© Ulrich Beuttenmüller International Ballet Directors Conference 2005 Ballet.co magazine coverage of Dance East's Rural Retreat for Ballet Directors 2005 Future of Ballet and Dance Forum... to link with the Ballet Directors conferences. Go and have your say in where ballet should be heading. Introduction to 2005 Conference Ballet.co coverage of the 2003 Conference Reid Anderson Ballet.co interview in Dec 2002 Stuttgart Ballet Home page recent Stuttgart reviews

Many artistic directors might envy Reid Anderson. He runs Stuttgart Ballet with a licence to be experimental denied to most of his peers. His houses are ninety eight percent full even for the most challenging triple bills. Anderson, Stuttgart’s director since 1996, is fortunate in the richness of his company’s history. When the young John Cranko became director in 1961, he transformed Stuttgart Ballet, establishing its reputation as a forcing house for creativity and bringing together a highly talented ensemble including Egon Madsen, Richard Cragun, Birgit Keil, and, most notably, Marcia Haydée. Crucially Cranko left the company a rich artistic legacy with the story ballets, Onegin, The Taming of the Shrew and Carmen.

Stuttgart Ballet has become as much a symbol of its city as Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Despite the chill winds that have swept through the German economy, the company is still amply funded by the city authorities. But Reid Anderson knows his company is not immune to the cuts that have had such a dramatic effect on the arts elsewhere in Germany. The regional government of Baden-Württemberg, on which Stuttgart Ballet relies for half its funding, has made some cuts in its grant, and I found Anderson more cautious about the future than when we last met two years ago.

Reid Anderson’s career as a dancer began at Stuttgart Ballet, and he returned there as its director eight years ago. In the intervening years he had a degree of preparation for the role unusual in the world of ballet, first as a balletmaster and coach, and later as a producer, before he directed his first company, the fledging Ballet British Columbia in Vancouver. There he learnt how to survive with little subsidy, relying heavily on marketing and fundraising. He left Ballet BC after two years, moving to Toronto in 1989 to direct the National Ballet of Canada. While this company was five times the size of Ballet BC, its problems were very similar. Anderson’s budget had no provision for new productions – for these he had constantly to raise additional funds. While in Toronto, he raised eight million dollars for National Ballet of Canada as well as funds for the company’s new premises.

 

Alicia Amatriain and Ivan Gil Ortega in Onegin
© Stuttgart Ballet

Anderson’s knowledge of ballet company management is probably unparalleled. He is equally at home in the free enterprise North American context and the subsidised world of European dance. As the keeper of John Cranko’s artistic flame, he has staged works such as Onegin for ensembles around the world. His personal style is very direct – a willingness to engage, straight answers to straight questions – and it is not hard to picture him as a potential CEO of a commercial business. At Dance East’s previous summit of ballet directors in 2003 at Snape Maltings, Anderson was the longest serving director present – that will also be true this time – and had previously coached several of the other directors during their dancing careers. These included Madeleine Onne of Royal Swedish Ballet, David McAllister of the Australian Ballet and David Nixon of Northern Ballet Theatre. While Anderson says he enjoyed the exchange of experience with the emerging generation of artistic directors at the Snape summit, he found some of their stories sobering. “I left with a real appreciation of my situation here and a realisation of how much easier I have it here in Stuttgart than many of my colleagues.”

Take programming for instance.  Because Stuttgart Ballet is so financially secure, Anderson can offer seven world premieres in this year’s season, made by seven different choreographers. “I can take that chance. I have an interested public. I don’t have to worry, as I did in Canada, about a starter and a main course and a dessert at the end. I do that sometimes but I don’t have to. I can promote new choreography.”

The new works will be shown in three triple bills, the first in February in the smaller Schauspielhaus (or Playhouse), featuring choreography by Marco Goecke, Marc Spradling and Matjash Mrozewski, and the second on Stuttgart’s main Opera House stage in April, with choreography by Wayne McGregor, Nicolo Fonte (formerly of Nacho Duato’s Compañía Nacional de Danza), and Christian Spuck, Stuttgart Ballet’s resident choreographer.

Fostering choreographers from within the company’s own ranks is one of Reid Anderson’s absolute priorities. Stuttgart Ballet has a well-established reputation for encouraging new work. Crucial to this has been the Noverre Society, which every year organises a series of evenings of experimental work. Jirí Kylián, John Neumeier and William Forsythe took their first faltering choreographic steps at the Noverre evenings. Of the emerging generation, Christian Spuck is a Noverre graduate as too are Marco Goecke and Mark Spradling along with Douglas Lee, an English-born principal with the company (who is making a work this season for Norwegian National Ballet).

