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When
Peter Quanz was nine years old he knew he wanted to make dances.
Watching all the big Brian Macdonald musicals at the Stratford Festival,
Quanz mentally tried to understand what made them appealing. Quanz
understood almost instinctively making people dance was not just
a dream,
but his life's work.
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Moving
Up
Peter
Quanz, young dance-maker on the move
By Gary Smith
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In 1996,
Quanz made it to the Banff Centre for the Arts to study dance construction.
From there it was a short hop to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School
where he created several pieces for the school's choreographic group.
When his 1998
ballet Billion Dollar Baby was taken into the school's permanent
repertoire, Quanz knew he had the skills to go on.
He went to Europe to study the finished
ballets and thought processes of major choreographers. Helped by
a Henny and Judy Jurriens Fellowship grant, he was able to tour
a number of important ballet centres and companies.
I met him in Stuttgart in 2001, when he
was working with Reid Anderson, trying to study the movers and shakers
of German classical dance. A thin, reedy boy, he had a remarkable
presence. His face, frequently lit by an ingenuous, almost
embarrassed grin, belied his inner strength.When his grant ran out,
Quanz remained in Europe at his own expense, determined to shadow
famous choreographers. He tried to make a connection with some company
that would help him liberate his own dance voice. "As
an artist you're a spiritual being," Quanz says. "I don't
think dance should just be a technical thing. It should have connection
with the soul."
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Since our first meeting, Quanz has created
SpringScape, a stunning work for American Ballet Theatre's
Studio Company. In March, he finished a full-length work about
Charlie Chaplin set to Cole Porter music for Germany's Chemnitz
Ballet called Charles Kreuzfahrt (see
sidebar article for a synopsis and review). This year's
production of Festival Dance (July 14, at The Banff Centre)
opened with his premiere Quanz by Quanz, a piece filled with
bright and joyous ballet vocabulary. A Banff Centre dance
alumnus, he was awarded the prestigious 2005 Clifford E. Lee
Choreography Award in the spring. On June 16, Quanz premiered
Ashton Ballet Fantasy for the Royal Ballet's Ashton Celebration
in the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
On October 20, there was a world premiere, Kaleidoscope,
for American Ballet Theatre's City Centre season in Manhattan.
It had an opening night cast of Ethan Stiefel, Gillian Murphy,
Veronika Part and Maxim Beloserkovsky.
You could say Peter Quanz is on the move.
In New York, in the summer, he talked about his dreams and
aspirations. "I'd do anything, sacrifice whatever was
necessary to continue my journey. I know I'm a bit strange,
but every minute of every day I'm thinking about how I can
make my work better, how I can say things in new and different
ways. I don't mean with new steps. I think we've put
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too much emphasis on that and it's caused
serious distraction. What we need to do instead is focus on new thought."
"Dance is my language. I can say things through movement I could
never speak out loud. I'm a rather shy person, I suppose, but I'm
not afraid to go after what I want. You've got to be a catalyst if
you expect miracles to happen." Quanz credits Stuttgart Ballet
director Reid Anderson for helping him find his important first steps.
"It was visionary of him to reach out his hand, but then he has
such interest in the future of dance. He's always willing to seek
out new choreography."
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Quanz
admits he lives hand to mouth. There's no place for luxury in
his life. The day we talked in New York he was wearing, the
wrong shoes. They didn't match his ensemble. Embarrassed, he
kept playing with the laces. "I don't care so much about
looks, but I do want to be taken seriously. I'm young enough
people don't always give me a chance. Looking right helps."
Quanz sent tapes of his work to the
Opera House in Chemnitz, Germany, and was surprised when the
company there offered him the chance to make a full-length work.
"You seize the opportunity even if you think it's too big.
You never say no to a chance to explore possibilities. You step
up to the challenge and you somehow make it work."
Quanz badgered the Cole Porter Trust
into letting him use a catalogue of the sophisticated
composer's brilliant songs for his ballet set in Hollywood in
the 1920s. "The songs were |
fashioned into a commissioned score
that wasn't fully ready by the time I started my first rehearsals.
I can tell you though, starting the work in Chemnitz I had more energy
than I've ever had in my life. I was up at 6 a.m. and working until
one in the morning."
