Word: cranko
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Dame Margot Fonteyn is indisputably a prima ballerina assoluta. The Stuttgart Ballet now ranks among Europe's best dance companies. Its director and chief choreographer, John Cranko, is possibly the reigning master of story ballet. Put them all together and what do you get? What you get, sad to say, is a campy, overripe, overdecorated disaster called Poème de I'Extase, which was given its American première last week at the Metropolitan Opera House...
...contrast, Cranko's Taming of the Shrew is a near perfection of sadness, sweetness and light. Particularly as danced by Haydée and Cragun (as Kate and Petruchio). Shakespeare's antic frolic, set to a score composed of snatches of Scarlatti music, subtly explores a remarkable range of domestic feeling from dominance to submission and finally to partnership. For Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the fourth full-length storybook ballet that Stuttgart is offering U.S. audiences, Cranko discards the whole Tchaikovsky opera score in favor of a graceful montage that helps make the ballet a romantic matinee...
Hardly anybody had ever heard of the Stuttgart Ballet-a small dance com pany paid for out of public funds to supply divertissements occasionally interspersed in operas-until the Württem-berg State Theater director, Walter Erich Schäfer, had the insight to hire John Cranko and give him his head in 1961. Cranko started by firing half the dispirited little company he inherited, then went shopping all over the world for incipient talent to train. He also began establishing procedures which are, in the customarily authoritarian world of classical ballet, curiously family-like and informal. Deliberately, Cranko...
...Cranko's most celebrated creation, however, is a dancer, not a dance. Marcia Haydée, 5 ft. 3 in., in her pre-Stuttgart days-at London's Royal Ballet School and later as a disconsolate member of the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet -weighed 138 pounds and was known as "the fat Brazilian." Today, at 100 pounds, she has an angular, spindly body that, in repose, sometimes suggests a Mary Poppins more than a Carmen or a Kate. But in motion she ranks among the world's top ballerinas. She is also, certainly, one of the world...
Dramatic Lifts. Making use of Marcia, and a handful of other new, young ballerinas, Cranko's productions are always attractive, marked by passionate pas de deux and dramatic, sometimes almost traumatic lifts. His choreography is far less inventive than it seems at first. But he has few peers at encouraging and developing talent, or in lending dancers the confidence to try new things. The company lacks the Royal London Ballet's palatial size and majesty. It cannot match the Bolshoi's disciplined depth and classical perfection. Yet in versatility and crowd-pleasing dramatic power, Stuttgart...