© John Slater Ballet into the 21st Century Conference Ballet.co magazine coverage Ballet into the 21st Century forum... to link with the second Ballet Artistic Directors conference. Go and have your say in where ballet should heading. Introduction to Snape Conference Wayne Eagling profile David Bintley profile Mark Baldwin profile recent Stuttgart reviews Stuttgart Ballet Home page

BMC: What issues are you most interested in having discussed at Snape?

RA: I’m very interested to see how everybody feels about globalisation in the ballet world. Many of us, especially the big ballet companies, are doing the same type of rep. The same full-length ballets are going around from company to company. I have the Cranko rep that was made here. Monica Mason has the MacMillan rep. One is always looking, when one has a big company, for full-length ballets. The “bums on seats” factor is relevant for many companies. Here in Germany it is slightly different. There is a rarified atmosphere of total subsidy. John’s ballets are being danced around the world. Most big companies are dancing Manon. It is starting now also with John Neumeier’s The Lady of the Camellias. What is happening out there is that young people choreographically are not addressing full-length ballet, or story ballet issues. For big ballet companies, that have to worry about that sort of thing, to make an original full-length ballet is, I guess, what most of us would dream of. Until we can do that, one seems to be filling in with full-length ballets that have worked somewhere else around the world. That’s an interesting issue for me.

The other issue that is, I think, pretty clear to all of us, is: where are the classical ballet choreographers, who

“Most of the young people today do short non-narrative abstract works. To get them actually to put their hands in the fire, and say something concrete, is very very difficult.” Reid Anderson

will take this art form forward, coming from? Who are they? How will we make that happen? Here in Stuttgart we create about five or six new works a year. We are a pretty creative company, along the lines that John Cranko envisioned it. Most of the young people today do short non-narrative abstract works. To get them actually to put their hands in the fire, and say something concrete, is very very difficult. Those are the kind of issues that would be very interesting to me.

Of course I am a very different animal here in Germany, than the people that will be representing companies from North America. I noticed that, when we had the directors’ conference in Toronto last May, a lot of the problems facing those companies didn’t exist for me. Because I was one of the few people at that conference from Europe and at this new conference there are going to be many many more people from Europe, I think the balance will be much better, for me at any rate, to hear what their experiences have been in subsidised theatres.

You mentioned the National Ballet of Canada’s Past Present Future Conference in Toronto. It was, of course, the first gathering of its kind. Do you regularly get to talk to your artistic director colleagues and to discuss the problems you share in common?

I do, yes, because I have a lot of friends that are directors. You phone up and say ‘don’t you think it would be nice if….’ or ‘shall we do a dancer exchange?’ or ‘do you have someone that could come and dance this, because I’m in a pickle’, something like that. I found the Toronto experience very valuable. We all got together and could actually talk to each other over a drink or over dinner. I found it really fascinating. There are people I have “known” for years, but never really really knew. We talked about the issues and what we are facing. I am not a meetings person. They normally don’t do anything for me. But Toronto gave me a lot of hope. Snape will be the biggest ever. In all my years I have never seen anything of the stature of the size of this endeavour.

No. It is not stuck. Being stuck, where people think we are stuck, is what a lot of people like. If you do a good traditional version of Swan Lake, and you dance it well, and you have good dancers to do that, that will always sell. You are not stuck from the point of view that you do not have a product. For instance, tonight in a few hours I am going into a dress rehearsal for Cranko’s version of Swan Lake, which we have been dancing since 1963. It is a very beautiful version of Swan Lake, lots of beautiful ‘John-isms’ in it. I could sell that ballet every day of the week for three months at least. There is still a great love for the classics that I don’t think will ever die. Having said that, I love Mats Ek’s Swan Lake, his Giselle and his Sleeping Beauty: especially the one he made for television which was absolutely genius. There is a place for all that. We do, or did - myself and my ballet mistress Valentina Sabina - a very traditional Giselle. I believe that Giselle is Giselle is Giselle. If you are going to show it, show it in the way it was probably meant to be. On the other hand, I could easily see that we could do Mats Ek’s version in our company

“I don’t think that the art form is dying” Reid Anderson

as well, and show the two works, one in juxtaposition with the other. That would be equally interesting.