"I'm a solitary person, I suppose. For me, people aren't so easy
to deal with, particularly on an emotional level. Moving dancers around
a space is easier than having deep conversations." Quanz would
like to work in Canada, but so far his work has been pretty much ignored
on home turf. "It's important to be respected in the place you
grew up. Maybe someday that will happen." So far ballet companies
in Quanz's native land haven't nibbled at his offers. "Right
now I feel homeless, rootless in a sense. Last year the longest I
stayed in one place was just about three weeks. Living out of a suitcase
is difficult. So is sleeping on someone's couch."
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So far Quanz feels the
ballet that reveals his soul most clearly is SpringScape.
It's a ravishing, lyrical ballet that echoes the energy of early
Robbins and Balanchine. There is a dizzying pizzicato at its
centre that is joyous to see. Freedom and passion ignite everywhere.
Quanz says it is a picture of his time in Stuttgart. He says
he's the solo boy without a partner - a |
revealing comment. "I don't have time for relationships,"
Quanz shrugs. "I have to keep moving."
Quanz says he would like to make a ballet for Evelyn Hart, a dancer
he claims as his strongest, most passionate influence. "She has
such love for her art, such a way of giving everything to dance. I'd
like to be like her."
"I'm the happiest and most complete when I'm working in the studio.
That's when I'm alive. Anything else is just a rehearsal for what's
real in my life." <end>
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Chaplin
En Pointe (Sidebar)
By
Gary Smith
It's
California in the days of prohibition. Bright young
things are dancing the Charleston. Columnist Louella
Parsons has the power of the pen. And, on the screen,
stars like Charles Chaplin and Marion Davies keep audiences
entertained, rescued from the boredom of humdrum, uneventual
lives.
The
music of the time comes from Cole Porter. "Night
and day, you are the one," tinkles from cocktail
pianos in speakeasies and on Hollywood
yachts. Anything Goes is the theme song of a generation.
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This is the background for choreographer Peter Quanz's ballet,
Charles Kreuzfahrt, about murder, mayhem and the seduction of
the silver screen. Set in motion by hot dances of passion and
lust, this is a captivating work that reveals the heart of a
serious young dancemaker. Everything about this full-length
ballet created for Ballet Chemnitz is authentic - from the Cole
Porter tunes fashioned into a lively and moving score by Tadeusz
Biernacki, to the evocative costume and set designs by Thomas
Pekny. It makes you long to return to this world of exotic and
moody charm.
The major excitement here, though, is the way Quanz has created
a compelling mystery and love story from the facts and the fantasy
of Davies and Chaplin's love life. The libretto takes a few
interesting swipes at a Hollywood conjured by its own lavish
fantasy. However, it is the choreography that most wins approval.
Quanz has fashioned dances of daring imagination. It's as if
Hollywood met ballet in a provocative, dramatic way. There are
several pas de deux for Davies and Chaplin that are sexy, yet
sweet. There is a comic pantomime for Chaplin that has serious
and dark overtones. There's also a vicious assault that is brutal
and ugly. Action is set aboard the luxury yacht The Oneida.
The Chemnitz dancers are challenged by much of the choreography
here. That's probably a good thing. Certainly Marléne
Zimmling-haus works hard to create the sweet sexuality of Davies.
Similarly, Marko Bullack makes a dramatic stab at suggesting
Charlie's comic genius as well as darker, more personal demons.
The Chemnitz company seems to enjoy liberation from the grand
old ballets that makes up much of its repertory. They revel
in Charles Kreuzfahrt's liberal choreographic thought.
Quanz obviously has a serious future creating narrative, classical
dance. At times, movement is repetitious and things occasionally
need more focus, but this is a ballet that portrays human relationships
and sexuality in a compelling and
intriguing way.
A very worthy full-length ballet from a young man with talent,
Charles Kreuzfahrt deserves to be taken up by a company in North
America so it can be seen by a larger audience of dancegoers.
<end>
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There's
a Danish word, gadedreng. It means a street-wise kid,
a bit of a tough guy. There is something of the gadedreng
about Peter Schaufuss. He has always gone his own way, done
his own thing and lived
with the consequences. An
independent streak carried him from the Royal Danish Ballet
School, around the world as one of the great male dancers
of his day, to the directorship of three world-class companies,
and finally home again where he has settled down with his
own company - named, inevitably, the Peter Schaufuss Ballet.
