Now that I’m a drama critic, I rarely get to go to working rehearsals, which I love to do, so it was a great pleasure to fly into the Raleigh-Durham airport last night, jump in a car, drive straight to the stage door of the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, and charge into the theater just in time to hear Robert Weiss, the artistic director of Carolina Ballet, speak the following words into a microphone: “Dancers, we’re going to try to go all the way through without stopping–unless there’s a train wreck.” I sighed with delight and plopped into a seat just behind Weiss and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the choreographers of Monet Impressions, who were furiously dictating last-minute fix-this notes to their assistants as the dancers on stage ran through Weiss’ “The Gardens at Giverny” and Taylor-Corbett’s “Picnic on the Grass.”
The New York Times ran a half-page preview
of Monet Impressions yesterday, so I’ll let their excellent reporter walk you through the show:
After carefully trolling the North Carolina Museum of Art’s “Monet in Normandy” exhibition, seeking inspiration for a new dance, the choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett ended up using a painting not in the show: Monet’s D