Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Please let me know via e-mail as soon as you spot All in the Dances in your local bookstore. I have yet to see it in New York, so I’d appreciate knowing where it’s on sale, how many copies are in stock, and what kind of display it’s getting.
Much obliged.
(And yes, I’ve finally answered all my accumulated blogmail. Sorry it took so long! I’d tell you I won’t let it happen again, but I know you wouldn’t believe me….)
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 r
I write about Carolina Ballet with some regularity, but it occurred to me on the way back to New York that many of you might not be aware of how the company got started. To that end, here’s part of a longer piece I wrote about Robert Weiss and his dancers five years ago for the New York Times. More than a few things have changed for the better since then (though not, alas, the constant struggle to make financial ends meet), but it’s still quite a tale.
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RALEIGH, N.C. — How long does it take to start a professional ballet company from scratch? Don’t try this at home, but Robert Weiss, the founding artistic director of Carolina Ballet, did it in just under two years. He answered an ad published in Dance Magazine in November of 1996; 23 months later, his new company, 21 dancers strong, made its debut here, accompanied by the 67-piece North Carolina Symphony. The company opened its doors with a demanding all-Balanchine program, and since then it has presented works by such noted choreographers as William Forsythe, Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Christopher Wheeldon, as well as two new full-evening ballets by Mr. Weiss himself.
It takes a driven man to carry off a high-wire act like that, and Mr. Weiss, a New York City Ballet alumnus known to all as “Ricky,” is nothing if not driven. A quarter-century ago, one dance writer compared him to Jimmy Porter, the seething young working-class anti-hero of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger”; at 50, he is still an in-your-face lapel-grabber, more polished but just as tough. He has had to be tough. After running Pennsylvania Ballet for eight years, Mr. Weiss ran afoul of the board and was fired in 1990. He then spent the next six years looking for a job. “I got a raw deal, and I had a very hard time,” he says. “I sent out resumes and auditioned for every post that opened up–there were 13 of them. Sometimes I’d come in second, but never first.”
You’d think a ballet company situated well below the Mason-Dixon line would have preferred someone a bit more genteel. But the Old South has changed, and though board chairman J. Ward Purrington, a Raleigh native, has a magnolia-sweet accent that any Hollywood casting director would covet, he is also a no-nonsense lawyer who speaks of Carolina Ballet as if it were a new Internet company: “What this is, is a venture start-up. You have to be lean and agile, and very, very good, and you have to grow as fast as you can.”…
After an abortive attempt to use a local dance school as the basis for a professional troupe, Mr. Purrington realized that he would have to build from the ground up, so he advertised for an artistic director; he received 98 applications, all but one consisting of fulsome cover letters and inch-thick resumes. The exception was Mr. Weiss, who sent a four-sentence letter and a one-page vita. “I’d had it up to there with looking for a job,” he says. “What did I know about North Carolina? And who was Ward Purrington, anyway?” But his bluntness impressed Mr. Purrington, and the two men started talking. Four months later, Mr. Weiss finally came in first.
“Ward said he wanted to start a ballet company on the highest level,” Mr. Weiss recalls. “I told him that every little city in America has a little company with a million-dollar budget, and they’re all trying to pander to what they think the public wants. You can’t do that if you want to do something real. You have to go for quality and seriousness, right from the start–good dancers, good ballets, good d
I’m listening to “My Ship,” from Miles Davis’ Miles Ahead, arranged by Gil Evans. Mmmmm.
Next up: The O’Kanes’ “Oh Darlin'” (recently downloaded from iTunes, thank you very much).
Tyler Green, whose Modern Art Notes
appears under the artsjournal.com umbrella, is now the art critic of Bloomberg News–an excellent choice, in which I am well pleased.
Read all about it at From the Floor, another superior art blog.
(Incidentally, Tyler never bothered to tell me the news. Shame on him! In the never-to-be-forgotten words of John L. Lewis, “He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.” So I’m a-tootin’.)
A reader writes:
A story I thought you might enjoy hearing:
My brother has no formal education, and never acquired a love of books. I doubt he’s read more than a dozen in his entire life, and he is not a young man.
Yesterday, he happened to notice a copy of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken on my bookshelf and began thumbing through it. Then,
to my great surprise, he sat down and began reading
it. Engrossed in it would be a better way of putting
it. Every so often he would look up and smile and read
aloud some terrific line from the book. Understand,
this is a guy who had never heard of Mencken before he
picked up your book. “Damn, who IS this Teachout
dude?” he asked at one point. “I’d give anything to be
able to write like he does.”
When my brother left, he took The Skeptic with him. He
promised to finish it quickly and return it promptly. I’ve no doubt he will do the former if not the latter.
I’m still smiling.
“A good action/adventure movie is like a great amusement-park ride, and I’m just not that interested in spending a year of my life on that kind of job. It’s not very interesting to me. One of my favorite things about moviemaking is working with actors. One of the reasons I get such good actors to work for scale in our movies is because most of what they do is very interesting to them. Whereas in a blockbuster, they’re in front of a blue screen yelling
Courtesy of iTunes, I’m listening to the bombs-bursting-in-air finale of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, played to the hilt by William Kapell. Bedtime music it isn’t, so I’ll follow it up with “Seven Wonders,” my favorite ballad from Nickel Creek’s This Side (I love Sara Watkins’ fragile lead vocal).
See you tomorrow. Or not.
An ArtsJournal Blog