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Peter
Schaufuss: Did it his way
Home again with his own company
By William Anthony
"From
the time that I was a child, there was never any doubt in my
mind that I would join the [Royal Danish Ballet] company,"
Schaufuss recalls. "I actually asked my parents to audition.
They didn't want me to, especially my father. He wanted me to
do something else, like be a lawyer or something."
His parents knew what they were talking
about. His mother, Mona Vangsaae, and his father, Frank Schaufuss,
were both in the middle of long, successful careers with the
Royal Danish Ballet and understood the triumphs as well as the
hardships of life in the theatre. Nevertheless, at the age of
seven, Peter got his wish and successfully auditioned for the
company. It was a world of which he had already been an unofficial
part of, watching performances from the fly gallery and classes
sitting on his mother's knee. Besides ballet, young Schaufuss'
other great love was football. "I was a great football
enthusiast. I played it from the moment that I came home from
school until I went to bed. And I was quite good at it because
I was training every morning as a dancer. I could outrun everybody."
When he joined
the junior section of Copenhagen's main club, his father
was furious. "He said, 'Either you do ballet or you
do football.' When I was 12 or 13 years old, I had to
make a choice." Another incident he remembers vividly
is the time he was given a two-week suspension and his
buddy, Johnny Eliasen, was expelled from the ballet school.
(Eliasen was later re-instated.) Schaufuss explains, "I
guess they felt they couldn't handle us. The school was
very different then. We were left alone a lot. We would
go to rehearsals and then not come back to the academic
classes. The school was really out of hand. It wasn't
only us that were naughty. We were just the nails that
were sticking up."
He defends himself with a smile.
"You have to understand, the old man who was looking
after us was a former army officer in his 70s. He had
no qualifications to look after children. Today, it would
have been handled completely differently. But I guess
we were just pushing our luck as far as we could. It was
very serious at the time. It wasn't every day that they
threw a child out of the ballet school."
Even before his graduation,
Schaufuss was offered a contract as a soloist with the
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National Ballet of Canada, and director
Flemming Flindt granted him a year-and-a-half leave of absence.
In 1967, he joined the Canadian company for two seasons before
returning to Denmark.
"I saw the National Ballet of
Canada in its early years, when it was really doing pioneer
work. We toured around on buses for three months, dancing in
different places every single night. We drove for eight hours,
and when we arrived, they would
say, 'We'll do class when everybody is ready.' Then we performed
and went to the hotel. And at eight in the morning we would
get on the bus for the next journey." Thinking about his
own company, he laughs. "Sometimes they think that what
we do here is hard, but they have no idea. Actually, it's wonderful
to have had that kind of experience, but I don't even want to
tell them because they'll say, 'Oh, he's just exaggerating.'"
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Returning to Denmark,
he called Flindt and asked if he should come to class.
"No," was Flindt's reply, so Schaufuss set up
a ballet studio at home and trained alone for four months.
"I think he was angry that I had gone away. After
all, he had given me the chance to do the Don Q pas de
deux on stage after my final exam. Maybe he did that to
try to convince me to stay, but I would have gone anyway."
It is a problem that has plagued the Danish ballet since
the end of the Second World War: young, talented Danes
needing to try their wings in the wide world and then
they are lost to the ranks of faithful dancers |
who stayed home. Names
such as Erik Bruhn, Peter Martins, Stanley Williams, Poul Gnatt,
Toni Lander, Adam Lüders, Ib Andersen, Nikolaj Hübbe
and Flemming Flindt spring to mind.
In Schaufuss' memories of his early
years, one face stands out: Erik Bruhn. As he told writer John
Gruen, "Erik set the example of a dancer wanting to leave
home and explore the world. My leaving Copenhagen had a lot
to do with this. And
I've become a much better dancer for it. I think that all the
male dancers who left Denmark owe it to Erik. He was the first
to open our eyes and minds. He showed us that it was possible
to risk everything by leaving. I left because I trusted his
experience."
And so in 1970, Schaufuss left Denmark
and spent the next 25 years performing as a company member
and guest artists around the world: London Festival Ballet,
New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Deutsche Oper
Berlin, Hamburg Ballet, the Paris Opera, the Bolshoi, The
Royal Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, the Vienna State Opera
and many others.
"I wanted to experience what was outside Denmark. Not
that I didn't think they were good enough in Denmark, but
I wanted to make an international career, to work with different
people and to get as much knowledge about dance and theatre
and life in general as possible."
