THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

For Noble and Ruth Barker, ballet is a beautiful nut to crack

Hank Hoffman

Ruth and Noble Barker. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, synonymous with the holiday season, is the high-profile performance event for which the New Haven Ballet is most widely known. But while preparation for the December production occupies much of the fall, the New Haven Ballet’s mission is much larger than the staging of this one work.

According to founder and Artistic Director Noble Barker, the Ballet’s goal is to “provide a superior dance experience for students who want to pursue ballet and dance for both personal development as well as, if they choose, a professional track.”

In addition, the organization’s faculty, staff and students reach out to the community “as advocates for the art of dance.”

Barker founded the New Haven Ballet in 1985 and ran the organization until 2000, when he and his wife, Ruth, relocated to Massachusetts. They waltzed back into town to take the reins again in 2006. (Ruth, a former ballet dancer, is a part-time instructor and ballet mistress at the school, and manages the office at 70 Audubon St. in New Haven.) With facilities in New Haven and Guilford, the student population draws primarily from the Greater New Haven and shoreline region, but also includes students from as far away as Middletown, Meriden and Stratford.

Last year the school had close to 500 students, as well as some 80 students in its adult open division. The latter section of the school has seen a recent increase in Yale University students taking classes. In addition, the school organizes the New Haven Ballet Company. According to Ruth, the Company is “primarily made up of intermediate and advanced students who want to augment their performances.”

While the school accepts all students who are interested, students have to audition to be part of the Company.

“One of the challenges is to work with students of various capacities to help them find their potential given that classical ballet has some technical features that favor certain bodies,” says Noble. “You’re not going to be a 300-pound offensive guard for the New England Patriots if you’re 5’6”; you’re not going to be playing for the Boston Celtics. Although, anybody can be successful to a certain degree in ballet no matter what their physical makeup if they apply themselves.”

Noble had an early introduction to dance. His mother had a dance school and he took classes in tap dancing until he was 12. But it wasn’t until his college years that he became serious about ballet. At the University of Pennsylvania, Noble says, he “dabbled a little here and there.” Noble, who had continued to pursue athletics after dropping tap, took a ballet class from his mother to work on stretching out.

“I started taking the class more seriously. I decided it would be a great thing to do. I wanted to be an athlete but didn’t have the tools to be successful at that,” he said. “Ballet is the perfect combination of athletics and aesthetics.”

He drew inspiration from the example of Eddie Villella, the former lead male dancer at the New York City Ballet.

“He came from a boxing, athletic background. He was short, Italian and very successful. I thought, ‘If Eddie can do it, I can do it.’”

Prior to founding the New Haven Ballet, Noble had a varied career as a dancer, choreographer and dance teacher. With Cincinnati Ballet, Concert Dance Company of Boston, Hartford Ballet, and Connecticut Ballet in New Haven, he has danced solo and principal roles in works by renowned choreographers George Balanchine, Paul Taylor and others. He has taught at schools and companies throughout the region including Yale University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a choreographer, Noble has created over 50 works for student and professional companies.

Ruth’s path was probably more typical of New Haven Ballet students. She started taking lessons when she was 7. Within a year or two, she says, “I absolutely loved it. I wanted to be a professional dancer.”

She started at the Connecticut Ballet and studied at the School of American Ballet in New York City, which grooms dancers for the prestigious New York City Ballet. She apprenticed at the Pennsylvania Ballet before joining New Haven Ballet as a teacher and dancer. With New Haven Ballet, Ruth performed the role of the Snow Queen in its first production of The Nutcracker in 1996. She has performed the role of Dawn in Coppelia and was a member of the Paul Hall Contemporary Dance Theater.

Ballet classes comprise the core of New Haven Ballet’s curriculum. But tap and jazz classes are offered in Guilford and modern dance classes are available at both facilities.

Noble says “the days of modern and ballet feuding are long gone.”

