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As American Ballet Theatre visited London and Paris this month, it was both both cities’ first look at one of ABT’s most impressive home-grown talents, the formidable, twenty-two-year old David Hallberg. Tall and blond, Hallberg has the kind of short-waisted, long-legged physique which seems designed for ballet, especially the sinuous line of those legs, with their almost too-perfect curves and arches. It’s not just his physical gifts which command attention, but the way he uses them, with a purity which might seem a bit obsessive were the results not so consistently thrilling. First making his mark at ABT in bravura roles like Theme and Variations and Grand Pas Classique, Hallberg mastered their difficulties with flair, so much so that the sight of him in a big jeté, legs stretched fore-and-aft in a perfect, flying-carpet split, or in an amazing sisonne where those legs unfurling like wings, became a much-anticipated treat of the company's repertory.

Since then, he's dived from his classical perch into the depths of ABT’s famously eclectic repertory, most dramatically with his assumption a year ago of the role of Death in Kurt Joos’ antiwar ballet, The Green Table. Weighty, earth-bound and somber, Death is entirely different from his light, pure classical roles, yet Hallberg's Death proved a great popular and artistic success.

On this tour, he appeared in four ballets which show his versatility as well as ABT’s. He his debuted as Solor in the Kingdom of the Shades scene from La Bayadere along with Veronika Part, and also reprised Death in The Green Table. He was in the “classical” ensemble of Twyla Tharp’s tumultuous In the Upper Room, and Mark Morris’ sweet Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.

In a brief interview at ABT’s headquarters near Manhattan’s Union Square, Hallberg epitomized the catholic taste and an almost palpable hunger to experience, by watching and by doing, as great a variety of dance as possible. At ABT, he's learned a broad variety of roles with vastly different requirements, and he relishes the opportunities these give him to learn different ways of moving and thinking about a role. Sometimes it seems that "It's a challenge" is his highest form of praise.

He has a disarmingly direct and straightforward way of speaking, and it's easy to put out of your mind that you’re talking to one of the bright lights of this ballet generation, at least until he stretches an arm, and you see the casual grace and power in his upper body. After he mentioned that he wass still a bit sore from having danced the lead in Lar Lubovitch's Othello in Washington, we spoke a bit about his year at the Paris Opera Ballet school, roles he'll be doing in Europe and ones he'd like to do in the future, and about his omnivorous viewing habits in New York.

So a friend of mine spotted you in the Fourth Ring at the New York State Theater a few nights ago. How did you like the performance?

Wow. Word travels fast. I'm very conscious of not overdoing asking for comp tickets. I usually pay for my own tickets, and I see so much that sitting in the orchestra is a luxury most of the time, just because I've seen City Ballet so many times, and I go to the Met for contemporary performances. Honestly, you get a different performance up there than you do from the orchestra.

Do many other ABT dancers go to performances as much as you?

Some of them. It's exhausting, finishing a day of work and going to a show. We finish at seven, a show's at seven-thirty, so we have to go running to the State Theater. When there's something interesting on the program -- I was interested in seeing the Bigonzetti piece, In Vento -- it's worth it. I like to think it's enlightening your career, life, and artistic path.

Do you ever feel an urge to join City Ballet? I'm sure they'd love to have you.

I don't, though people have suggested it.

Do you go to the Brooklyn Academy of Music often?

It's probably my favorite venue. I try to see almost everything.

 

So how did it go, dancing in Othello? It looks grueling.

It is. It's brutal. I'm still feeling the aftershock of it. We just finished a little less than two weeks ago, and my body's still feeling it. It was an exploratory process for me. I'm not the typical....People were baffled I'd be doing Othello, they were more like, I should be Iago, or whatever.

It was a real challenge, but I'm always up to a challenge. You can never stop growing.

So let's backtrack a bit. You're tall now, you have great line and legs. Was that apparent when you started ballet at age 13?

Yes. I had a very good teacher, Kee Juan Han. I didn't know how great he was until I went off and did my own thing. He nurtured me so well, and just kind of formed me like clay in a sense. I had, luckily, been given these natural gifts. He was always just very nurturing and kind of molded me rather than letting me go wild. There were natural gifts there, natural physique, but it needed to be molded. I was still trying to get my bearings.

What made him so good? I gather he was very strict?

