flying around the stage in a sophisticated blend of naive piety and cool rationality, and is touchingly old-fashioned and timeless at the same time -- a ballet from the days when dancing still sought to help its audiences. This of course was also the result of the fresh energy of the Carolina Ballet’s young dancers, led by Timour Bourtasenkov, Melissa Podcasy, Margaret Severin-Hansen, Lilyan Vigo, Gabor Kapin and Alain Molina, as they reveled in their human and biblical character parts; there was an unqualified identification with roles and an unreserved absorption in the choreography of a kind scarcely seen any longer in Europe.
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