So, no I don’t think that the art form is dying. Some people and critics, and critics of me too, say that it is stodgy. I just don’t believe that if you take a classic like Giselle and you put it in modern sets, and you change the frocks somehow, but you kind of keep the choreography and maybe add the odd thing: for me that is not doing it. Then I’d rather go to something completely different and just go the whole hog on that. Here in Stuttgart, that is not my problem at all, with the classics in whatever guise they are being presented. My problem is to find choreographers that can make many ballets in a season and make the ballets different enough, so that the public is interested in seeing them.

But looking at your repertory for the present season, I have the impression that your company is fantastically successful at creating new work. There is certainly a great volume of it, in comparison to other companies that seem to struggle with creating new ballets in a way that your company, on the face of it, does not?

There is a huge volume. I have a built-in public here. The audience adores the Stuttgart Ballet. Nobody could believe it, when I said this in Toronto, but people stop me on the street, and the one thing they ask is: “why can we never get tickets to the Stuttgart Ballet?” That is my problem. That is not the problem most companies have. Having said that, there are some modern evenings that don’t sell out so well (perhaps an 80% audience). But the season before last, we did 98% and last season 96%. We play sometimes in the Schauspielhaus (the Playhouse), as well as in the Opera House. The ‘bums on seats’ factor is not a big factor for me. My public, and certainly the critics, want to see the new and the different. When I was director of the National Ballet of Canada, for instance, I could never have done what I do here. In the last three seasons I have done evenings where every ballet was new. People think that is fantastic, the greatest thing ever. Not that the choreographers will all turn out, necessarily, or turn into geniuses. There is such an interest in the company and in the art form, that I can do that. In Toronto, it would have been impossible. If I had a new ballet there, usually what I did was: I would open with, say, Balanchine’s Serenade, or with the second act Shades from Bayadere, or something of that ilk, or maybe Paquita. Then I would put the modern work in the middle and close with a short ballet that might be a story ballet, perhaps a Month in the Country or Elite Syncopations. I always had to put a menu together: a first course, a second course and a dessert. Here in Stuttgart I do not have to do that. That is great. It means I can be much more experimental. My public is going to go with me, and the critics certainly.

Yet there is a major problem with Germany’s public finances and, in particular, in the funding of local government. It has affected some companies, such as Ballett Frankfurt, has it had any implication for you?

At the moment, no. But it will come. We have been dealing with cuts, small as they would be, over the last few years. When I first took over the company, (it’s hard to believe that I am in my seventh season already here), the very first time I came to Stuttgart, they cut local government spending across the board. We were to have been cut four million Marks, but ended up with cuts of two million. These cuts have been happening, in small doses, since I arrived and it is a very scary time here in Germany, as it is everywhere in the world. But at the moment, it’s still OK. One of the reasons is that the theatre here is extremely successful. The Opera has been nominated for four successive years as the ‘Opera House of the Year’ in the German-speaking world. The Schauspielhaus, the Playhouse, is also highly successful. It’s invited everywhere and is doing cutting-edge stuff.

Our company, Stuttgart Ballet is, like Mercedes-Benz and BMW, a symbol of Stuttgart. Last year we were in Japan, in Italy and in Korea. This season we return to America for seven weeks and next year we have five tours. The people here and the government here are extraordinarily proud of Stuttgart Ballet and seem to understand that art is important too and that part of what makes Stuttgart Stuttgart, is the Stuttgart Ballet and that it gives the city a profile. The mayor is very for us. The president of the Lander of Baden-Württemberg is very for us. They give us, equally fifty-fifty per cent of our budget. Yes, it is a little bit frightening out there, true. We will probably have to tighten our belt to some extent, but I don’t anticipate it being too grave.

Earlier you mentioned the development of young choreographers. How do you approach this issue in your own company and how do you get them from the workshop stage to the point where you can give them a proper production budget, launch them on a big stage and trust them?

I do it exactly as John Cranko did when he was alive, and in the way I learnt from him. We have our Noverre evenings every year (the choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre worked in Stuttgart two hundred years ago). When I first came to Stuttgart at the age of 19 in 1969, these evenings had been going on for years. They weren’t evenings then, they were matinees. They have become so popular now that, if we do them in the Chamber Theatre, we do six or seven evenings. If we do them in the Schauspielhaus, which holds 900 people, we do a couple of evenings. They are extraordinarily popular.

