Yikes! Blue Suede Pointe Shoes

It’s Thursday night at the ballet. Inside the 2,700-seat San Jose Center for the Performing Arts, the curtain rises on an eruption of hot color and the twang of electric guitars. Over a cranked-up audio system comes the unmistakable sound of Elvis Presley’s velvety baritone, underscoring a stage full of elegantly trained dancers adding hip thrusts to pirouettes, boogie to pointe work. For the next 80 minutes, “Blue Suede Shoes,” a story ballet created and presented by the Cleveland San Jose Ballet (and due this week at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), rocks out in this its second year of showcased and briskly selling performances. On this night, a capacity crowd, more than willing to be entertained, claps along with the King.

This is not exactly the traditional stuff of ballet. The score is made up of 36 Presley hits recorded from the original masters, 280 costumes and 17 set changes by Broadway designer Bob Mackie, a total production cost of $1.5 million, and an independent investment group called New Dance Ventures that gets above-the-title producing credit with the company itself.

“We’ve never been afraid of tackling big projects,” says Dennis Nahat, the company’s artistic director and the creator of “Blue Suede Shoes.” His goal, he says, is “things an audience can’t resist. I sort of go in with a naivete, that’s my saving grace. You do what you know has to be done and worry about the mammoth quality later.”

Taking calculated risks and nosing out opportunities in unconventional places is part of the history of the Cleveland San Jose Ballet and Nahat.

Nahat, who started as a dancer with the Joffrey Ballet and American Ballet Theatre in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, co-founded (with another Joffrey/ABT dancer Ian Horvath) what was then called the Cleveland Ballet in 1976, on a hunch that the city was ready for a professional company.

“There was a curfew in place. The city folded up at night and was quite scary,” Nahat remembers over tea in San Francisco during the company’s San Jose engagement in April. An intense and youthful looking man, he also remembers that “the supporters wanted us to move out of town. But I think a ballet company belongs in the center of a metropolis, not in a suburban shopping mall.”

So the ensemble stayed in the inner city. “We put speakers on the roofs and played music; we strung colored lights along the lampposts and put mannequins in theatrical costumes into the windows of the empty storefronts. People came in droves and loved us,” he says, but “during our first ‘Nutcracker’ four people had their cars stolen.”

Ten years later, however, the company had a home at the 3,300-seat State Theater in revitalized downtown Cleveland, a professional company of 26, and a respectable subscription base. Yet Nahat (solely in charge after Horvath retired in 1984) was not content. He knew that he could not play his home base often enough to keep his dancers employed full time. What he needed was new territory.

The conventional way for companies to supplement their income is to tour their seasonal repertory. “That didn’t make any sense,” Nahat explains. “We tried that. We lost money. Touring is expensive. You have to raise money to do it. I would much rather raise money and put it into new ballets than spend it on touring. We had a good home, what we needed was another one, another city that would like to bed down with us.”

The company started looking, checking out Minneapolis, Buffalo and Chicago, all cities where they had already toured. Half in jest, Nahat told his board he really would prefer sunny California. Shortly after that, the company got a call from the Ballet Guild of San Jose, which was doing its own search for dance company. The relationship, and the Cleveland San Jose Ballet, was inaugurated in 1986. It was definitely a calculated risk--early in the ‘80s, the Joffrey Ballet (then based in New York City) had tried a similar bicoastal arrangement with Los Angeles that had failed.

For Nahat and his troupe, however, the marriage of convenience has worked. For the last 11 years, the company, with separate administrative, training and financial structures, has been traveling back and forth between Cleveland and San Jose. It presents between six and eight programs in Cleveland, three or four in San Jose--with the rest of the San Jose subscription season being given over to guests, such as the Paul Taylor and Jose Limon companies.

Last September the company opened a West Coast school in a newly purchased building, and plans are under way to merge the two already collaborating boards. (While still rare, Cleveland San Jose’s successful model has since been imitated by other ballet companies. Eugene Ballet, for instance, has a similar symbiotic relationship with Boise, Idaho, where they are known as Ballet Idaho.)