“It’s kind of like cross-training for the mind and body. We like our dancers to do as many different things as possible,” he explains. “In Guilford, we’ve kept the tradition of our ballet class having a tap component. It’s a great way of relating to the music and developing musical awareness and rhythm. And for younger children, they like making some noise.”

Noble does most of the choreography for the Ballet. It’s important, he says, “to put students in a position to succeed while providing appropriate challenges. We want to show them off, not show them up. There is an edge to that because you want to push them a little bit.”

The Nutcracker is the annual showcase performance for the New Haven Ballet. Preparation for the production consumes much of the fall. Noble says wryly that “it’s a black hole for my life.” From the mid-September auditions through the final performance on December 20, it’s non-stop. There are rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday nights, as well as on Saturdays and Sundays.

“There is scheduling and keeping track of everybody and teaching the material and bringing it all together and running it through so it’s seamless,” Noble says.

He notes that The Nutcracker’s “modular” structure — “it’s a bunch of vignettes strung together” — lends itself to the non-professional setting. Different students learn different sections; the whole performance is assembled from the disparate components. The basic choreographic structure stays the same from year to year. It is modified on a yearly basis, according to Noble, “sometimes to upgrade a little section and sometimes because we get so sick and tired of something we have to change it.”

Ruth adds that changes are also occasionally prompted by the need to choreograph to the strengths of different dancers.

Besides The Nutcracker, the Ballet usually puts on a spring show featuring the Company. The school has been partnering with the Educational Center for the Arts on collaborative performances, often with a guest artist or company from out of town.

Dancers have performed at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and the Company will perform with the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra in March. New Haven Ballet has had a community outreach program from its inception. Last year, the organization initiated a “shared abilities” program in which members of the student Company and students with disabilities collaborate in a shared choreographic project.

“One of the greatest challenges is to help students realize that to be successful as a dancer, you have to be extreme both in the amount of energy you give to movement and the amount of thought on the aesthetic level you put into the work,” Noble says. “People tend to think of ballet as being delicate, effervescent, light and airy. But I always tell my students that the difference between a football player and a ballerina is that football players wear helmets. Otherwise, it’s the same, because they both wear tights.”



Long Wharf welcomes Waterston for premiere of Athol Fugard play

David A. Brensilver

	Sam Waterston stars as Henry Parsons in the world premiere production of Athol Fugard's Have You Seen Us? at Long Wharf Theatre November 24-December 20. Photo by Jude Domski.

Long Wharf Theatre Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein recently spoke with The Arts Paper about the world premiere production of Athol Fugard’s Have You Seen Us? The new play, which will be staged at Long Wharf Theatre November 24 through December 20, stars Sam Waterston as Fugard’s main character, Henry Parsons, and is being directed by Edelstein.

Q: Long Wharf Theatre has a long history with Athol Fugard, having staged The Blood Knot nearly 40 years ago, Sizwe Bansi is Dead shortly thereafter, and the world premiere last year of Coming Home. You’ve said Long Wharf Theatre is “reclaiming a relationship” with Mr. Fugard. Sam Waterston also has a history with him, having worked with him on The Killing Fields, and with Long Wharf Theatre, last appearing in (Tom) Stoppard’s Travesties. How does such familiarity benefit the collaboration that necessarily goes into taking Fugard’s story, his words, to an audience through Waterston and the rest of the cast?

A: Well, I don’t know that familiarity is the question. I think what that familiarity reflects is similar values. Athol’s plays have for the 50 years of his writing career, nearly 50 years, have been committed to and demonstrate his faith in some basic values. … And if you look at the trajectory of Sam Waterston’s acting career you will see that — and also his public service career — that … his commitment to certain values … (is) simpatico with Athol’s work. And if you look at the history of the kind of plays the Long Wharf Theatre has been committed to, and certainly that I’ve tried to be committed to in my tenure … you’ll see tremendous synergy and similarity … in Long Wharf, Sam, Athol’s, and my commitments and passions.

