Angels RUSH IN AT Carolina Ballet - Messiah as a ballet

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2000 by Susan Broili

"For Unto Us a Child Is Born" and other music from the Messiah might not have everyone's feet tapping. But Carolina Ballet's artistic director, Robert (Ricky) Weiss, felt its rhythms in his bones many years before he made a dance to this masterpiece. This month marks Carolina Ballet's second season of George Frideric Handel's Messiah, with seven performances December 21-24 and December 26-27.

Weiss heard his first Messiah at age 9 when his parents took him to a New York production. At that time, he had already taken ballet for a year at the School of American Ballet. "I could hardly contain myself. I felt like getting up and dancing in the aisle. The music is very danceable," Weiss says. "The Messiah has such lilting melodies and a great undercurrent of propulsive rhythms."

He had to wait about four decades to see people actually dance to it onstage. In the meantime, he performed for sixteen years as a principal dancer for Balanchine's New York City Ballet and later became artistic director for the Pennsylvania Ballet. When he left Pennsylvania in 1990 and worked as a freelance choreographer for five years, he proposed the Messiah project to a lot of people, but had no takers.

Faced with having to come up with a holiday program three years ago when he launched Carolina Ballet's first season in Raleigh, North Carolina, Weiss saw a chance to bring his vision to life. Audience response to the two portions he set--including a section in which an angel appears with a golden wingspan of sixteen feet--was so good the first season, he says, that he felt inspired to choreograph the whole oratorio, minus thirty-five minutes of music. "I took out some repeats," Weiss says. His version runs for two hours and ten minutes.

Weiss, 50, is no stranger to ambitious projects: He choreographed a full-evening production of Carmen, based on Bizet's score, to close Carolina Ballet's season in June 2000, and he staged his own version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet in the company's inaugural season in 1998. But he said he had some doubts as he tackled the Handel project: "What am I going to add? It's one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, so why am I choreographing to it? Some people think you don't need to add anything to the music. They were sated by just hearing it," he says.

Still, he persisted. "The piece makes you feel a lot of things and you want to express that in gestures and movement. This overcame my fear of how great the music was," Weiss says.

"It was all a challenge. What should be literal and what should be pure emotion? When you're listening to a piece of music, a lot of times ... you get visual images in your mind, but they're your personal images. You listen to the music and then you have these wild thoughts. In your imagination they can go backwards ... You see all these great images in your mind. I saw the angel with these huge wings flying through the air, touching the ground on pointe all by herself," he says.

He initially thought of attaching the wings to the dancer's arms but then reflected, "How do you get close enough to partner her?" Only when the company's scenic designer, Jeff A.R. Jones, suggested the wings be separate and operated with rods, Japanese puppet-style, did Weiss see his mental image materialize. Well, almost.

Weiss's wife, company dancer Melissa Podcasy, takes flight with the help of a male partner and four dancers, who operate the foam wings, which are covered with shiny, hand-painted gold fabric. Podcasy's sixteen-foot wingspan creates a big sweep on the forty-seven-foot-wide stage.

Dancer Emily Younger, 21, helps work the wings, which are operated by three thirty-pound rods. Two male dancers each carry a rod while two women work the third rod. "It's one of those things I never thought I'd do," Younger says. "It took a long time for us to get it. Ricky was getting discouraged. The biggest thing is just staying with her. We have to stay close to Melissa, yet our steps are different." With practice, they learned to make the wings flap, fold and follow the angel as if they were her own.

Younger also appears as one of six sheep, danced by women in the corps. Except for playing a mouse when she was 3, Younger says she has never been an animal onstage and found it challenging. "We had to run on pointe and wiggle our butts at the same time. Basically, we just had to make it amusing. The heads are so cute, all you have to do is cock the heads to one side and you get a laugh," Younger says.

The heads, made of faux wool and worn like a hat, proved hot. "We had to keep our chins in our chests to make sure everybody sees the heads of the sheep with big eyelashes and red lips. You look down at the ground all the time and hope you don't run into somebody else," Younger says.

Weiss says the sheep have drawn a strong--and evenly split--audience response. Some viewers thought the sheep were sacrilegious and not funny at all, while others liked them, he says.

"If you listen to the music ... the music is funny," Weiss says, then demonstrates by humming an upbeat section that sounds as though it could accompany a cartoon. "He's tongue-in-cheek. I think he's making fun of the fact that we all sin. We can't help it as a species. No matter how hard we try to be spiritual, it's sensual pleasure we succumb to. And guess what? It's fun, whether we want to admit it or not," Weiss says, pointing out the words: "All we like sheep have gone astray."