Goyas and Dolls

This Carmen is scarcely voluptuous. Rather, she is a kind of molting puma, long in claw and tooth, snarling at a world that is not to her liking. Wanton she may be, but she gets no joy out of it; her eye is out for the main chance, for social advancement rather than sexual gratification. Her quarrel with the overseer of the cigarette factory ends in no mere slap; she tears the poor creature's bodice and carves a bloody cross on her back. Her seduction of Don Jose is more challenge than submission, and when he ultimately kills her for her faithlessness, she dies in a rage.

Such divergence from the stereotyped passion often associated with Bizet's opera is characteristic of Choreographer John Cranko and his Stuttgart Ballet. Last week the company presented its new Carmen as part of a six-week stand in New York that will be followed by a road tour lasting until August. Cranko had sat through scores of Carmen operas, and he says "I always thought they were all wrong. If you see in Carmen nothing but a nymphomaniac who meets a tenor, seduces him, gets tired of him, then meets a bullfighter--it's a bore." Instead, he went back to the original Merimee novel to help create Carmen as a shrewd, tough outcast--a gypsy in an age when gypsies were treated very much like blacks in an intolerant white society.

Dissonant Morass. Not everybody liked it--and with reason. As one expects of Cranko, the ballet had dramatic cohesiveness. Settings, cleverly suggestive of Goya, managed to be both beautiful and forbidding at the same time. In Marcia Haydee (Carmen), Richard Cragun (the Toreador) and Egon Madsen (Don Jose), Cranko could field a trio whose ability to project feeling into narrative ballet can hardly be matched. What went wrong was the music. Scorning Bizet, Cranko got German Composer Wolfgang Fortner to produce a dreadful, cacophonous "Bizet collage" incapable of sustaining any nuance of emotion. Worse, the score picked up a bar or two of familiar melody, only to distort it unrecognizably or drown it in a dissonant morass.

Near Perfection. The failure, though disappointing, will hardly dampen the Stuttgart's tour. Ever since Cranko, now 43, took over the company ten years ago, he has been building a formidable repertory of splendid, full-length dramatic works. Romeo and Juliet was his first success, done to the traditional Prokofiev score. Typically, Cranko stripped the story of many a nonessential, involved the whole town of Verona in the clash of families, including a market-square fight with tossed oranges. He skipped the implausible intricacies of Romeo's exile and Friar Laurence's muddleheaded planning and then, to simplify the drama of the final tomb scene, dropped the ritual reconciliation of Capulets and Montagues over the lovers' bodies.

By contrast, Cranko's Taming of the Shrew is a near perfection of sadness, sweetness and light. Particularly as danced by Haydee 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 idyll.

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 Wuerttem-berg State Theater director, Walter Erich Schaefer, 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 keeps no office of his own; instead he conducts daily gab sessions at the theater canteen where, over humdrum food and endless cups of coffee, he and his young dancers, drawn from 20 different countries, exchange ideas. The director encourages them to plan their own ways of interpreting his creations.

Celebrated Creation. In some ways the men he has assembled are Stuttgart's strongest asset. Richard Cragun, born in Sacramento, Calif., and trained in Canada, Britain and Denmark, has vast reserves of power, grace and masculinity that make him one of the best dramatic male dancers anywhere. Egon Madsen, a youthful Dane with a baby face, skillfully alternates with Cragun in many dramatic roles: when Cragun is Romeo, Madsen is Mercutio and vice versa. Backing them both up in the rotational order is a German dancer, Heinz Clauss, whose black-clad Eugene Onegin seems as subtly menacing as an elegant spider, as sickly romantic as a young Werther.

Cranko's most celebrated creation, however, is a dancer, not a dance. Marcia Haydee, 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's most effective dramatic actresses, a master of body language who sometimes seems capable of reaching an audience's heart--or funnybone--simply by running barefoot through the Yellow Pages.

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 can be fairly compared to both.

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