Francis Patrelle: going his own way - choreographer - Interview

Dance Magazine, March, 1996 by Lynn Garafola

For as long as he can remember, Francis Patrelle has been making dances. His first studio was the family living room in Bucks County, Pennyslvania, where he grew up, and his first teacher was television. There were two ballroom shows on TV in the ealy 1950s, and he would stand, glued to the set, watching them. Before long, he was making up his own routines and, with the girl who lived next door, performing them at sock hops. Catholic Youth Organization clubs, and synagogues. Eventually, "Little Frankie and Jeanine" landed a spot on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. A snapshot in the family album shows him beaming at the host's side, a pint-sized "star" in a blazer and bow tie. It was a maverick start for a career in ballet.

Patrelle's development as a choreographer was equally unusual. He came to ballet late, with an imagination already partly formed by vernacular dance and musical theater (its songs have inspired some of his best works). He loves story ballets and has choreographed versions of Firebird, Romeo and Juliet, and the full-length Macbeth that received its premiere in New York City last spring. Even in plotless works he reveals a sense of drama and characterization that harks back to ballet styles of the 1930s and 1940s. Although the danse d'ecole is his preferred idiom, he actually received his formal training in composition from modern dancers. His company, Dances . . . Patrelle, has the fluid structure of a modem dance pickup troupe and, like traditional modem dance companies, exists as a showcase for its founder's work. Lastly, he is that rarity in ballet--a choreographer who has never had a long-term affiliation with a company as a dancer.

Although he cares passionately about teaching, his own training was haphazard. It began at the onset of his teens, when the gigs for Little Frankie and Jeanine ran out. "Somewhere I had read that Fred Astaire had studied ballet," he recalls, explaining that at the time he intended to go into musical theater, "and I convinced both Mother and Dad that I should be doing it too." He took his first classes with William Sena in nearby Philadelphia, then worked for a couple of years with Michael Lopuszanski. Eventually, he received a scholarship from Barbara Weisberger, director of Pennsylvania Ballet, only to be told after a year in the company's school that she was taking it away because his legs were too short. "I was destroyed," Patrelle says.

At this point, Jean Williams entered his life. Director of Germantown Dance Theatre, she needed "eleven lords aleaping" for a Christmas show. Patrelle auditioned, and before the day was out had asked her for a scholarship. A superb teacher, Williams had nearly a dozen men in her classes, ballet as well as jazz. "Jean taught me to push the walls away in my dancing. She taught me to fill up the stage and dance `big,'" Patrelle recalls. "My first character role was Death in Valse Triste with Quitman Daniel Fludd, who later became an award-winning black composer. Jean had a great integrated company, and casting was color-blind."

Another pivotal experience came after finishing high school when he studied with Jose Limon, Alfredo Corvino, and Joyce Trisler at the Ramblemy summer dance camp in New Hope, Pennsylvania. They urged Patrelle to go to the Juilliard School. However, it took two years at Philadelphia's La Salle College, where he "couldn't walk into the cafeteria without being catcalled," to convince his parents in 1967 to let him go to New York City.

Juilliard was eye-opening. The studied ballet with Corvino and Antony Tudor; modem with Limon, Mary Hinkson, Betty Jones, and Helen McGehee; and composition with Lucas Hoving and Doris Rudko. New York City, too, was a revelation. He saw Graham works, as well as Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, and Tudor's Lilac Garden, which left a deep imprint on his imagination. He danced wherever he could--at Hunter College on a program of works by James Clouser, at the 92nd Street Y in a Luciano Berio piece that was "very avant-garde," at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park in a Peer Gynt that starred Stacy Keach and was choreographed by Trisler. And in his last year at Juilliard, Limon made the role of the Birth Boy in La Pinata on him.

It was at Juilliard, too, that Patrelle created his first ballet--for a choreography class with Tudor. "The first thing he had us do," Patrelle recalls, "was walk down the staircase as if we were Carmen. The second was choreograph on ourselves Adam meeting Eve or Eve meeting Adam. Then he said, `I don't want to see any of you until April'--it was then October--`and when you come back I want a full ballet.' Everyone thought he was kidding, and flunked. I did a three-movement piece to Scarlatti--three boys, a young girl, on the beach, and they raped her--and got a B. The ballet was probably horrendous, but I finished it. Martha Hill, who directed the dance division, wanted to include it in the concert that year. But Tudor rightly said, `Martha, they'll kill him. Nurture him.'"