Q: You’ve said Fugard in this play once again explores “the poison of racial hatred.” His work tends to ease us into explorations of uncomfortable subject matter through his characters and brings us in close touch with those circumstances — be it apartheid, AIDS — without hitting us over the head. This makes the characters and thus their circumstances, I think, more powerful. What challenges do you as director face in terms of preserving his style and his voice as you stage the work?

A: Well, there are a couple of questions in there … Athol first and foremost — first and last — is a teller of stories. Most great writers are. They’re storytellers. The question is: What kind of stories do they want to tell? … Athol … each one of his plays is sort of different, yet you can see the same obsessions, the same concerns, the same preoccupations in his work as you can with any great writer. The personal is political, and Athol does not write “political plays,” although the social politics of his native South Africa had a profound impact on the world that he grew up in and so would have a profound impact on how he saw that world and the stories that he’d want to tell. It was difficult for a writer in South Africa not to deal with race, although there are a few plays of Athol’s that don’t deal directly with race in South Africa, Road to Mecca, say, being one … Athol tells simple but profound tales with a kind of seemingly bottomless empathy and understanding of character. And he loves everybody he puts on the stage, people who behave well and people who behave not so well. He loves them. And he loves them for their humanity. But he’s a storyteller.

Q: This is I believe the first of Fugard’s plays to be set in this country, half a world away from his native South Africa … is it fair to say that it explores or is almost set inside the characters more so than where it’s physically set?

A: … I think that’s true. … The play really is about an encounter (between) four very unalike people … the happenstance of this encounter.

Q: It could be anywhere, in a sense.

A: … No, it couldn’t be anywhere. I know what you’re trying to say, but I wouldn’t say that. … That it’s here is significant. What you’re trying to say maybe is that place isn’t as important as say it would be in the fact that in “Master Harold” … and the Boys it takes place in a restaurant that is owned by Hally’s parents and Sam works in, I understand that and to a certain (extent) that’s true … I mean I suppose this encounter could happen at a bus station, let’s say, but that it’s taking place in America and in Southern California is very important.

Q: When I saw The Old Man and the Sea last year, what struck me in talking to some, actually some production/tech folks outside, was that they were saying that Mateo Gomez’s delivery and his interaction with Rey Lucas kind of evolved over the show’s run. With a world premiere production, how do you manage a work’s evolution — how much of it is engineered and how much of it is uncharted?

A: We did The Glass Menagerie last year — this is a play that’s a very familiar play in the canon — so all of us who were involved in the play had some perceived opinion and knowledge of the play, we’d seen productions of it, so, you had something you were already responding to. When you’re doing a premiere, how the play actually works is completely an unknown question. We have the wisdom that we bring because we’re theater professionals and we should know the answer to that to a certain extent, but there’s a lot we don’t know. We don’t know probably more than we do know. So that’s a process of exploration and it’s both the most thrilling thing in the world and it’s also very, very daunting. It’s true of any play, however, that — for example you used the relationship of Mateo and Rey, and how that developed over the run. Well that … would be true in the relationship between the actor Judy Ivey and the actor Patch Darragh in The Glass Menagerie. There’s no question that it evolved over the run. That is the normal process of performing a play. That’s not unusual to a world premiere. What’s unusual to a new play is that … you don’t know what it is yet. … You don’t ultimately really know what beast it is until you work on it.