For Nahat, the lesson of the bicoastal experiment is that risk taking is definitely worthwhile. Not that a great deal of forethought didn’t accompany the decision to go out on a limb with “Blue Suede Shoes.” He didn’t want the project to jeopardize the company, and he knew that conventional dance funding sources would look askance at such a large, expensive excursion into popular culture. So, taking his cue from Broadway, he formed an independent for profit production company, New Dance Ventures, whose investors share the risks with Cleveland San Jose Ballet.

Venture capitalists are willing to be creative if the bottom line looks promising, he says. “The visionaries among them invest in movies and musicals, so why not ballet?”

The choice of an Elvis ballet seemed logical since Nahat grew up--in Detroit--on Elvis’ music as a teenager in the ‘50s. But there was more to it than Nahat’s admiration for Presley.

“Think about it,” he says. “The big 19th century story ballets”--’Swan Lake,’ ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Nutcracker’--were all done as entertainments for the people of that time. I love those ballets, and we do them well. But why shouldn’t we make our own story ballets, about American subjects for American audiences?”

So Nahat went big time, American-style. From RCA he secured the rights to the Elvis tunes, including such classics as “Jailhouse Rock,” “Hound Dog,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and, of course, “Blue Suede Shoes.” The Presley estate gave him permission to use Elvis’ name and image.

Though “Blue Suede Shoes” roughly follows Elvis’ life from high school to the army to Las Vegas, Elvis isn’t a character in the piece. Nahat has broadened the story by making his heroes three young men: the jock Johnny, Raymond the loner and a Jerry Lewis-type geek, Arthur.

The choreographer, whose Broadway credits include “Good Time Charlie,” Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers” and the Tony-winning “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” kept his women dancers in pointe shoes (“This is a ballet,” he insists), but incorporated a wide variety of jazz, modern, Broadway dancing into his vocabulary.

“Blue Suede Shoes” has been received enthusiastically in its two hometowns. Just before coming to Los Angeles, the company played another week in San Jose where all 13 of its April-May performances had sold out. “ ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ is a rarity, an instantly likable and accessible crowd-pleaser,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. In Cleveland, the Plain Dealer described the production as ending “on such a high note that audience members leave the theater with smiles on their faces.” The Los Angeles engagement is the first outside the company’s home bases. For 1998 the show has already been booked to Miami and St. Petersburg, Fla.; Detroit; Denver; Houston; and Chicago.

Nahat admits that not all the dancers initially were enthusiastic about the company’s excursion into pop culture. “There are always some who don’t want to do anything which is not in a tutu or for which they are not trained. Some of our foreign dancers, for instance, didn’t know what a jitterbug was. But they all have come around. Bob [Mackie] was wonderful in the way he designed the costumes for each individual dancer. He makes them all look so good.”

To assuage any additional fears, and to remind audiences that Cleveland San Jose Ballet remains a classical ballet company, he opens the program with his own “Quicksilver,” a fluid neoclassical, non-narrative work that company members take turns performing every night.

“The beauty of this arrangement is that we are a ballet company doing a ballet/show/theater piece, but unlike a Broadway show, we don’t have to perform it every night in order to survive. New Dance Ventures is not identical with Cleveland San Jose.”

If the “Blue Suede Shoes” venture pans out, the company could have a steady source of income for some years to come. “We might also be able to increase the employment for our dancers from the current 32 weeks to as many as 46 or 50 per year,” Nahat says.

And that, of course, is another reason to do pop culture extravaganzas.

“We still have our other repertoire,” he says, “and I am already working on pieces for the next three seasons. But ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ is ready and we’ll be happy to take in on the road whenever our schedule permits it.”

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“BLUE SUEDE SHOES,” Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Tuesday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and next Sunday, 2 p.m. Prices: $15-$50. Phone: (213) 365-3500.