Years of international experience
led him to the next logical step in his career, ballet director.
His first assignment was with London Festival Ballet: whose
name he changed to the English National Ballet. "When I
was first appointed in London, I found it exciting because I
was very young and felt this was a creative situation. Like
a football manager, you have to get the good players. That was
very different from the job that I did later in Copenhagen,
but in London I did get some of the best young players. I engaged
Christopher Bruce as a resident choreographer to make new ballets.
I convinced Sir Frederick [Ashton] to revive his Romeo and Juliet,
which would have been lost otherwise. I was able to convince
Kenneth MacMillan that he shouldn't do ballets just for The
Royal Ballet. I think we did 36 premieres during my time."
Differences with the board of directors
ended his tenure but opened the way to the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
"In Berlin, we had the money that we didn't have in London.
Then German re-unification started, and finances becafie more
difficult. I had to learn to work in an opera house, and to
play second fiddle to the opera, which I didn't like at all."
Then Copenhagen called. Schaufuss says he had been convinced
by people in Denmark that the working atmosphere had changed
since he left. "I found that the people were not working
the way that I had been used to for the last 20 years. Finally,
the chemistry just wasn't right. Even before I started the job,
I knew that I probably shouldn't have said yes to that engagement."
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In spite of
successes and innovations, Schaufuss lasted exactly one
year. And like any good gadedreng, he dusted himself off
and headed in the direction of the next challenge.
"All of this led me to
start my own company, which I had wanted to do many years
ago but obviously wasn't ready to do. I don't think I
could have done this company without all of the other
experiences. Copenhagen as well. It brought me so low
that I knew I couldn't go back to being a hired director.
I had to succeed."
While Schaufuss was casting about for ways to make his
dream a |
reality, a call came from the opposite
side of Denmark, as far from Copenhagen as you can get. Holstebro,
a city of 41,000, is on the north-west side of Jutland, the
peninsula that extends north from Germany. Rural Jutland traditionally
sent its produce and its taxes to Copenhagen, but Holstebro's
city fathers decided to change the balance and in 1965, they
purchased Alberto Giacometti's sculpture Woman on the Cart,
the first purchase in a series that would transform the farming
and meat-packing town into a leading cultural centre. In 1966,
Eugenio Barba's Odin Theatre, an experimental theatre laboratory,
was invited by the municipality to take up residence. Thus,
the city began making large investments in the visual and performing
arts. By 1995, Schaufuss and Holstebro were ready for each other.
| Talks began in 1995.
A branch of the Royal Danish Ballet School was opened
in 1996, and in 1997, the Peter Schaufuss Ballet made
its debut. Today, the company tours Denmark, dancing in
some of the beautiful municipal theatres in medium-sized
Danish cities, the names of which you've probably never
heard and wouldn't be able to pronounce if you had. And
the company travels regularly around Europe and beyond.
Schaufuss has created 14 full-length ballets for his company,
from Tchaikovsky to Elvis and the Beatles. He is a natural
story-teller, and his ballets get right to the heart of
the music and the story. While his ballets have a modern
feeling, Schaufuss avoids the main ingredient in modern
dance-theatre, irony. Schaufuss |
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means what he says. He doesn't distance
himself from his theme or his materials but grabs them with
both fists, making his ballets immediately visceral.
Schaufuss has assembled a company
of 21 beautiful, individualistic dancers who help bring the
work to life. They are exceptionally well-trained and highly
motivated, with a contemporary, full-body physicality. The
company mirrors Schaufuss' personality: energetic, ambitious
and pioneering. And in contrast to his image as a tough guy,
it reflects his other side: well-bred, disciplined and accessible.
It has been a long road from Copenhagen
to Holstebro. Peter Schaufuss has been around the world a
couple of times to get there. <end>
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: Winter
2005-2006 Issue [top]
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- Seeking Balance: Karen Kain takes on
the most challenging role of her career
by Michael Crabb
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Departments
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- Commentaries from Vancouver, the Prairies, Montréal,
Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Britain, France, Italy, Russia
and Denmark.
- Reviews of Dancing on the Edge, the National Ballet of Canada,
Alberta Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Youth America Grand
Prix and Australia Ballet
- DVDs/Film
by Paul-James Dwyer and Michael Crabb
- Book Reviews
by Allana Lindgren, Kaija Pepper and Elizabeth Godley
- Notebook
by Michael Crabb
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