I have heard a little about the Noverre evenings. Explain how they work.

Fritz Höver, who runs the Noverre Society, organises these evenings. The choreographers come from the company. Choreographers from outside the company, who are dancers, can come and do something as well. They work like this. The dancers give their time freely; the choreographies are choreographed over and above the call of duty, which means, not in ‘real time’. The dancers not only do the ballets, but they do them in their free time. Stage time is given for set and lighting. There is some money for costumes, but of course we have a huge costume department where dancers can find costumes. Then Fritz puts the evening together. He has been running the Noverre Gesellschaft since before John Cranko came to Frankfurt. It still continues in the same way today.

If I or John Cranko in his day, or Marcia (Haydée) when she was director, think that someone has talent, then we start off in the smaller house, the Schauspielhaus, and give them something there. Then, over the next few years, if I feel that the talent still warrants it, they get more chances there. Then they get a chance to do something in the big house, the Opera House. That means all that entails in the way of an orchestra, sets and costumes. I now have a resident choreographer, Christian Spuck (see picture below, Ed). I have another wonderful choreographer, he’s English actually, Douglas Lee, and he came and auditioned for me in the first year we held those huge auditions in 1996. He was trained at the Royal Ballet School, and I think, at the English National Ballet School as well. In the six years since, he has become principal dancer here. He is a beautiful dancer and he is also a very good choreographer, which I discovered through the Noverre evenings. Now Douglas has done four weeks. This is the first season in which he will do a ballet in the opera house in June.

I think you’re right. It’s that kind of nurturing. As one does with dancers actually. You nurture them with a carrot. “There you go”. Then the carrot gets bigger, “come on, let’s go!” And it’s the same with choreographers. Douglas is actually a very talented choreographer. As I mentioned earlier, we will be on tour in America for seven weeks from the

“John Neumeier, Jirí, Billy and I were all good friends. I was in very many of Billy’s first ballets” Reid Anderson

middle of March until the end of April. We will show Douglas’s latest piece everywhere, in Los Angeles and in New York. That’s the way I do it and I really don’t know of a better way. That’s exactly how it happened with Jirí Kylián. Jirí and I were in the Royal Ballet School together. We both joined Stuttgart in the same season. Already John Neumeier was here as a dancer. Then, just a few months before John (Cranko) died, John hired Billy Forsythe. John Neumeier, Jirí, Billy and I were all good friends. I was in very many of Billy’s first ballets. That’s how they got their start, all in the Noverre evenings.

You are not primarily a choreographer….

I’m not at all a choreographer. I used to choreograph, at my first company, Ballet British Columbia, basically because I had to.

In terms of running Stuttgart Ballet properly, are you glad you don’t have the onus of being a choreographer as well?

Absolutely. My day is so full. I eat, sleep and drink this. I don’t think I could do the job that I do, if I was a choreographer as well. Although – other people do it. Chapeau, chapeau, they do it very well. I think it is rather positive that I am not a choreographer, because I can see the bigger picture. I don’t only have ‘my dancers’, or ‘the dancers that I like to work with’, as can happen. The dancers that are in my company are the dancers that I want to have in my company. Sometimes, choreographers are interested in them, and sometimes not. If they are not, it is up to me to find things, if I think that they have a reason to belong in this company and a reason to be here, then it is up to me to find things for them to do. That is very much part of my job. I think, perhaps, if you are a choreographer/director, that might not be what would happen. It works actually quite well for me that I am not a choreographer.

Training artistic directors: could you have learnt to do your job other than by doing it in practice. Is there any way of training future artistic directors?

No. For me though, I was trained.

How?

Nobody knew that I was being trained. It was training without borders in that I was trained actually to be a ballet director. But nobody knew it was happening. Nobody has ever asked me this question before, so let me try and explain it to you. When I was in my early thirties, I did a teacher training programme here at Stuttgart Ballet with Alexander Ursuliak. He was the balletmaster here and he asked Marcia Haydée if he could give a teacher training course. She said: ‘yes, of course he could.’ He gave a teachers’ training course over two years (because we were all still dancing then). In those days we worked from ten o’clock in the morning until one, and five o’clock in the evening until eight. The afternoons were free. Over a two-year period I did a teacher training course in the Vaganova method with Alex. Then, later on, one of the ballet staff left quite suddenly. Marcia came to me and said: “would you be interested in being the balletmaster, as well as dancing, because I don’t want to bring somebody into the company from outside.” I guess at that time I was 32 years old. I said: “yes I’d love to.” I jumped at the chance. I started ‘balletmastering’, if that’s the word in English, and soon ended up teaching class everyday and doing it while I was still dancing. It meant I had to have eyes in the back of my head. I would do the whole barre and half of the centre. Somehow it worked. I started to coach the roles I used to do, and worked quite a bit with the corps de ballet. Also, Marcia used me to do the hard things; to tell one that she had to lose weight, tell another that he is not going to do the role, tell another that this is not good enough. That kind of thing.

