Daniel Pelzig: new kid in town - Boston Ballet choreographer

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1996 by Iris M. Fanger

Daniel Pelzig, the new resident choreographer for Boston Ballet, ended his first season last May with a batting average of 1.000 in a town that is not used to home-run heroes. The two premieres he created for the company--The Princess and the Pea and Nine Lives--have been enor-mously successful, as have the dances and movement he devised for the Huntington Theater's revival of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe last January. In passing, Pelzig last fall had also served as choreographer for Boston Lyric Opera's production of Gounod's Faust before settling down to revise parts of Boston Ballet's megaproduction of The Nutcracker.

The Princess and the Pea, one of a three-part, evening-long work based on stories by Hans Christian Andersen, was the hit of last season's opening series. The nearly forty-five-minute work, set to Gustav Holst, was a fractured fairy tale for twenty-three dancers; Pelzig's characters included a flat-footed princess, a nerdy prince who wears glasses, and a tribe of twelve cavorting mattresses. The result was that rarest of entertainments, a truly funny ballet.

Pelzig says that he asks himself a series of questions before he begins to work: "What is the story? What is interesting about the story? The Andersen story ran only a page; what about expanding it, creating a cast of characters and a plot? I sit at home. I listen to the music. I get images in my head that drive the story. I never come into a studio with steps, or arrows and patterns. I let the dancers define the movement. Everyone contributed to the storytelling."

After rethinking some of the segments of Nutcracker to try to preserve the health of the corps de ballet, which must give fifty performances of the company's holiday bonanza, Pelzig set to work on his contribution to the spring series, "Hot & Cool," three new works in the contemporary mode. Nine Lives, set to songs of Lyle Lovett, is a succession of vignettes based on characters from the pages of a supermarket tabloid. The joy of the spoof was seeing svelte ballerinas like Marie-Christine Mouis in a get-down, sexy adagio and Paul Thrussell as the laid-back cowpoke. It looked as if Pelzig had uncovered the alter egos of the classically trained dancers. "The characters you saw dancing up there are who the dancers really are," Pelzig says.

Credit Bruce Marks, artistic director of Boston Ballet, for recognizing talent when he sees it. Pelzig caught his eye when the choreographer took the gold medal at the Boston International Choreography Competition in 1994 with an abstract ballet entitled Cantabile, set to Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1 in D Major. Within a week after the competition had ended, Marks had asked Pelzig if he would be a resident choreographer for Boston. "I hired Danny on the basis of Cantabile," says Marks. "It was a dramatic work without a story. I recognized his great musicality, his understanding of stagecraft. These things made me feel he needed a place to work on his ideas.

"I think a choreographer in residence begins to create a style for the dancers. It brings out the best in them. Someone creating continually on the same group of dancers can help them find their voices. There's a great model in the Balanchine-Robbins combination at New York City Ballet. I think we've found our Robbins. Danny understands theater very well."

Boston Ballet has had a history of choreographers in residence, stretching back to Samuel Kurkjian and Ron Cunningham with E. Virginia Williams, the founder of the company, and Bruce Wells, who had served in a variety of capacities with Williams, Violette Verdy, and Marks before leaving to join Pittsburgh Ballet. Marks, who wanted a gifted dancemaker to create ballets that would be unique to Boston, had not found a suitable replacement for Wells. "I'm looking for another chore-ographer in residence. We could use two of them," he says.

Pelzig was in the midst of a thriving career when he got the Boston offer: "I had just finished the summer at the Santa Fe Opera," he says, "and my opera career was taking off. Yet my training was as a classical ballet dancer. Even with the theater work, I made very sure to find places to do a ballet, even if it didn't pay much money. But since I'd spent the bulk of my career in musical theater I had very few contacts in the ballet world.

"When Bruce presented the opportunity to me, I said to myself, 'Take it, take it.' I've always considered myself a classicist."

Always is a relative word for the forty-one-year-old native of New York City, who did not set foot in a dance class until his junior year in college. Pelzig was born into a family he describes as "extremely liberal." When his father, who was a doctor, died around Pelzig's fifth birthday, his mother went back to school to become a biology teacher. Pelzig attended the U.N. school until fourth grade, then spent his high school years as a self-described math and science whiz at Valhalla High School in New York's Westchester County. He enrolled as a science major at Montreal's McGill University, pigging out on physics, chemistry, and biology courses in his freshman year. He transferred to Columbia University because "in May they were still shoveling snow in Montreal." He graduated from Columbia in three years with a degree in cellular biology.