Gazelleschaft

Considering the sad record of the past, the idea of a good German ballet troupe might seem as implausible as a Nepalese surfing club. Times have definitely changed. Not long after the curtain lifted at the American debut of the Stuttgart Ballet last week, the audience at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House was cheering in disbelief at the light-as-air elegance of a pack of young gazelles from the edge of the Black Forest.

Although the Stuttgart Ballet (formal name: the Wlirttemberg State Theater Ballet) is German mainly through accident of residence, its accomplishments have become as strong a source of pride to its city as the Mercedes and Porsche automobile works located there. Like most major German cities, Stuttgart (pop. 650,000) had long maintained an opera house, with a resident but minimal ballet company to help out where needed. In 1960 John Cranko, then a 33-year-old South Africa-born staff choreographer of the Royal Ballet, staged Benjamin Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas in Stuttgart. He was immediately engaged as ballet director, with a mandate to build a company of international quality.

Limitless Variety. Cranko has gone the mandate one better. He has given Stuttgart not only a superbly knit, brilliant young company but has also played on his dancers' strengths to form a style that is like none other. At any given moment in a typical Cranko ballet, the stage bristles with a seemingly limitless variety of movement. Instead of bloodless, assembly-line precision, the Stuttgart's 38-member corps is more apt to suggest a 38-ring circus, with a panoply of gesture and stance that dazzles the viewer's eye.

Cranko's work is at its best in extended ballets with strong dramatic substance. Opening the company's three-week New York visit was one of his best, an evening-long interpretation of Pushkin's intensely romantic verse-drama Eugene Onegin. Two nights later, the company presented an even more stunning tour deforce, a balletic version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Both were lavishly mounted, eye-filling pieces. Onegin uses a score by Music Director Kurt-Heinz Stolze based on short pieces by Tchaikovsky. The work moves quickly and assuredly through Pushkin's tale of romance and betrayal, never assuming the luxury of a dance-for-dance's-sake diversion, bending every movement toward dramatic ends. Shrew, with music by Domenico Scarlatti arranged by Stolze and liberally peppered by his modern harmonies, adds a welcome touch of wit and tenderness to Shakespeare's buffoonery.

Both works featured the company's prima ballerina, Brazilian-born Marcia Haydee, 29, a dancer of stunning technique with the rare ability to turn the simplest body movement into a full statement. Touchingly simple as the lovelorn Russian girl who draws strength from rejection, deliciously rambunctious as Shakespeare's ultimately tamed volcano, Haydee is to the dance what Maria Callas has been to opera. She is an artist incapable of a dull or empty gesture, able to communicate a state of mind through an impressive range of movement or even by standing still. Her frequent partner is California-born Richard Cragun, 24, a bravura but seemingly effortless soloist who within a very few years may be the world's finest male dancer.

Of 52 ballets currently in the Stuttgart repertory, well over half are by Cranko, created after he took over the company. They range from reworkings of such familiar masterpieces as Giselle and Romeo and Juliet to a mixed-media glorification of contemporary neuroses called Presence. Following its current visit, the company will store its scenery in New York, return to Europe for the summer, and open a transcontinental tour in Philadelphia in October. Stuttgart is beginning to repay Cranko and his company for their contribution to civic fame. Currently under construction back home is a state-subsidized $1,000,000 ballet school, to assure the continuance of the city as a center for something more than automobiles. That, along with a subsidy from city and state, should keep the Stuttgart Ballet moving swiftly ahead on the autobahn to glory.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.