by Debbie Gilbert
This year, Ballet Memphis is celebrating
its 10th season as a professional company--the largest and most successful
dance organization ever created in this city. The company now employs 21
full-time professional dancers on 40-week contracts, stages four major productions
a year, and has extensive school-outreach and regional touring programs.
But this expansion has come at a price: growing pains. At Ballet Memphis' headquarters--a former AutoZone store on Summer Avenue near Perkins--sheets of plastic are draped across the ceiling to catch incoming rain. As dancers take class and rehearse in the two studios, they sidestep around a scattering of red plastic buckets labeled "DRIPS ONLY--NO TRASH."
"We have a strange requirement in our lease where we don't own the building, yet we're responsible for the roof," says marketing director Marilyn Adams Hury. "We don't see the point of spending money to repair it when we're not going to be here that much longer."
How much longer? At least a year. But sometime in 1998, the company and its school will move to a brand-new building at the corner of Trinity Road and Germantown Parkway, on a parcel of land donated by First Tennessee Bank. "To build our own facility on donated land is less expensive than renovating," explains Dorothy Gunther Pugh, Ballet Memphis' founder and artistic director.
With approximately 19,000 square feet of space, the $2.6 million building will encompass three studios, a costume room, lounge, student dressing rooms, separate dressing rooms and showers for the professional dancers, and lots of office space. The latter is especially important, according to Pugh. "Some of our staff have to work out of their houses because there's no room for them here," she says.
But the company's chaotic environment has been no barrier to artistic achievement. To prove what can be accomplished through vision, talent, and plenty of corporate support, Ballet Memphis is bringing back four of its most popular works for a production called Encore!, showing at The Orpheum this Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. (for tickets, call 763-0139 or 525-1515).
The first half of the program consists of three short, abstract works. Behind the Garden Wall, with music by Debussy, was choreographed by Gregory Huffman during the first year of the professional company (which was then called Memphis Concert Ballet). Janet Preslar later revised the piece to match the abilities of Ballet Memphis' newly acquired, highly skilled dancers, but the exquisite pas de deux set on Monique Tuell--the company's first professional ballerina, and still an audience favorite--remains the same.
Andante, a pas de deux staged by Dennis Wayne to a Rachmaninoff concerto, drew raves when it premiered at The Orpheum in February 1995. "People loved this one," says Pugh. "It's very beautiful, very sensual. The woman hardly ever touches the ground, so it's an incredible amount of work for the man."
In 1994, choreographer Stephen Greenston of Germany's Stuttgart Ballet staged Blue 'n' Gold for Ballet Memphis. A clever frolic, this piece features five men and five women engaged in a light-hearted battle of the sexes, accompanied by a Leonard Bernstein jazz tune.
Following an intermission, the
tone shifts 180 degrees to the elaborate story-ballet Scheherazade,
set to the famous Rimsky-Korsakov score. Pugh commissioned Polish choreographer
Oleg Briansky to create this work in 1991, and she's brought him back to
Memphis to restage it. Briansky once danced the original choreography of
Scheherazade, as created by Mikhail Fokine in 1910 for Serge Diaghilev's
Ballet Russes. But Briansky agreed with Pugh that Fokine's version, a harem
fantasy with sultans and concubines, was "too archaic by today's standards."
In Briansky's staging, the Arabian Knights element is reduced to a ballet-within-a-ballet, part of a larger story depicting the life of Polish dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950). The Ballet Russes star was considered the greatest male dancer of his time, the standard by which all others were judged until Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov came along. Unfortunately, Nijinsky suffered from schizophrenia, and it didn't help that he was the pawn in a tug-of-war game between his wife Romola and the tyrannical impresario Diaghilev. By his late 20s, Nijinsky had descended irretrievably into madness; he spent the rest of his life in mental institutions.
The ballet begins with Nijinsky sitting in an insane asylum envisioning his old roles, including the Golden Slave in Scheherazade. Through flashbacks, the tragic progression of his life unfolds, alternating between conflict and triumph.
"I'm not trying to tell a story per se," says Briansky. "It's not a play. But it creates strong feelings. I remember seeing people crying in the audience, because it's so dramatic--though not in a corny or sentimental way."
"The ending is about comfort and forgiveness and reaching for the sublime," says Pugh. "Yet there's no real resolution. We don't have another piece in our repertoire that's so open to interpretation."
It's this sense of emotional fulfillment that Pugh hopes audiences will derive from ballet. And now it's her mission to convince more people that if they tried watching ballet, they'd really like it.
"There's still a problem in America, especially here in the South," Pugh says. "Men are afraid to look at men in tights. I've had men tell me, `I'll support you, I'll make a donation, but I just can't go see those men in tights.' Yet they can look at skimpily clothed people on TV and it doesn't bother them at all. Dancers wear what they have to wear in order to do their job. In ballet, the motivations are almost always pure. We're using our bodies to express ideas, not to sell something."
Well, she is trying to sell one thing: The idea that Ballet Memphis, an ensemble of exceptionally talented dancers who came here from across the U.S. and from five other countries, is worth paying to see. Most Memphians don't know, for example, that company member Deirdre Carberry is a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre--one of the top ballet companies in the world--and has frequently been partnered by Baryshnikov. Other members have similarly impressive credentials, and their experience becomes obvious when you watch them move onstage.
You can also get a glimpse of the company in your living room this week. On Thursday, February 20th, at 9 p.m., WKNO-TV Channel 10 will air A Dancer's Life, a 30-minute behind-the-scenes documentary about Ballet Memphis. You'll see for yourself how much work and sweat and pain it takes to create the art of dance.
Ballet ain't for sissies, folks.