Crucial skills….

Then I was in on the planning. I was told: “why don’t you help with the plans, because you have a good brain.” So I started to do plans and then I was in on meetings. By the time I was 35 and I decided I wanted to give up dancing, I thought that I had two choices: to stay in Stuttgart as a balletmaster, or, maybe leave Stuttgart after 17 years, go back to Canada, freelance and see what would happen. I made the second choice, because I just thought that I was unfireable, that I had it all. I thought ‘that’s too comfortable. Maybe you’ll be in the right place for the wrong reason. I decided to leave, probably the best decision I ever made. I moved back to Vancouver, where I came from. Then suddenly Ballet British Columbia, a young fledging company, fell into my lap. I became a director after a year’s freelancing. The one thing that I missed while freelancing was that you do it all, but then the premiere comes and everybody finds it nice or not, and you leave and you can’t build on anything. I’ve been so used to, my whole life, building on things. When the job at Ballet British Columbia came up, I jumped at it. I learnt so much there. I didn’t even know what marketing and development was. We never had that in Stuttgart. We never had to advertise, we never had to market anything, and we never had to develop anything. We didn’t need the money: it was subsidised. That was a huge learning curve, making my first public speeches to raise money.

Then two years later I put my name in for the National Ballet of Canada: not because I wanted to, but because someone said that I should. Out of eighty candidates, suddenly I had it and that was another huge learning curve. It was Ballet BC, but five times as big, with a huge orchestra, a big house, a board of directors – all the things that we really don’t have in Germany very much. Our board here meets twice a year and it is all politicians. So, it seems like the serendipity of life that I was somehow meant to learn the things I needed to learn, to come back and take over the Stuttgart Ballet. In Canada, you are subsidised to a certain extent, but it got worse and worse and so I was doing fundraising continually, lunch here, and dinner there. I raised eight million dollars in the seven years. This was just to do new productions, because I didn’t even have a line in my budget for new productions. Then we raised huge amounts of money for a new building. Actually that was also very strange. I raised all the money for it, saw all the building happening, but when the building opened, I moved to Stuttgart, so I never really moved into my office. So, yea, I did have training as a ballet director. But it just happened. It was the serendipity of life.

I kept learning things one thing after another and then Ballet British Columbia enabled me to take over the National Ballet of Canada, and funnily enough, even though we don’t have all the fundraising concerned here in Germany, the

“When I came back to Stuttgart, the problem was that I had to clean up the company. I fired twenty-five people before I took over. Most of them were my friends.” Reid Anderson

National Ballet of Canada certainly taught me, running a huge company for seven years in Toronto, all the things I needed about the ways of dancers, choreographers, money – what I needed to come back to Stuttgart. When I came back to Stuttgart, the problem was that I had to clean up the company. I fired twenty-five people before I took over. Most of them were my friends. Most of them I had grown up with. If anyone had asked me what was the hardest time of my life, that was the seven months of my life making the transition in 1996 from the National Ballet of Canada to Stuttgart. When we opened our first performance in the Fall of 1996, twenty-five dancers had left the company and twenty-one new dancers had come.

Let me ask you about the culture of the company itself: making dancers better dancers, equipping them properly for what they do. Is your company very traditional in terms of its hierarchy?

