| The World of Dance with Francis Mason December 26, 1999 WQXR, the Radio Station of the New York Times I have a favorite new ballet company- the Carolina Ballet. I’ve been to North Carolina to see them twice and can report that we have an important new ensemble nationally. Robert Weiss, a Balanchine dancer of consequence at the New York City Ballet for years, has established an international group of dancers who perform Balanchine superbly but who also are dancing new work by Christopher Wheeldon, Lynn Taylor-Corbett and Weiss himself. That is the real newsña ballet company that can turn out terrific new work by its artistic director. The new Romeo and Juliet Robert Weiss has made with only 26 dancers is stunning, dramatically engrossing and beautifully danced. Using the Prokofiev score and a clever set that changes swiftly, Weiss has made the best Romeo and Juliet, I believe, since Antony Tudor’s many years ago. He has studied the play and puts into dance the poetry the lovers speak so that when a gesture recurs you know what they are recollecting. Melissa Podcasy is the actress ballerina as Juliet and Timour Bourtasenkov is her Romeo. The fine performance I saw recently in Winston-Salem was being recorded by educational television. Here’s hoping we see it up here! Carolina Ballet is the new star in our national ballet firmament… And that’s the story on THE WORLD OF DANCE. This is Francis Mason. Francis Mason has been writing about dance throughout his career as cultural affairs offcer at the U.S. embassies in Belgrade and London, at Steuben Glass in New York, as assistant director of The Pierpont Morgan Library. He was the Hudson Review’s first dance critic and co-authored with Balanchine 101 Stories of the Great Ballets and Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. Editor of Ballet Review, he is dance critic for WQXR radio in New York and chairman emeritus of the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance.
|