Q: The difference between a new work and a familiar work is that with a new work you don’t know at the outset how that’s going to …

A: … You don’t know quite know what it is yet, how it works, how the machine works. … It’s like, if I was a car mechanic and I were to work on a 2010 car, a new Toyota let’s say. Now, I know how Toyotas work and I know how engines work. But let’s say they’ve redone the engine. I don’t know exactly how that engine’s going to work. I know something about engines, but I don’t know exactly how that’s going to work. In The Glass Menagerie, there’s no prescription of how to say a line. That’s not what I mean by how it works. … It’s not like opera where you have notes. “Che gelida manina,” the tenor aria in La Bohème … every tenor brings his own timbre of voice, quality of voice, but … the differences between the half-a-dozen tenors that I can name to you singing that aria is not nearly as different as would be the half-a-dozen people that have played Amanda Wingfield. It’s an important point for people to understand about the interpretive leeway when it comes to actors and drama. …

Q: In terms of casting, it seems like Sam Waterston sort of embodies the necessary qualities …

A: … It’s perfect casting, isn’t it? It’s perfect.

Q: … What makes it so perfect?

A: First of all, Henry Parsons is the host of the event … Henry Parsons carries this play. And so you first need an actor of tremendous stage charisma and stage chops, of which there are a number of them, but there are none better than Sam. That’s number one. Someone you want to spend the evening with. Sam is an actor of great courage and great facility. So he won’t be afraid to get to the darker self-hating, self-loathing parts of Henry Parsons, yet he also will be unafraid to face Henry’s more tender expressions. …

Q: Fugard told the New Haven Register that writing is “one of the most positive forms of action.” Do you think about how such profound work will affect an audience?

A: Of course. As an artistic director, I think as much as I can about what I am putting in front of an audience. Of course I’ve got to balance many, many things. But … it is my abiding faith that the humanity of the work that we put on stage has a humanizing effect, a positive net effect on people’s emotional and spiritual life.

Q: … It’s the effect that’s desired, right?

A: … Yes, that’s exactly right. … If you are thinking something you haven’t thought before, questioning something you haven’t questioned before, or rethinking something, or remembering that you felt this way, or being reminded one more time in the common humanity of us all, that is a positive net effect in the quality of an audience member’s life.



ONE to perform ‘desperate fundraiser’ for ‘failing Tories’

David A. Brensilver

Orchestra New England Music Director James Sinclair in character for one of the ensemble's Colonial Concerts. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

Orchestra New England is preparing to transport its audience to 1782 — specifically, Music Director James Sinclair said, to a “desperate fundraiser for the failing Tories.”

The concert, Sinclair said, will likely attract at least a few protestors.

“There will be pissed-off Patriots booing,” he said.

In case you’re confused, this has nothing to do with critics of President Obama’s health-care plan. After all, we’re talking here about a concert taking place more than 200 years ago.

Orchestra New England’s 30th annual Colonial Concert is one that Sinclair believes will be the greatest the organization has ever produced. Each year, the orchestra dons period dress and performs a concert of “baroque and classical hits” the way a local audience might have experienced them at the time of their composition. Sinclair and the orchestra perform works by Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart the way they were programmed two centuries ago, the idea being that audiences can “re-experience this music as fresh, as new.”

At the time, Sinclair said, audiences “wanted to hear the newest stuff they could from Europe,” works by then-living composers whose works make up the canon as we know it today.

When Sinclair steps onto the podium he’ll be a conductor in 1782 presenting new music to an audience 200 years his senior.

“The conductor is always less knowing than the audience,” Sinclair said. “The conductor is representing the attitude of the time.”

He might say from the podium, for example, “We have skeptically discovered Mozart,” Sinclair said. “We’ve heard of him … but we don’t know much of his music.”

Humor aside, Sinclair said, “In this context, I think you really do rediscover the oft-played … familiar work.”

Sinclair’s historical ignorance offers some insight into a period audience’s experience of new works by Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart and the way they were presented. Whereas today a typical symphonic program might feature an overture and concerto on the first half and an orchestral work after intermission, an audience 200 years ago might have heard portions of works — individual movements from symphonies — mixed in with other instrumental and vocal music. Sinclair said recreating that format “ends up delivering a very old paradigm” in a world of atrophied attention spans. It is, Sinclair said, virtually the perfect concert through which to discover classical music.

