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January 11, 2007
TT: Busman's holiday
Now that I'm a drama critic, I rarely get to go to working rehearsals, which I love to do, so it was a great pleasure to fly into the Raleigh-Durham airport last night, jump in a car, drive straight to the stage door of the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, and charge into the theater just in time to hear Robert Weiss, the artistic director of Carolina Ballet, speak the following words into a microphone: "Dancers, we're going to try to go all the way through without stopping--unless there's a train wreck." I sighed with delight and plopped into a seat just behind Weiss and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the choreographers of Monet Impressions, who were furiously dictating last-minute fix-this notes to their assistants as the dancers on stage ran through Weiss' "The Gardens at Giverny" and Taylor-Corbett's "Picnic on the Grass."The New York Times ran a half-page preview of Monet Impressions yesterday, so I'll let their excellent reporter walk you through the show:
After carefully trolling the North Carolina Museum of Art's "Monet in Normandy" exhibition, seeking inspiration for a new dance, the choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett ended up using a painting not in the show: Monet's Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. That's right, Monet's--not Manet's better-known 1863 painting of the same title, depicting a languid luncheon party of four, including unabashedly naked women, but Monet's more decorous 1865-66 scene of a luncheon party of a dozen or so ladies and gentlemen, elegantly dressed.
"Whenever the word Impressionist is used, most people think first of Claude Monet, who depicted nature in a subjective and innovative way," she said. "Conversely, his studies of people seem objective and detached. I wondered about ‘Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe.' Who were these people, about to sit down outdoors to enjoy a meal together? What had they been doing moments before? What were they feeling?"
The dance that resulted from her musings, "Picnic on the Grass," will be the first part of the Carolina Ballet's "Monet Impressions," opening Jan. 11 at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. The program, which also features "The Gardens at Giverny," by Robert Weiss, the Carolina Ballet's artistic director, coincides with the final weekend of the museum's substantial Monet exhibition...
The company's resident set designer, Jeff A.R. Jones, created a painted translucent scrim that can overlay either of two painted backdrops to suggest a changing Impressionist landscape without recreating each painting. For "Picnic" a drop of a tree trunk and leaves, created from woven strips of fabric for additional texture, is suspended over a hazier backdrop, evoking part of "Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe." For "The Gardens at Giverny," Monet's rose arbors and waterlily paintings are evoked.
That sounds ambitious, and it looks...well, astonishing. This morning I went to the museum to see "Monet in Normandy," having spent the previous evening gazing with mounting amazement at Monet Impressions, and my first impression of the ballet was confirmed by my hour-long visit to the exhibition: I don't know when I've seen a more complete fusion of dance, décor, and music. To be sure, I was watching a dress rehearsal, not the real thing, but even when accompanied by the frenzied mutterings of anxious artists determined to get it right on the night, Monet Impressions was so unabashedly gorgeous to behold that it knocked me flat.
The two dances are completely different in character. Taylor-Corbett's evocation of "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe," set to Poulenc's suavely bittersweet music, is charming in the very best sense of that oft-misused word--Sunday in the Park with Claude, so to speak. Weiss's ballet, accompanied by Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun and Nocturnes and the lushly Franco-Wagnerian music of Ernest Chausson, is more abstract, as befits a choreographer who learned his trade from George Balanchine, but no less immediately appealing to the eye and ear. Afterward he asked me what I thought, and I replied, "That one definitely passes the ooh-and-aah test."
That such an extravaganza should have been created in Raleigh will be surprising only to those who know nothing of Carolina Ballet. I've been covering the company for the better part of a decade now, and I know what Weiss and his collaborators can do. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal back in 2002:
The story of Carolina Ballet is, to put it mildly, improbable. Started from scratch in 1997, it has grown to the point where it will be spending more than $5 million to present 84 performances this year. By big-city standards, of course, that's peanuts: New York City Ballet has a budget of $46.6 million. But you can cook a lot of tasty things with peanuts if you hire gourmet chefs. The company's fast-growing repertory includes both modern classics (one recent program featured Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" and Antony Tudor's "Lilac Garden") and new works by principal guest choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett and whiz kid Christopher Wheeldon. It has performed in Budapest and at New York's Guggenheim Museum. It has collaborated with the cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci and the surrealist artist Patricia Nix...
Above all, Carolina Ballet has Robert Weiss. 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.
This time around I came to Raleigh not as a critic but as a civilian, more than happy to simply sit in my seat and watch Weiss and Taylor-Corbett do their stuff. I'll be at the premiere of Monet Impresssions tonight, accompanied by a local blogger friend, and I won't be taking any notes. I'm just going to look. That's my kind of night off.
Posted January 11, 2007 12:06 PM