The Noverre Society evenings are open to choreographers both from the company and to visitors. Dancers give their free time, and rehearsal hours are ‘over and above the call of duty’. Choreographers make what arrangements they can with the wardrobe department for costumes. Some stage time is allocated for set and lighting. If creativity can survive the inevitable struggle for scarce resources, it is worth encouraging.  If Anderson is impressed by a work shown at Noverre and thinks that there is a talent to be encouraged, the next step is an opportunity to make a work on the Playhouse stage, and then, finally, the main Opera House stage.

Christian Spuck, now Stuttgart Ballet’s company choreographer, has perhaps most – of this generation - repaid the company’s creative investment. Last year he made his first full-length story ballet, Lulu, based on Frank Wedekind’s character. Afterwards the veteran German critic Horst Koegler praised Spuck as a worthy successor to Cranko, while Larry Lash, writing for the Financial Times, was impressed by Spuck’s manipulation of elements of Tanztheater in conjunction with ‘a striking modern ballet vocabulary’, and enough narrative to appease traditionalists. Lulu was a major success for Stuttgart Ballet, and it features again in the current season. Its success has been particularly important for Reid Anderson, who has been concerned at the dearth of ballet choreographers interested in making full-length narrative works.

 

Alicia Amatriain and Jorge Nozal in Lulu. A Monstre Tragedy
© Stuttgart Ballet

But Stuttgart’s programming is also a shrewd mix of the new and the proven. In addition to the more experimental work, Reid Anderson’s current season also includes Giselle, The Sleeping Beauty, Balanchine and Stravinsky mixed bills, Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew (with Cranko’s Onegin and Romeo and Juliet being performed on tour in Asia), as well as John Neumeier’s full-length work A Streetcar Named Desire, based on the Tennessee Williams play.

If there is a cloud on Anderson’s horizon it is the cuts in arts funding that have been forced by Germany’s deteriorating public finances. While Stuttgart Ballet has had cuts in its subsidy, these have been absorbed without major changes to artistic policy.  But experience elsewhere is discouraging. “What is very frightening in Germany is that with cutbacks it is usually the ballet or the dance company that goes”, Anderson told me. In Berlin Vladimir Malakhov is artistic director of a company born of the merger of three ensembles. Many dancers jobs were lost as a result of the merger – where there were once 140, there are now 88. At Leipzig Ballet, whose director, Uwe Scholz, died recently, 60 dancers have been whittled down to 40 and the company has also lost its school. “The moment the government abolished the school and reduced the number of dancers, that was it”, Anderson told me. “It changes the whole nature of the company and it was no longer a big gun company doing the big rep. You cannot be a 24 Swan company, because you cannot do that with 40 dancers.”

There are worrying developments too at Saarbrücken, where the Irish-born choreographer Marguerite Donnellan directs the ballet. The cultural budget has been cut so deeply that both the ballet and the city’s theatre are likely to close. The cities of Freiburg and Heidelburg have merged their two dance ensembles. While this is described as a ‘unique’ fusion, it actually means the end for the Freiburg Ballet Pretty Ugly and its director Amanda Miller. Cologne no longer has a ballet company: it now spends its dance budget on visiting companies. But the development that Reid Anderson finds most frightening of all is the disbandment of William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, a cost-cutting measure by the city council.

 

Reid Anderson
© Ulrich Beuttenmüller

Many of these cuts have been imposed despite the resilience of the dance audience. The reality in Germany, as elsewhere, Anderson accepts, is that dance and its institutions are not good at lobbying for themselves. “That has always been the problem. Dancers are not good at lobbying. It’s the way it is. I don’t see an end to that. Germany is not doing well and the economy is declining and everyone is looking where they can to cut costs. That is a very worrying situation for the dance world. Germany is quite famous for having large numbers of opera houses, each one with an opera and a ballet and that landscape is also starting to change.”

Whatever the intended agenda for Dance East’s 2005 summit, it will be surprising if the directors do not discuss the increasingly fragile economic context in which their companies have to justify their existences. Ballet needs political friends and an economic basis for survival, which is less vulnerable to rises and falls in public spending. Reid Anderson with his unusual experience both of the North American free market and of the more rarified atmosphere of public subsidy of a supportive German city is well placed to advise his fellow directors how they might navigate the future.