Very strict! He was very, very strict, and I am so grateful for that. I feel like in a lot of American training it lacks a certain amount of the discipline classical ballet calls for a lot of the time. In this day and age being politically correct doesn't always equate to what the rigors of classical ballet actually are. Prime examples are Russian training and French training. It's just so strict, with such discipline. It's what he really emphasized.

By not being "politically correct," you mean he was like a drill sergeant?

Uh huh. He was.

Not the person for sympathy if you were feeling tired?

No. No. And I'm just grateful for that, I really am. Now he's at the North Carolina School of the Arts; I've gone down there a few times to work with him.

After finishing your training at Arizona Ballet School, you spent the summer of 2000 at ABT's summer intensive, then went off to the Paris Opera Ballet school for what seems to have been a very trying year. How did you end up going there? Were you invited out of the blue?

I wasn't, actually. I wanted to spend my last year of training at a professional school. I wasn't at a professional school. I was the only boy, and I just needed to dance, I needed a men's class, I felt I just needed to get out there. I always knew Paris Opera was a long ways away. It was a long shot, not just in a geographical sense of course, but also that it was just the cream of the crop, like the Kirov school, and it wasn't like any American school. So I sent a short video, a ten minute video I'd prepared with my teacher -- barre, center and variations -- and two weeks later they sent me a litter that I was accepted. I was really shocked. I honestly thought I would not get in. I was too old, American.

So you weren't on any kind of scholarship?

No. We had to pay for it. There's three different types of students at Paris Opera. For regular French students, everything's paid for. You can be an etrangere, which means you don't stay at the dorms, or if you do there's a minimal fee. Then there is eleve payante, a paying student who'll pay a little bit to the school to be there. Eleve payante means someone who's a European. And then there's an eleve payante etrangere; that was me.

There was one star next to the names of eleves payantes in the programs, and two for eleve payant etrangere. I always joked I was one of the two-star people. I was an odd exception.

Were there many?

There were five to start. By two months later, there were two of us left.

I've often read that part of the school's style is to make people quit, to weed students out. Was it a hard experience in that way for you?

Only because I wasn't French, and I was only spending a year there. So, I didn't have certain advantages the French had. I knew I was going back to ABT (I'd already received an offer to join ABT 2). I wasn't relying on getting a contract with the Paris Opera Ballet, although I possibly would've been interested had I been offered one. But it's not just getting a contract; you have to go through a competition. It's a complicated thing.

It was a really beneficial learning experience for me. I wouldn't take back my experience at POB at all. I didn't speak French when I arrived there. It was sink or swim, basically. It's a very hard school, a very disciplined school, but the product they make is phenomenal in my eyes. Claude Bessy has done wonders for the school; built it from the ground up.

Did you have friends there?

I didn't. It was a solitary experience for me.

To jump ahead a bit, have you performed in Paris since leaving the school?

I haven't.

Have you been thinking much about what it will be like to return under such different circumstances?

I have, a little bit. You know, it's just interesting to me, where not only my career has gone since I left the school, but also how removed I am from my experience there. I spent a year there and after that, I went to ABT and it was fast and furious, just learning so much. I still am learning so much. So I didn't really keep any connection to the people at POB, to the people I went to school with. I'm looking forward to it, I really am. I'm in a good spot in my career, and it will be what it will be.

 

How did you end up as Death? Like the Moor in Othello, it's not necessarily the kind of role one might immediately associate with someone who first made his mark with such classical bravura.

Originally I was not supposed to do Green Table. I think they were, I don't know, they didn't consider me. I guess they were having a hard time finding a Death. Then Anna Markard, Kurt Joos' daugher, and Jeanette Vondersaar, three days into their cycle of setting it, they watched company class and asked me to come to rehearsal. They gave me some movement with everybody, and said they wanted me to do Death.

It ended up, it was one of the most beneficial processes I have ever encountered yet. Definitely top five; top three maybe. It was so intense, them setting the ballet. So many details, imagery, such depth to the movement and the meaning. I really, really enjoyed the process. Having been given the chance to perform the role numerous times already, I feel a personal connection. It's one of those things I feel very natural doing, well, natural's not a very good word. I just really connected to the role.

Had you seen it before?

Yes. Ballet Arizona had done it when I was training at the school. I remember watching rehearsals and performances. I was lucky to have seen the ballet; it's so rarely performed.

So after so many classical roles, Death was a challenge?