No. We have hierarchy, because hierarchy is psychologically very important to dancers, I find. But, the hierarchy

“Hierarchy is psychologically very important to dancers, I find. But, the hierarchy really means nothing when you get into the ballet room” Reid Anderson

really means nothing when you get into the ballet room. The hierarchy is needed so a dancer knows that they’re getting ahead. I know, because I was a dancer. They want to see it on paper. They want to have it in their CV. With us, it’s just like it was in John’s time, Marcia’s time, Glen’s time (Glen Tetley). Very often I will have a principal dancer, a woman dancer with a corps-de-ballet man, or exactly the opposite. When choreographers come to me, they can have anything they want, with whom they want, the mix that they want. That is very important to me. But the hierarchy is there, because I feel it is very necessary for the dancers to know where they are, for the public to know, and for the critics to know, who is up and coming.

I keep up with that hierarchy on paper, but we are not hierarchical at all in the company. We are all doing what we can do, the best we can do, to make it the best we possibly can. We have – kind of – a very loosey-goosey way of working. We work when we have to: we work the way we need to, to make it work, to make the company attractive to choreographers, to make people want to come back here, to make people very happy when they are here. Particularly when it comes to the point of view of creation; there we all are, the choreographer is there. She or he is God. We are there to serve them and we are going to do the best we possibly can to serve them. That’s how I was brought up and that very much is how it is nowadays.

A final question: the word ‘ballet’ is understood very differently here in mainland Europe to the way it is understood in Britain. There the connotation is the classical tradition. It seems a much more of a ‘catch-all’ word in Europe. How do you experience the divide between ballet and contemporary dance? Or is it a divide that is real to you?

I don’t think there is a divide anymore. I call it ‘dance’ now. I call a ‘pas-de-deux’ a ‘duet’. My language has changed through the exposure to “the modern dance world”. I think that ‘we dance’. The basic difference is that we

“I don’t think there is a divide anymore. I call it ‘dance’ now. I call a ‘pas-de-deux’ a ‘duet’. My language has changed through the exposure to “the modern dance world”. I think that ‘we dance’.” Reid Anderson

dance, based on a technique that modern dancers don’t have. Some do, some don’t. For me, dance is dance is dance. I think a really well trained classical ballet dancer, that is intelligent, musical and has that, what John Cranko used to call, ‘it’, that magical ‘it’. You don’t know what ‘it’ is. But if you have it, you have it. You can’t get it. You can work on it. If you have that combination, that dancer can really do anything. What I have to expect of my dancers in this company is incredible. If you take the spectrum from A to Z, what they actually do here, from the stylistic point of view, is phenomenal compared to what we used to do. Just phenomenal. For me, what is very important is that everything looks like it should look. If it’s Robbins, it has to look like Robbins. If it’s Cranko, it should look like Cranko. MacMillan should look like MacMillan. Kylian should look like Kylian. Forsythe should look like Forsythe.

You have to have the people coming into your company, either, if the choreographer is not alive anymore, then designated people, who know these things inside out. I go around the world doing John’s things. People have to come in with the knowledge and the love of the way that it was when the choreographer was alive, or the way that it is, if the choreographer can’t come. What is expected of dancers nowadays is phenomenal. It’s not any good anymore just to hire a very nice young lady, and – yes – she’s pretty and has nice legs and she’ll fit in the corps-de-ballet. But what will she, or he, do when it comes to the modern side of what we do. Because the modern side of what we do, certainly here in Stuttgart, is so extremely important, that they have to be able to move as well. The expectations are extremely high. At our auditions now, we audition the dancers. The ones that we are interested in, then we send them into a room with a coach. Then they are coached in a modern variation, for the ladies not on pointe but in soft shoes. Gentlemen of course too. Then they come back and show us that. Often times we have changed our minds, positively, about dancers, because they could move and they had something, where we thought: “wow! – This could be for the modern side of our rep, absolutely fantastic. So, it is a very different ballgame nowadays. Dancers, certainly those that I would be interested in, really have to be able to nail it all on very very many different levels. That was starting to be the case, when I was young.

I think a person, maybe one can say, that personified this change would be Glen Tetley. Glen, I think, really started to wed the two different styles of classical ballet with modern dance. I could be wrong here, but it seems to me that he was pivotal in bringing modern dance to the classical ballet world; that you have to be able to contract and release; you have to be able to breathe; you have to be able to move; you have to be able to walk properly on the stage; you have to be able to bring a kind of pride and a kind of animal thing to the stage, that classical dancers until his time didn’t do. There was this strict line between modern dancers and classical dancers. That line is so blurred now that I don’t know where the divide begins or ends. I find that, actually, the most fascinating thing about the art form at the moment.