This year’s Colonial Concert, which is being sponsored by Chamber Insurance Trust, will continue many longstanding traditions: The United Church on the Green will once again be decorated appropriately with apples and boughs of green and glow with candlelight, and Sinclair, the orchestra and the evening’s soloists will wear wigs and period attire. The program will also boast a few new musical and dramatic elements, including a pre-concert muster of fife and drum corps on the New Haven Green, among other surprises.

After 30 Colonial Concerts in as many years, Sinclair remains as inspired as ever by the annual program. Treating familiar works — musical masterpieces — as new, he said, is “very refreshing.”

“It’s really fun to be educational and entertaining,” Sinclair said.

Orchestra New England’s Colonial Concert XXX, “A 1782 Concert in Olde New-haven,” takes place on Saturday, November 28, at 8pm, at the United Church on the Green. For more information, visit orchestranewengland.org.



The Little Guy
How do you take your music?

Stephen Chupaska

I’m in my early 30s, so I’m old enough to remember how going to buy music, whether it was at a bona fide record store or at local Caldor or Bradlees, was an event. You actually had to go to another place, as opposed to another window on your computer, to find and buy music. And sometimes, people who knew what they were talking about would help you find what you were looking for and get you enthused about whatever record you were about to take home.

On a recent visit to Cutler’s Records, Tapes & Compact Discs, a longtime employee named Mindy said, “I love my iPod … But it’s not the same as a record.”

Record companies seem to have cottoned on to that dynamic. These days, they release more albums on vinyl than, say, 10 years ago. Now, those albums include codes that allow you to download the record onto your computer.

Like Mindy, I have an iPod and a turntable. I love the ritual of putting a needle on a record and listening to one side all the way through then flipping it over to listen to side two. But life gets busy, and lately I’ve been defaulting to the iPod. It’s great for the gym, great for the office and great for the car. Sadly, the turntable is getting to be the motorcycle that only comes out of the garage on fair-weather Sundays.

But it only takes the mere sight of 45s and LPs hanging on a record store wall and resting in its bins to remind me of the singular joy of record shopping, of using both hands to zoom through miscellaneous albums categorized under, say, the letter “B.”

I hadn’t been to Cutler’s in more than a decade. I used to stop in while visiting friends who went to college in New Haven. I’d spend an hour or so perusing new and used records and compact discs.

When I walked into Cutler’s on a recent Saturday morning, Mindy, who preferred not to provide her last name, had just put on The Doors’ self-titled debut album. A few people were flipping through records organized in bins.

A middle-aged man asked a store employee about a particular conductor, a reminder that Cutler’s once had a separate shop dedicated to classical music. Nat Cutler opened the store at 41 Broadway in 1948. Needing more space, he moved the shop to 33 Broadway. In 1982, Cutler’s son Jayson, who running the store at that point, opened a second space out of which he sold classical recordings. Ten years ago, with Jayson’s son Phil Cutler at the helm, the store consolidated into its current space at 27 Broadway.

“I think you’ll really like this one,” the employee offered.

Kyle Mullins, who’s worked at Cutler’s for 12 years, told Arts Paper editor David Brensilver that “there’s no good way to browse listening to samples,” referring to buying classical music online. “It’s like judging France by the airport.”

That’s what you get in a record store like Cutler’s, employees who want to be there and have a breadth of knowledge.

“Cutler’s has emotional value for people,” Mindy said. “It’s not like shopping at a Wal-Mart or K-Mart, it’s not the same feeling.

“We have tenure,” she said.

“If your employees aren’t knowledgeable, you’re just like everyone else,” Phil Cutler told Brensilver. Cutler said Mullins and the store’s other employees “live for music,” and, “everybody knows their names.”

Mullins told Brensilver, “You’re almost like Joe the bartender because you know what (customers) want when they come in. … It’s people who love music selling music to people who love music.”