It was. Such different, angular movement. You have no choice other than to fully commit yourself to the style of the role, the style of the ballet. It's like no other. It by no means can be a phone-in.

Every piece you're doing in Europe is different. Green Table, Shades, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris. Do you have any part more of a favorite than the others?

Given that Green Table is so specific, has its own movement, the polar opposite has to be Bayadere, it's going to be a challenge...

Shifting gears?

Shifting gears can be difficult. One thing I find the hardest about the City Center season is, especially, doing Theme and Variations then going into Kylian or Forsythe. You can always use what you learn from something else, even something from weeks ago. It's one of the biggest challenges when I have Green Table one night, Bayadere the next.

So what might you bring from Green Table to Shades? In one you're Death, in the other you're the only one who's not dead.

Well, maybe weightiness. After all, Solor is a warrior.

You and Veronika Part are going to be making your debuts on the road, and you're in rehearsals now. How are they going?

It's one thing to the next. Learning Othello was such character development, with such a commitment to finding the movement, the character, the story line. That was the type of commitment Othello needs. Now it's finding Solor. Every role is different, every role has its own style. That's what's time consuming.

You're one of the "classical" group in In the Upper Room. That is another piece which looks utterly exhausting.

It is, definitely. It's almost like an engine, when you're in a BMW M5 and you can just feel it roaring and ready to go. That's like The Upper Room, because it just builds and builds and builds. And although it is exhausting, you just keep churning and churning and churning. There's always a small sense of dread when we're about to go on, only in the sense that it is so exhausting. But it's always just such a rewarding ballet.

And what part are you doing in the Mark Morris?

I do Wes Chapman's old part, not the Mischa part. It's interesting movement, yet again example of completely different movement. Twyla has her own things. Mark does also.

It's a fascinating European tour. We're not doing one full-length, but such a mixed, eclectic repertory.

In the spring, after this tour, do you have new roles you're looking forward to?

The full-length Bayadere at the Met. There are always the touring full-lengths we do during the winter, in the rest of the country. I debuted in Romeo and Juliet last year. This year, Gillian Murphy debuts Juliet, and I'll be her Romeo. Then there's our new Sleeping Beauty. I haven't done Sleeping Beauty yet, full-length. It's something that, I hope -- people tell me -- comes easily. The danseur noble, the prince. I hope I can show that side of me after doing Othello, etc.

Do you have any preferences between doing full-lengths at the Met, one or two nights a week, versus mixed repertory, where you might be dancing every night?

They're just so different. There's nothing like carrying a full evening, being Romeo or Siegfried and just having to carry the whole evening. But I also like the challenges of dancing different choreography like the City Center season.
 

Have you ever danced in Fancy Free?

I've done Fancy Free. I didn't do it at City Center, but at Kennedy Center. We did a gala with the Royal Danish and Bolshoi. Each took an act. ABT brought Fancy Free, the Bolshoi Spectre and Don Q, the Royal Danish brought Napoli excerpts, we closed with Fancy Free.

It was another Othello-type challenge, because that turn-in, be a sailor, be a regular guy, doesn't come so easily to me. I'm more turn-out, wear the tights, blah-blah-blah. So it was exciting. I don't think I've ever done a role as much fun as Fancy Free. I was the shy sailor. I didn't do the pas de deux. I don't think there was enough time to rehearse it.

Looking at ABT's repertory, you seem to have cornered the market on princes. Do you have any roles, in the back of your mind, you'd like to do?

Definitely Albrecht. I haven't done Albrecht yet; I'm looking forward to that one, and really kind of evolving the contemporary repertory, because there are just so many interesting choreographers out there, that I'd love to get a chance to work with. It's only a matter of time and circumstances.

Did you like the Bigonzetti (In Vento)?

I really did. I feel like there was structure. Sometimes I see choreography, it lacks piecing the puzzle pieces together, putting structure into the ballet. But it had a good amount of structure. I enjoyed it.

So, getting back to watching performances and saving money, you haven't joined City Ballet's Fourth Ring Society? That'd be too perfect.

No, but what's funny, is they call me to donate money. One time I actually told them my circumstances, that I actually dance across the plaza. They have a junior society, like MOMA. I have thought about doing that. It would be so ironic. There's this whole City Ballet/ABT thing that does not exist in my eyes. I'm completely supportive of what they do for ballet in New York City, and in the world. Maybe one day you'll see me in one of those pictures as a junior society member.