Talk about bad timing: Boston Ballet stages a program called “Celebration of Dance” just as its new artistic director bids farewell before even taking up her post. A week ago Monday, citing “clear differences of opinion,” the company announced that Maina Gielgud, whom it had named last September to succeed outgoing director Anna-Marie Holmes, will not be coming to Boston after all. Complicating the situation was a report the previous week that some nine company dancers would not be offered new contracts.

General director and CEO Jeffrey Babcock has insisted that Gielgud’s departure has nothing to do with the company clear-out, that those nine dancers (there’s been no official announcement; the list appears to include some of the company’s Russian artists, including Aleksandra Koltún, but not Jennifer Gelfand, as had been rumored) will not be rehired, and that Holmes will not be staying on past the June 30 expiration of her contract. In other words, Boston Ballet is heading into its 2000-2001 season (the details of which are to be announced next month), with no artistic director, no interim replacement in sight, and no sign of replacements for the departing dancers. You could say the company is looking for direction.

In truth, Boston Ballet has been spiraling downward since the 1994-’95 season, when it attempted to extend all five of its subscription productions to three weekends. The schedule that season was attractive: Giselle; Coppélia; an “American Festival” that included works by Balanchine, Tharp, and Paul Taylor; and, to close, John Cranko’s The Taming of the Shrew. The performances were rewarding. But the ballet public didn’t bite, and in 1997-’98 the company had to cut back to two weekends for the smaller productions. We also began to see major disappointments on stage: Carmen and The Pirate in 1997 (the latter a Rudolf Nureyev vehicle for which Boston Ballet received a $100,000 grant from the Nureyev Dance Foundation), Ben Stevenson’s Dracula in 1999. In February of 1997, artistic director Bruce Marks, who during his 11 seasons had turned Boston Ballet into one of America’s premier ensembles, announced his departure, perhaps anticipating that he had taken the company as far as he knew how. His successor, Holmes, had been his long-time associate; she received his official blessing but didn’t inherit all his authority, and it was never clear that she was the artistic director the board really wanted.

In September of 1998 the company named Jeffrey Babcock, who had been the cultural director of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, as its new general director and CEO. For the 1998-’99 and 1999-2000 seasons Boston Ballet moved its smaller productions across Tremont Street to the Shubert (capacity 1600 versus the Wang’s 3800), substituting taped music for the live Boston Ballet Orchestra. For the current season, the company has returned all productions to the Wang, but last year it parted company with Holmes (who was surely pushed out) and signed on Maina Gielgud, who had previously directed the Australian Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. “Her superb international reputation and impressive career as a performer and artistic leader make her the right choice for an organization whose sights are set on becoming one of the world’s top ten ballet companies by 2010,” board chairman Susan Y. Friedman explained. The company announced it would be auditioning for new members in San Francisco and Paris — in Gielgud’s words, “Boston Ballet deserves the very best dancers in the world.”

So what happened? One report has Gielgud concluding that taking Boston Ballet to the top would require more money than the company seemed able to raise. The joint statement released by Boston Ballet and Gielgud cited “a mismatch of expectations.” Regardless of what really went wrong between Gielgud and the company, it’s hard to understand why the selection process wouldn’t have included an agreement as to how much money would be available and how soon. Or why it took everyone five months to discover they don’t have the same expectations. A company that botches the hiring of its most important member doesn’t inspire confidence.

Then again, perhaps Boston Ballet no longer considers its artistic director to be top dog. Jeffrey Babcock has been more visible than was his predecessor, David Brown, and whereas Brown’s name had appeared below Holmes’s on the company’s masthead, Babcock’s appears above. Perhaps Gielgud and the board reached an impasse over how much authority she would have. Whoever succeeds her may have even less clout, since it’s likely to be a candidate who was originally passed over in her favor. This is not the stuff that the world’s “top ten ballet companies” are made of.

And if Boston Ballet is hoping to paper over the current artistic void with marketing expertise, it’ll have to do better than “Celebration of Dance.” Not that a line-up of Jerome Robbins, Rudi van Dantzig, and George Balanchine is easy to characterize — it’s buffet ballet that tries to cater to all tastes, if not all appetites (there’s barely an hour of dancing here). Variety isn’t a bad strategy for a repertory program, but finding varied works with a common theme would give marketing something to work with.

One might also hope for something more ambitious than Jerome Robbins’s Interplay — though the audiences last weekend seemed to enjoy it. Set to Morton Gould’s 1943 piano concerto American Concertette, this 15-minute appetizer probably looked hipper on its debut back in 1945, when both the music and the choreography could anticipate West Side Story. Four men in different-colored shirts and four ladies in ponytails and different-colored mini-dresses pair off, leapfrog, slide back into a line of eight, throw in some square-dance moves, unsure whether they’re a crowd or couples. There’s some fingersnapping and then some solos emerge. Echoes of Rhapsody in Blue accompany a slower boy-girl duet; the closing section, to music reminiscent of the Hoedown from Copland’s Rodeo, finds our heroes choosing up sides for a “rumble” in which individuals compete with their best moves.

