I write about Carolina Ballet with some regularity, but it occurred to me on the way back to New York that many of you might not be aware of how the company got started. To that end, here’s part of a longer piece I wrote about Robert Weiss and his dancers five years ago for the New York Times. More than a few things have changed for the better since then (though not, alas, the constant struggle to make financial ends meet), but it’s still quite a tale.
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RALEIGH, N.C. — How long does it take to start a professional ballet company from scratch? Don’t try this at home, but Robert Weiss, the founding artistic director of Carolina Ballet, did it in just under two years. He answered an ad published in Dance Magazine in November of 1996; 23 months later, his new company, 21 dancers strong, made its debut here, accompanied by the 67-piece North Carolina Symphony. The company opened its doors with a demanding all-Balanchine program, and since then it has presented works by such noted choreographers as William Forsythe, Lynne Taylor-Corbett and Christopher Wheeldon, as well as two new full-evening ballets by Mr. Weiss himself.
It takes a driven man to carry off a high-wire act like that, and Mr. Weiss, a New York City Ballet alumnus known to all as “Ricky,” is nothing if not driven. A quarter-century ago, one dance writer compared him to Jimmy Porter, the seething young working-class anti-hero of John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger”; at 50, he is still an in-your-face lapel-grabber, more polished but just as tough. He has had to be tough. After running Pennsylvania Ballet for eight years, Mr. Weiss ran afoul of the board and was fired in 1990. He then spent the next six years looking for a job. “I got a raw deal, and I had a very hard time,” he says. “I sent out resumes and auditioned for every post that opened up–there were 13 of them. Sometimes I’d come in second, but never first.”
You’d think a ballet company situated well below the Mason-Dixon line would have preferred someone a bit more genteel. But the Old South has changed, and though board chairman J. Ward Purrington, a Raleigh native, has a magnolia-sweet accent that any Hollywood casting director would covet, he is also a no-nonsense lawyer who speaks of Carolina Ballet as if it were a new Internet company: “What this is, is a venture start-up. You have to be lean and agile, and very, very good, and you have to grow as fast as you can.”…
After an abortive attempt to use a local dance school as the basis for a professional troupe, Mr. Purrington realized that he would have to build from the ground up, so he advertised for an artistic director; he received 98 applications, all but one consisting of fulsome cover letters and inch-thick resumes. The exception was Mr. Weiss, who sent a four-sentence letter and a one-page vita. “I’d had it up to there with looking for a job,” he says. “What did I know about North Carolina? And who was Ward Purrington, anyway?” But his bluntness impressed Mr. Purrington, and the two men started talking. Four months later, Mr. Weiss finally came in first.
“Ward said he wanted to start a ballet company on the highest level,” Mr. Weiss recalls. “I told him that every little city in America has a little company with a million-dollar budget, and they’re all trying to pander to what they think the public wants. You can’t do that if you want to do something real. You have to go for quality and seriousness, right from the start–good dancers, good ballets, good d