Carolina ballet calls all dancers.

RALEIGH, North Carolina--Carolina Ballet artistic director Robert Weiss wants to hire sixteen dancers and eight apprentices for his newly formed company and has planned a nationwide search to find them. "Basically, I'm looking for the best dancers in the country--extraordinary young talent as well as older dancers who are stars in their own right," Weiss says.

Auditions begin February 1, and will be held in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, and West Palm Beach, Florida, with the last audition on April 5 in New York City.

The company will reflect Weiss's vision: "An eclectic repertory with the best of the past and, at the same time, forward-looking." Rather than look for modern dance choreographers for future ballets, Weiss wants to tap what he sees as a "big, big surge of classical choreographers," who incorporate folk, modern, and other dance forms, "but in their own way," as classical choreographers have done in the past. "Ballet is a great gobbler up of all dance styles," Weiss maintains, pointing to Petipa's use of Spanish dance and the inclusion of Russian and Hungarian folk dances in Swan Lake.

The best of the past will include work by George Balanchine, who invited Weiss, at age seventeen, to join New York City Ballet, where he rose to the rank of principal dancer during his sixteen-year career. For eight years--from 1982 to 1990--Weiss choreographed for and directed Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia. In April 1996, Weiss was hired as Carolina Ballet's first artistic director.

The company has its roots in Raleigh Dance Theatre, founded by dance teacher Ann Vorus in 1984 as a performing outlet for the Raleigh School of Ballet, Twelve years later, encouraged by the company's ability to increase audience and by fund-raising efforts, the board of directors, led by Raleigh lawyer Ward Purrington, decided to go professional and to call the new troupe Carolina Ballet.

The company has already raised 25 percent of a $2.5 million Founders Campaign to provide seed capital. The campaign will culminate in a gala performance of Balanchine's Western Symphony by stars of New York City Ballet and other companies on March 29. The company's first season begins with performances, October 22-25, in Raleigh's Memorial Auditorium.

Weiss believes that the audience is already here, in the region known as the Research Triangle (which includes Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill), with its six universities and other rich cultural offerings. "This is an incredible, cultured audience. Educated, sophisticated people from all over the world" live here, Weiss contends.

He credits the Durham-based American Dance Festival with helping to build a strong dance audience over the last twenty years. And he expects audiences to grow along with the area's population, projected to double to two million over the next fifteen years. If 5 percent of the population comes to see ballet, that will be enough to support the company's earned income, Weiss believes.

"I'm very excited," Weiss continues. "Starting something from scratch is just a great thing. There are no preconceived ideas. It's your vision." Since Weiss had never started a company from scratch, he said that he consulted with someone who had, fellow NYCB star Edward Villella, who founded Miami City Ballet. "His advice was, `Don't start until you have the money in the bank.' His vision was to have something on the highest level. He told me, `You can't struggle along and become the best. You've got to start out with the best.'"