Tulsa Ballet heads 'em and moves 'em West

Apr. 7--Victoria Simon has spent a good part of 2006 in the literal and figurative West.

Simon is ballet mistress for the George Balanchine Trust, and the person usually given the task of staging Balanchine's ballets for dance companies throughout the world.

The ballet that has occupied her for the last couple of months is Balanchine's foray into frontier Americana, "Western Symphony."

Simon worked with Houston Ballet earlier this year for its March production of the work, and this week she is back in Tulsa to put the finishing touches on Tulsa Ballet's staging of the piece.

"I've been calling this my 'Western year,' " Simon said, during an interview backstage at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. "I've only staged it a few times in my career, but this past season a lot of companies are doing it. Miami, Pittsburgh, as well as Houston and Tulsa."

Tulsa Ballet's production is part of its mixed-bill program "Evolution," which also includes the return of the Jerome Robbins-Leonard Bernstein ballet "Fancy Free," and the U.S. premiere of Young Soon Hue's "Backstage."

"Western Symphony" was created in 1954, the same year Balanchine created his version of "The Nutcracker" that would become a Christmas tradition.

Balanchine once said his idea for "Western Symphony" was "to make a formal work that would derive its flavor from the informal American West, a ballet that would move within the framework of the classical school, but in a new atmosphere . . . I wanted to do a ballet without a story in an unmistakably native American idiom."

And, for a Russian-born cosmopolitan who had made his home in the United States since 1934, that unmistakably American idiom had to include cowboys and dancehall girls, a little slapstick humor and a few touches of elegance.

Balanchine commissioned arranger and orchestrator Hershy Kay to create a symphonic score based on popular folk songs, including "Red River Valley," "Rye Whiskey," "Good Night Ladies," "Oh Dem Golden Slippers" and "The Girl I Left Behind Me."

Kay, coincidentally, has another connection to Tulsa Ballet's mixed bill. His first Broadway job as an orchestrator was for the musical "On the Town," which was an adaptation of the ballet "Fancy Free."

Simon recalls seeing that debut performance in 1954 as a youngster -- a performance that was quite unlike any other in the ballet's history.

"The costumes weren't ready on opening night, so it was performed without sets, and with dancers wearing just practice clothes," Simon said. "(Barbara) Karinska was the costume designer, and she was known for not always being punctual."

One reason was the care Karinska lavished on her work. Simon showed off some examples of the "Western Symphony" costumes, pointing out the craftsmanship of the abbreviated dance-hall outfits some of the women dancers wear.

"She was always doing things like this," Simon said, indicating a line of pearls stitched onto one of the frills. The sets and costumes that Tulsa Ballet are using are exact copies of the original pieces, on loan from San Francisco Ballet.

"There's no way the audience is going to see all these little things, but they're there," she said. "When I was dancing with New York City Ballet, I was doing the Spanish dance in 'Nutcracker,' and my costume had this hidden locket with a picture of (NYCB co-founder) Lincoln Kirstein in it."

That same attention to detail, Simon said, can be found in Balanchine's choreography.

"The music was always the impetus for him," she said. "And he studied music so closely and understood it so well that you tend to hear music quite differently after seeing a Balanchine ballet.

"He might hear a couple of notes -- a little 'tink-tink' in the score -- and that little sound will be emphasized by the choreography," Simon said.

Simon isn't quite sure what has prompted this sudden resurgence of interest in "Western Symphony," but then, she's not entirely certain why the ballet seemed to fade from the repertoire for a while.

"It might be because it requires a fairly large company," she said. "The version we're doing in Tulsa has 20 girls and 12 men. And there's another version, the four-movement version, that used 24 girls.

"And it's not an easy ballet to dance -- the steps are quite difficult," Simon said. "But dancers always seem to get a real kick of out dancing this ballet. Maybe it's because it's one of those ballets where everything doesn't have to be exact and perfect.

"The dancers are portraying people, and there's a little room in the choreography for them to express themselves, bring out their individuality," she said. "And also to get across the sheer, wonderful joy of dancing. That always should be there, in every ballet."

EVOLUTION presented by Tulsa Ballet Theatre

When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday

Where: Chapman Music Hall, Tulsa Performing Arts Center, Third Street and Cincinnati Avenue

Tickets: $20-$70, available at the PAC Ticket office, 596-7111, and www.MyTicketOffice.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, Tulsa World, Okla.

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