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Dance Preview: Take me out to the ballet game
Sunday, March 11, 2001 By Jane Vranish, Post-Gazette Dance and Music Critic
Choreographer tries to maintain batting average with 'Mighty Casey'
There was a time when choreographer Lisa de Ribere didn't know who was on first or what was on second. She was sort of stuck on third with "I don't know."
"The Mighty Casey"
Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre's "Mighty Casey" will get some promotional help this week by way of some related events and sponsors:
-- Jane Vranish
These days, de Ribere feels as if she's sliding into home plate, balancing family, school and a little choreography -- in this instance, restaging "The Mighty Casey" for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. Performances of "Casey," plus a world premiere by Dwight Rhoden, "7th Heaven," are scheduled Thursday through next Sunday at the Benedum Center.
We've watched de Ribere grow as a person and a choreographer. In fact, PBT presented a de Ribere piece every season from 1987 through 1997, second only to George Balanchine, with whose New York City Ballet company she performed as a young dancer.
She began her association with PBT as a budding choreographer in the bubbling "Eau de Vie" (1987 and 1988), a ballet that was as much Balanchine as it was her. That's another way of saying it was as sound musically as it was visually. Patricia Wilde, then artistic director, selected de Ribere as one of three choreographers to nurture, the others being Ohad Naharin, who produced the highly successful "Tabula Rasa," and Daniel Levans.
It was de Ribere who won Wilde's favor. She carried on with Bartok's complex rhythms in "Music" (1989, 1990) and her commission for Performing Arts for Children, "The Mighty Casey" (1991, 1993, 1995). They were balanced by the dark spirituality of "Hunter's Moon" (1992, 1994) and a risky interpretation of "Amazing Grace" (1995) for the "Women's Choreographers Project." De Ribere's final project with PBT would be the Pittsburgh premiere of her Swing Era ballet, "Harvest Moon" (1997).
Things came to a stop when Terrence Orr arrived as Wilde's successor, but that was as much due to de Ribere. In fact, PBT had some competition in negotiating another game for "Casey."
No, not with another company. Something more important than that.
"It's like planning the Normandy invasion just to be away for five days," de Ribere says, acknowledging the difficulty in separating herself from her two children. "I guess I've become the reluctant choreographer. It's because I get stressed out if I have to do 10 things at once.
"We had a full-time nanny for eight years, but my children were giving us loud messages by complaining, and I wanted the opportunity to do more things with them."
De Ribere nearly decided against going back to school, this time to take up another form of storytelling: writing. ("It's not all that different from choreography, except that you cut out all the middle men," she says.) But after some rejiggering, she was able to schedule classes -- short story, screen writing, comedy and journalism -- around her children's activities. She's now a senior in communications and media studies at Fordham University. Although she has written for dance publications like Pointe and Dance Teacher, de Ribere's current project is a script for a short film she hopes to get produced.
PBT came up with a plan to lure de Ribere back. Ballet mistress Dana Arey did much of the pre-planning, working with the dancers from the 1995 video of the "Casey" production.
"She is one of the best in the ballet business for the accuracy of her staging," de Ribere says. "Still, I was surprised when I arrived, because she had just flown through it."
That didn't stop de Ribere from making a few changes in the plays and, particularly, the second pas de deux.
"I was never really happy with it -- it's too passive," she says. "When you do a big ballet, you can't do it right the first time. You just hope you have time to keep revisiting it."
It's a shock that she did "The Mighty Casey" at all.
"I had never gone to a baseball game. Well, maybe I had seen one on TV in passing, but I never sat down to watch."
So, de Ribere went to catch America's pastime the right way -- with a friend who wrote for Sports Illustrated. And, she concedes, "it was a big eye-opener."
Armed with just the rudiments, she set out to tackle the subject. The story, based on the famous Ernest L. Thayer poem, wasn't meaty enough for a one-hour ballet, so de Ribere added a girlfriend for Casey. The dancers liked it and still do 10 years later.
"One rehearsal got pretty rambunctious," de Ribere notes. "It's very child-spirited, and the nice thing is that the dancers really get into it. No matter how old we get, I guess there's still a child in there."
But there have been a few complaints, she says.
"When we first did 'Casey,' we got letters from men complaining about having women in the ballet, that we muddied up the story with romance. But that was all right, because normally these men wouldn't be caught dead at a ballet."
And, she adds with a laugh, "it's all right to be passionate about something."
This time around, de Ribere trusts that the passion on stage will bring those same men back to the Benedum, sans grievances.
It stands to reason if she rebuilds it, they will come.
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