Bringing ballet to everyman; Septime Webre takes a user-friendly approach to directing The Washington Ballet.

ANYONE WHO THINKS ballet is stuffy should meet Septime Webre. As Washington Ballet's artistic director for nearly three years and a longtime devotee of contemporary pop culture, Webre has found a way to stay true to classical technique while pushing the proverbial ballet envelope. Since his appointment in June 1999, the troupe has studied flamenco and African dance, traveled to Cuba to perform at the Seventeenth Annual Dance Festival in Havana, and participated in an ongoing program called "Beer and Ballet," in which the public pays $10 to enjoy local microbrews while watching the company rehearse.

Webre, 40, is committed to making ballet accessible to the average viewer. He often personally welcomes audiences before a performance and describes in simple terms what they are about to see. "I want audiences who are unfamiliar with the form to appreciate some of the things I appreciate," he said.

After each performance he conducts Ballet Talks, where he answers questions informally for about ten minutes. At the Kennedy Center last November, as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary season, the company performed Balanchine's modernist The Four Temperaments (1946), Choo-San Goh's classic In the Glow of the Night (1982), and premiered Webre's dramatic new Carmen, in which dancers performed flamenco style on pointe. Afterwards Webre took questions. Wearing a stylish navy suit and tan loafers with no socks, his responses were swift and pithy.

"Does music or dance come first?" someone asked.

"I start with an idea," Webre said. "I'm usually influenced by a book I'm reading or an experience I've had."

"What have you not yet done that you would like to doT' asked another.

"I have not yet been to China."

Everyone laughed, but Webre was serious. The twenty-one-member company has been invited to perform there and is trying to raise the money. At the rate Webre's going--the number of subscribers has tripled since he came on board--the odds look good.

Webre has come a long way since his years as a club-dancing teenager in Austin, Texas. He struggled to figure out the connection between his love of social dancing and classical ballet: "My early works as a choreographer were largely about trying to integrate these two seemingly contradictory things--a very formalist approach to classical ballet and who I am as an American steeped in pop culture with a lot of urban energy," he said. "I needed to understand how ballet could be pertinent in contemporary American society."

As artistic director of American Repertory Ballet in Brunswick, New Jersey, for six years, and now in the same position at The Washington Ballet, Webre seems to have found the connection--at least according to dancer Jason Hartley. "There's a harmony in combining the way you move naturally with technique and structure," he said. "Classical ballet is my roots, it's my introduction to dance. But in our modern life, beyond King Louis XIV, we like to get funky."

Right now, Hartley is getting funky in a new piece choreographed by Webre to the live accompaniment of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a six-woman African American a cappella group known for ils soulful harmonies and powerful lyrics about freedom and equality. The hourlong dance premieres at the Kennedy Center April 4-7.

WEBRE CHOSE SWEET HONEY not only because its members are glorious singers and internationally known Grammy Award-winners, but because they are Washington locals. "I thought it would be a wonderful way to connect The Washington Ballet with the Washington community," he said recently over a Coke and a tuna sandwich at a cafe near the Kennedy Center. He speaks quickly and sincerely, looking you right in the eyes. "It's also a way to develop repertoire that I have always sought to develop, reflecting different cultures that make up the American landscape."

Washington Ballet company members make up the American landscape and beyond, with dancers from China, Cuba, Azerbaijan, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. Webre's own eclectic background--his father is French-American and his mother was Cuban--certainly influences his desire to honor diversity.

In addition to incorporating multicultural styles into his work, Webre is committed to making the company, founded by ballet pioneer Mary Day in 1976, a vital part of D.C. culture. Toward this end, he started a program called DanceDC that offers elementary school students free weekly ballet classes and complimentary tickets to Washington Ballet performances.

He was also careful to choose only Washingtonians as primary collaborators on the upcoming piece with Sweet Honey. Painter Sam Gilliam, whose works appear in New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Tare Gallery in London, and Le Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris, will design the sels and costumes. Writing the libretto is playwright Norman Allen, whose productions include Nijinsky's Last Dance, In the Garden, and the television production From Renoir to Rothko: The Eye of Duncan Phillips, for which he won an Emmy.

Webre is working with these exceptional artists for the first lime (though The Washington Ballet collaborated with Sweet Honey in 1996, before Webre's arrival), but his unusual choreographic process is the same as always. Unlike many ballet choreographers, Webre allows his dancers to develop movement phrases through improvisation. In rehearsal for this particular piece, dancers lay on the floor with their eyes closed. They were asked to respond to questions with one-count body movements. Hartley recalled Webre asking:" `If your mother was in a hospital bed and you had one second to tell her something, what would it be?' It was slightly intense," he said. The dancers then string their impulsive responses together into movement phrases, which Webre may or may not end up using in the final piece.

"I have a system," said Webre. "I sit at my dining room table between 9:00 and 11:00 P.M. and work on the next day's material. I spread out with the music and a cold Mexican beer--generally a Negra Modelo. Usually l'Il experiment with tbrming the dancers' phrases into an articulate whole. Of course, when I doit with the dancers, everything changes."

The Sweet Honey project explores the meaning of identity and the relationship of the individual to community. Both Webre and Aisha Kahlil, Sweet Honey's premier blues singer, agreed that the project has taken on new meaning since the events of September 11. "We organized the songs so that the musical journey would deliver a message about the importance of taking responsibility for your life and the need to contribute," Webre said.

Sweet Honey is accustomed to delivering politically pertinent messages through its lyrics. Now, said Kahlil, the singers are careful to select songs from their gospel- and blues-based repertoire that "address issues of war, people losing their lives, and the element of death and rebirth," she said. "At a certain point you have to become more aware of what's going on," she continued. "Art can gel people to look at their lives a little more deeply and gel a little closer to the general beat, the rhythm of humanity."

Webre denies that his work is political, though social issues do play a role. He majored in history and pre-law al the University of Texas and worked for former Texas govemor Ann Richards after graduation. Still, regarding his company's trip to Cuba in 2000, for example, he insists that he was not trying to make a political statement. "The goals were cultural and artistic," he said. "But I certainly hope we contributed to good will and understanding between the people of the United States and the people of Cuba."

Good will is an understatement. Due in part to ballet's overwhelming popularity in Cuba, Webre and Washington Ballet company members were treated like rock stars. "Construction workers and hotel doormen would recognize me on the street," said Webre. "I was doing abdominal exercises on the beach and a group of people came up to me and asked if I was the director of the ballet," he said excitedly. The company took home Cuba's Premio Villanueva award for best foreign production after the festival.

Webre claims that his mission to combine works from the classical canon with contemporary styles fils perfectly with Mary Day's original vision for the company. "I believe we're philosophically linked," he said. "She envisioned a company of very fine classical technicians with an emphasis on new work." During Day's directorship, she included Petipa, Balanchine, Tudor, and Tharp in the repertoire and provided choreographer Choo-San Goh with a creative home. The Washington Ballet alumni roster boasts Kevin McKenzie, now artistic director of American Ballet Theatre, and Amanda McKerrow, an ABT principal who often comes back to guest with the Washington troupe.

The Sweet Honey project will be performed alongside Trey McIntyre's Blue Until June to recordings of blues artist Etta James. After its Kennedy Center premiere, the company will tour with both pieces to Pennsylvania, Arizona, Texas, New York, and New Jersey.

After that, the company returns to D.C.'s Warner Theater to perform Webre's reworking of Where the Wild Things Are (1996). Based on the children's book by Maurice Sendak, this piece is about fantasy, catharsis, and what it takes to lame wild things. What better way to bring ballet to Everyman?

Shayna Samuels is a freelance dance journalist living in New York City.