Tuesday, November 9, 2004
By TERRY TEACHOUT drama critic
for The Wall Street Journal
For a guy who doesn’t like to fly, I’ve sure been spending a lot of time on the road lately: first Chicago, then North Carolina. I went down to Raleigh last Friday to see Carolina Ballet dance half a dozen ballets by George Balanchine, plus the premiere of Symposium, a major new work by Robert Weiss, the company’s artistic director. I was—as always—delighted and amazed.
My delight came from the fact that Carolina Ballet dances Balanchine’s formidably complex choreography with a stylistic assurance that can never be taken for granted, not even in the biggest of cities. Concerto Barocco, Tarantella, Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and Who Cares? are longtime staples of the company’s repertory, and Victoria Simon, one of the Balanchine Trust’s répétiteurs, flew down to stage Square Dance and Donizetti Variations. I thought they all looked fabulously finished, but don’t take my word for it: I happened to be sitting next to an old Balanchine hand whose memories of Balanchine and New York City Ballet go back four decades, and he whooped and hollered after every one. “You know,” he told me at intermission, “I saw Eddie and Patty [Edward Villella and Patricia McBride] dance Tarantella, and it wasn’t a bit better than this!”
My amazement came from the fact that Carolina Ballet is located in a medium-sized city far from the beaten path of even the most devoted balletomanes. By all rights, it ought not to be much more than a well-meaning enterprise just good enough to please novice dancegoers. Instead, it’s one of the best small classical troupes (twenty-nine dancers, two apprentices) in America, “regional” only in the frustrating budgetary cheeseparing that so far has prevented Weiss and his staff from spending enough money to establish it as a significant presence on the national ballet scene. Dancers as fine as this ought to be touring regularly and appearing in New York or Washington every couple of seasons. Instead, you have to go to Raleigh to see them—which I do, once or twice a year.
I don’t go just for the Balanchine, which is in any case only a small part of Carolina Ballet's fast-growing repertory. I’m just as interested in Weiss’ own dances, and the main reason I went to Raleigh this time around was to see his new ballet, Symposium (The Masks of Dionysos). He is, as I’ve said more than once in this space, a remarkable artist in his own right, the only New York City Ballet alumnus of his generation to have used Balanchine’s movement vocabulary as the basis for a wholly personal choreographic style. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal two years ago:
He knows Balanchine’s demanding neoclassical style cold, but instead of making the abstract “plotless” dances that were his mentor’s trademark, Weiss specializes in narrative ballets modeled after Balanchine’s 1962 adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which the plot is propelled, and the characters defined, through movement rather than mime. Like that deeply conservative yet radically innovative masterwork, Weiss’ “Carmen” and “Romeo and Juliet” emphasize character-driven virtuoso dancing over the glitzy pageantry that dominates—and deadens—most of today’s full-evening story ballets.
“It may be,” Weiss says, “that I’ve shied away from plotless ballets because Balanchine did them so well, with such great depth of subtext.” Whatever the reason, his knack for storytelling has given Carolina Ballet a clear identity at a time when most American companies are chasing vainly after the trend of the week…
Even when Weiss tries his hand at a plotless ballet, he tends as often as not to be inspired as much by words as music. Symposium, for instance, is set to Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium”, and Weiss immersed himself in Plato’s discourse on love, along with various scholarly commentaries on the Symposium, in the process of readying the dance for the stage. Not that you’d know from looking, for Symposium makes sense to the eye even if you've never read a word of Plato. In truth, it’s as much a tribute to Balanchine as it is an evocation of the Symposium, one into which Weiss has woven fleeting allusions to such ballets as Apollo, Serenade, and Agon. Yet these subtly deployed quotations are never allowed to impede the unfolding logic of Symposium, nor do they stand out in any other obvious way. They simply add an additional layer of poetic implication.
I'm afraid that last paragraph may make Symposium sound like…well, like a symposium. In fact, it’s a fast-moving, tremendously exciting audience piece—a brainy crowd-pleaser, if you will—graced by the superlative dancing of Melissa Podcasy, Weiss’ wife and the prima ballerina assoluta of his company. To be sure, Weiss has trained a formidable roster of young up-and-comers (any classical company would be lucky to have Margaret Severin-Hansen, Lilyan Vigo, Margot Martin, or Hong Yang on its roster), but in Podcasy he also has a seasoned veteran who dances with a poise and maturity that come only from long experience and true artistry. I can't say often enough that you don't expect to encounter this kind of world-class dancing in a “regional” company, just as I can't help but wonder whether the citizens of Raleigh, appreciative though so many of them are of Carolina Ballet, fully understand how uniquely lucky they are to have such a group in their city.
It’s not my fault if they don’t, because I told them so. All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine having just been shipped to booksellers last week, I took the opportunity to speak briefly but emphatically about Balanchine and Carolina Ballet at the end of Friday's performance, then signed copies of the book in the lobby. It was my first appearance in support of All in the Dances, and I’m pleased to say that each and every copy was sold and signed by evening’s end. (Hear that, Harcourt? We're off and running!)
In addition to three performances by Carolina Ballet, I made time for a private view of “Matisse, Picasso, and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art,” a touring exhibition that opened at the North Carolina Museum of Art yesterday and is on view through January 16. It’s a nifty little 70-piece blockbusterette drawn mainly from the BMA’s fabled Cone Collection and including such showstoppers as Matisse’s “Purple Robe and Anemones” and a small Cézanne “Bathers” that Etta Cone bought from Gertrude Stein in 1926. Once again, please note that I saw "Matisse, Picasso, and the School of Paris" in Raleigh, not New York or Washington or even Chicago—after which I dined on a superior North Carolina-style barbecue from the museum café. You can’t get that at MoMA, not even for twenty bucks.
Now I’m back in New York, gearing up for another week of writing, playgoing, and club-hopping, and I couldn’t be happier to be home again. If you long to consume vast amounts of art on a 24/7 basis, this is the only place to live. But if your notion of a balanced life also includes carports, front lawns, and next-door neighbors who know your name, America is full of smaller cities that have much to offer in the way of civilized pleasure—and if you love dance, you owe it to yourself to pay a visit to Raleigh the next time Carolina Ballet is performing. Until they start coming here, I’ll keep going there.
P.S. If you don't know Bernstein's Serenade after Plato's "Symposium," try this recording. It's a beauty.
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