Awakening America to Ballet : N.Y. City Troupe Tries to Build a Mass-Media Audience, Even Using Film

In “The Sleeping Beauty” sleep and stagnation overcome the kingdom of Florestan when Princess Aurora pricks her finger on a spindle and doesn’t awaken until the handsome prince at last frees her and the realm from an evil spell.

The New York City Ballet, whose West Coast premiere of Peter Martins’ “The Sleeping Beauty” takes place Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, is attempting a similar wake-up service for all of American ballet--an art form that has endured if not an evil certainly a prolonged unfortunate spell.

Ballet has been in a state of stagnation in recent years, with many companies all but destroyed by the weak economy. There was also the end of the dance boom of the 1970s and ‘80s, and the dying off of great choreographers, from George Balanchine in 1983 to the death of Agnes de Mille last week.

As the nation’s largest and financially strongest ballet company (with an annual budget of about $30 million), the City Ballet has launched an unprecedented single-handed effort this year to create an entirely new national audience for ballet. Bringing “Sleeping Beauty” as well as nine Balanchine works to Orange County in 13 performances over 11 days is a small step in the campaign. No ballet company has undertaken so many big projects in a single year, most geared to reach mass-media audiences that traditionally have had little contact with major classical dance companies.

The City Ballet is staking its biggest hopes for barging into the awareness of Main Street America on its $10-million film version of Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker,” with Macaulay Culkin playing the prince, due to open in movie theaters nationwide Nov. 24. No arid film of a stage production, this is a full-blown commercial movie, complete with special effects, location shooting and movie sets, and directed by Emile Ardolino, who did “Dirty Dancing.”

The City Ballet--and other companies--are praying it will do for ballet what the film “The Red Shoes” did 45 years ago (the same year the City Ballet was formed)--create mass enthusiasm for ballet among a whole new generation. Gary Dunning, executive director of American Ballet Theatre, said popular success of a high-quality ballet film “would be to the benefit of all dance companies.”

(There have been other “Nutcracker” films and videos, but none of the George Balanchine version that arguably first popularized the ballet in this country in 1954, although it was televised on CBS in 1957 and ’58. The most recent previous “Nutcracker” film, the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “Nutcracker: The Motion Picture” in 1986, directed by Carroll Ballard with costumes and sets by Maurice Sendak, was panned by many critics, had no well-known stars, and had an unconventional sad ending.) There is even remote hope among company officials that superstar Culkin’s leading role in the film may draw a generation of boys into ballet classrooms. Culkin was a student at the City Ballet’s School of American Ballet before he became a film megastar.

“The problem has been that ballet doesn’t really come into the public consciousness very often,” says Ellen Sorrin, the City Ballet’s director of special projects.

On the film set last year, City Ballet Ballet Master in Chief Peter Martins confided his worries about the future of ballet. “My concern is that it’s dying,” he said then in an impromptu interview. “Maybe this (film) will bring people back to ballet, maybe cause people to wake up and say, ‘We didn’t know ballet could be like this.’ ”

The City Ballet has also arranged to air on public television a three-hour special on Christmas day: its “Dinner With Balanchine” gala that capped the company’s season-long homage to its founding choreographer last spring on the 10th anniversary of his death.

In addition to the company’s 100 dancers, the “Dinner” broadcast includes stars from leading ballet companies around the world, including Mikhail Baryshnikov.

The company’s other efforts to reach out include a documentary and performance video that has been tentatively scheduled to be televised in the next several months--and also sold commercially--of last year’s collaboration between Martins and musician and jazz composer Wynton Marsalis. The video “Jazz (Six Syncopated Movements)” shows their actual collaboration in the studio and Marsalis and his group in the orchestra pit providing live music for the performance.

And the company is making strategic use of its Orange County visit: Audiences at the Orange County performances will rub shoulders with film producers and studio executives who have been invited by the City Ballet, in the hope of igniting interest in a movie production of “The Sleeping Beauty.” City Ballet officials decline to say who from Hollywood has accepted the invitations.

Martins’ stage version is cinematic in approach--for example, traditional scenery is intermingled with rapidly changing slide projections to connote the passing of time. And Martins streamlined the ballet with dramatic pacing, while preserving all of the most famous dance sequences from Maruis Petipa’s original 1890 choreography.

Whether all of these efforts will have much impact on entertainment consumers of the 1990s remains to be seen. Ticket prices have become so expensive--First Ring seats for City Ballet performances of “The Nutcracker” at the New York State Theater are now $65; seats for the company’s Orange County run range from $18 to $58--that ballet has been inaccessible to many.

The company’s mass-media drive may also be an effort to appeal to the public over the heads of some critics who have never reconciled themselves to Balanchine’s passing. Many critics gave the Balanchine festival last spring a rough time, even though it was extremely successful at the Lincoln Center box office. The company mounted an astonishing 73 ballets over a mere eight weeks, far more than any other company these days would attempt.

But one dream that Balanchine had for broadening the New York-based company’s audience, and that Martins has shared, is still likely to go unfulfilled for the foreseeable future: Establishing a regular short season for the company in Southern California.

Greater Los Angeles has failed to sustain a resident ballet company, even as much smaller cities such as San Francisco and Houston have done so successfully. The consensus is that the Orange County Performing Arts Center is a logical venue for a regular visit by New York City Ballet to Southern California because of the center’s large stage and seating capacity and strong association with dance. But Tom Tomlinson, the new executive director of the center, says that although Orange County will continue to present regular visits by touring companies, there is little chance of a home for any ballet company there until and unless funding is secured to build an additional auditorium.

The problem, he says, is being able to continue to offer a very diverse program. “To be able to do that as well as offer a home for a particular company is really prohibitive at this point in time,” Tomlinson says.

In the meantime, Barbara Horgan, Balanchine’s longtime personal assistant and now head of the trust that oversees most of his choreographic legacy, says the City Ballet under Martins will continue its efforts to preserve ballet by popularizing it.

“You’ve got to find a way to stimulate the public, to make them feel familiarity, even if it means bringing it to them like a sitcom,” she says.