It’s a lighthearted Balanchine kind of piece, though I think Mr. B would have found music with more depth and movement with more edge. The ladies, in particular, look great in Santo Loquasto’s outfits, but I wonder whether the original costuming by Irene Sharaff (tunics over leotards) wouldn’t give the work back to its own time period and accord it an innocence it lacks in its contemporary form. Would that also enable the company’s performance, exuberant as it was last weekend, to seem less anonymous?

Rudi van Dantzig’s 1977 Four Last Songs doesn’t lack for ambition — he chose Richard Strauss’s last work, the 1948 Vier letzte Lieder, four songs set to texts by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff and drenched in the darkly exalted romanticism of Novalis and Jean Paul and Caspar David Friedrich. The Friedrich-like backdrop Balanchine created for Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze would have been appropriate here; instead, we get rolling clouds and plains, more like something Thomas Hart Benson might have painted for Agnes de Mille. And it’s hard to see what the choreography — one couple for each song, with a dancer (Alex Lapshin) representing Death hovering and becoming increasingly ominous — has to do with the texts (which are not provided in the program). How do the dragging clinches at the end of “September” convey any sense of “weary eyelids”? And why have a couple dance the flight of the soul into the “magic circle of night” in “Beim Schlafengehn”?

Of course you can ignore the words (affectingly sung here by soprano Margaret O’Keefe), but even in the context of Strauss’s lush scoring van Dantzig’s choreography looks generic, lots of running and leaping and clinching — I kept thinking of American pioneers. Their excellent partnership and individual moves aside, Jennifer Gelfand and Paul Thrussell had no link to either Hesse or Strauss in “Beim Schlafengehn”; only Aleksandra Koltún, bringing some jagged artistic edges to “Im Abendrot” (and watch for the beautiful développé right on the harmonic change of “So deep in dusk”), had me on the edge of my seat; I was seeing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoyevsky’s Nastenka or Katerina Ivanovna. Credit van Dantzig, too, with an original depiction of totentanz in the last two minutes of “Im Abendrot,” after the singing has stopped.

As for Theme and Variations, well, I celebrate every time Boston Ballet programs it, but that doesn’t happen nearly often enough (the last staging was in 1991), particularly since in Balanchine practice makes perfect. The final movement of Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 is a 20-minute “Tema con variazioni” that spotlights instruments (woodwinds in variation #7, English horn in #8, violin in #10) or techniques (counterpart in #1 and #5); the 12th and final variation is one of the composer’s grandest processional polonaises. In 1947 Balanchine translated this into an “academic” ballet (it was revived in 1960 and made part of Tchaikovsky Suite No. 3 in 1970) where the basics (starting with a battement tendu, which is as basic as it gets) of bar and classroom — bourrée, pirouette, entrechat, développé, arabesque, etc. — are explored in the first 11 variations before the class is presented to St. Petersburg society in the graduation ball of the finale. Call it “technique with expression” — or maybe “no expression without technique.”

Thursday night I again couldn’t take my eyes off Aleksandra Koltún, whose technique can be disconcerting (she somehow looks wrong and right at the same time) but whose expression walks the exquisite line between devoted and dangerous; she seems idiomatic in a way that partner Simon Ball doesn’t. After the corps has bourréed on to the 30-second woodwind chorale of #7, her simplicity in the développés and penchées of #8’s withdrawn English-horn solo is disarming. Friday (before an alarmingly empty house) Jennifer Gelfand looked better objectively but didn’t move me, and her partner, José Martin, seemed self-conscious in his presentation. The corps has technique but not quite the panache that makes deep expression possible, and at the end, after that magnificent long diagonal, we don’t get the precise geometry that makes the final tableau snap into place. Programming more Balanchine would solve that problem.

And coming up with a bigger budget would doubtless make this a better company — but does Boston Ballet have the money to spend its way to the top? Maybe there’s another solution. In Jonathan McPhee the company has a conductor of international stature, particularly in Tchaikovsky — the orchestra’s performance for Theme and Variations is hardly inferior to the one that Gennady Rozhdestvensky directed when he did the entire suite with the BSO back in January. (When McPhee took the podium on Friday, I heard a gentleman behind me whisper, “He’s the best part of the whole ballet.”) So in the pit, at least, there’s excellence without excess spending. On the Wang stage, too, there’s a lot of talent, but it needs to be put in the right productions, and those need to be promoted intelligently. And that calls for the kind of creative intelligence that, sometimes, money can’t buy.

Issue Date: March 8-15, 2001