And while everyone at Cutler’s seems prideful of the store’s successful longevity, they’re not blind to the proliferation of big-box stores and the convenience of online shopping, and the threat the new marketplace poses to small business owners.

“Something shook my faith recently,” Mullins told Brensilver. “Kim’s (Video and Music), which was one of the greatest record stores I’ve ever been to … had been gutted, just completely gutted.” Earlier this year the business closed its flagship store in New York’s St. Mark’s Place.

Phil Cutler, though, focuses on his store and not what anyone else is doing.

“I don’t worry about anything,” he told Brensilver. And the evidence suggests he doesn’t need to, especially with the vinyl “renaissance,” something Mullins called “retro-nostalgia.”

“Right now we’re going through a vinyl revolution,” Cutler told Brensilver.

Mindy said she’s noticed that younger people are buying more vinyl.

“They come in and buy Journey albums and the Stones, not just the new Death Cab for Cutie,” she said.

I spent about an hour at Cutler’s, looking mostly at the store’s collection of vinyl. I’ve been on a bit of a power-pop kick lately, and drooled over an original copy of Badfinger’s Straight Up. But after glancing at my wallet, I had to be content with a copy of Cheap Trick’s In Color, along with a used Faces compilation, The Kinks’ Arthur on CD and a new, limited-edition Big Star 45. I’m bad with money in a record store.

“Nice haul,” Mindy said as she rang me up.

This is the first in an occasional series about independently owned music and book stores.



Thoughts and remembrances of Zannette Lewis

Bitsie Clark

On September 25, 2009, Zannette Lewis passed away and the Arts Council lost a former staff member and a very good friend. Between 1998 and 2001, Zannette worked at the Arts Council under the auspices of the Regional Cultural Plan. She was employed to be a major change agent for the arts community. Zannette’s charge was to assure full participation by all parts of the community in the cultural life of the region and provide opportunities for sharing artistic and cultural resources between city neighborhoods and the larger community.

Working with neighborhoods in the Empowerment Zones and with the Arts Council’s Inner City Cultural Development program, Zannette recruited and worked closely with Cultural Development Officers from each neighborhood, trained and nurtured emerging artists and held speak-outs that brought together the leadership of such organizations as the Yale museums and the Shubert with neighborhood management teams, grassroots political leaders and emerging artists to dialog and learn from one another. She listened, taught, encouraged, empowered and expanded everyone’s thinking and experience. She opened up the community on so many levels and helped us all to appreciate one another across barriers of race, ethnicity, social class and spirituality.

Betty Monz, director of the Regional Cultural Plan and executive director of the Arts Council from 2002 to 2006, expressed very well the importance of Zannette’s work.

“Zanette was an agent for change in a challenging environment,” Monz said. “She gave a collective voice to a powerful community of neighborhood artists and persevered with a steady pace filled with baby steps, giant steps and a few stumbles along the way. Her work in the community paved the way for the vibrant, culturally diverse and thriving arts community that New Haven is known for today.”

In addition to her profound effect on the community, Zannette never ceased to surprise and delight her colleagues on the Arts Council staff with her unusual and exotic knowledge. One of our staff meetings was devoted to the extraordinary horoscope that Zannette cast for the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. By learning the exact date and time of the Council’s founding in 1964, Zannette told us useful and thought-provoking facts about our past, present and future.

All of us on the staff and board of the Arts Council will never forget the contribution Zannette made to one of the organization’s most successful fundraising events, the “Little Court of Horrors.” This was a Halloween Costume Ball held on the first floor of the Superior Court building at Elm and Church streets in 2000. Zannette sent this already lavish entertainment over the top by her recruitment of a phalanx of professional psychics, astrologers, and palm and tarot card readers who provided private consultations free of charge in a large room just off the dance floor. It was the hit of the evening.

Zannette was a stimulating, exciting and fascinating person to know. We mourn her passing. Quoting Shakespeare, “We shall never look upon her like again.”

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