The Stuttgart Metroliner

By Joan Downs

John Cranko, founder of the Stuttgart Ballet in 1961, molded it into a company of world rank with his ballets on great classical themes: Romeo and Juliet, Eugene Onegin, The Taming of the Shrew. Cranko's traditional style stressed drama and athleticism. Ballet audiences were therefore stunned when, after Cranko's sudden death in 1973, American Choreographer Glen Tetley was appointed his successor. An iconoclast of the dance, Tetley, 49, raises conservative eyebrows high with his infusion of modern dance idioms into ballet. Again, unlike Cranko, he has always been known for relatively small dance pieces that concentrate on pure movement. He had never created an evening's length ballet. Some doubted that he ever could.

With mixed expectations, then, New Yorkers turned out at the Metropolitan Opera House last week for Balletdirektor Tetley's debut visit with the Stuttgart and his first full-scale work, Daphnis and Chloe. The choice was an odd one. Daphnis and Chloe has not been a lucky ballet. The 1912 Paris premiere by Diaghilev's Ballet Russe suffered from underrehearsal and, according to Michel Fokine, who choreographed the work, indifferent dancing by Karsavina and Nijinsky. No one faulted the dancing of Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes in the 1951 Sadler's Wells revival, but the public was cool to Choreographer Frederick Ashton's jarring transfer of the mythic lovers from the 3rd century B.C. to modern Greece. This spring, for New York City Ballet's Ravel Festival, John Taras confected an ill-favored mod-squad version that will probably be consigned to the choreographic trash can. George Balanchine flatly called the Ravel score, with its wildly eccentric rhythms, impossible. Nonetheless, because he was "madly in love with the music," Tetley plunged ahead. Said he: "It is simply one of the most sensual scores ever written. Ravel invoked a Greece of the imagination."

Stripping the shepherd's tale of its garlands and Hellenistic pageantry, Tetley retains only the theme of the legend to provide a scaffolding over which he has draped an elaborate visceral poem. In the Chagall-blue-and-aqua forest of Costume and Scenery Designer Willa Kim, Daphnis and Chloe, two innocents danced by Richard Cragun and Marcia Hay dee, are instructed in the art of love-making by Egon Madsen's lithe and sinuous Pan.

Outer Limits. Tetley's vision is not literary but psychological, vital and sexual. Absent is the usual dance contest between Daphnis and the cowherd Dorkon, danced by Reid Anderson, for the reward of Chloe's kiss. The veil dance of Lykanion, the Grecian Salome, is gone too. Instead, German-born Ballerina Birgit Keil slithers into a hot pas de deux with Cragun, whose ardent body is counterpointed by his gentle face. Through her mellifluous movement, Haydee conveys a Chloe too ripe to be altogether innocent.

Like Cranko, Tetley pushes his dancers to outer limits, interweaving distended limbs and torsos in intricate patterns. Ballerinas jet up like natural gey sers in grandiose one-handed lifts, only to plummet a moment later in balletic kamikaze dives. This is not orthodox story ballet. But the choreography is fluent, strong, and from the beginning moves with the propulsion of a Metroliner. Tetley's Daphnis and Chloe should be a Stuttgart staple.

With reporting by HP-Times.com

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