Chaotic activity on the Berlin dance scene.

BERLIN - BALLET in Berlin looked pretty chaotic during the final weeks of 1993. At the city's three opera houses three separate ballet companies are busy. A fourth house, the Volksbuhne playhouse, also offers regular dance performances. Johann Kresnik and his Bremer Tanztheater are temporarily installed there as guests, with one hundred performances during the 1993-94 season and with the prospect of a permanent residence. Another venue, the Hebbel Theater, is run as a house for guest companies, with a special dance program directed by the indefatigable Nele Hertling. Tanzwerkstatt Berlin, a contemporary school with a small resident performing unit, heads the long list of independent groups.

Prospects for the three state-supported opera ballets seem bleak at the moment, with everyone afraid of drastic budgetary cuts. in 1995 the question of whether Berlin can still afford to maintain three opera houses, or whether one has to be closed, will be discussed seriously.

At the Deutsche Oper in former West Berlin, Peter Schaufuss recently completed a Tchaikovsky trilogy, with his staging of Swan Lake following revisions of Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty, just in time for the hundredth anniversary of the composer's death. The ambitious project, which attempted to connect the three ballets by making their protagonists (Siegfried, Florimund, and Drosselmeier) reflect aspects of Tchaikovsky's inner conflicts, was a critical failure.

At the time of Swan Lake's premiere in November it was already known that Schaufuss had asked to be released prematurely from his contract as artistic director, running through 1995, in order to succeed Frank Andersen as artistic director of Royal Danish Ballet. Heinz Spoerli, ballet director of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, was asked whether he would be interested in taking over from Schaufuss, but he refused, preferring to continue the process of developing the company in Dusseldorf-Duisburg. The next candidate for Schaufuss's job was Marcia Haydee, currently the director of Stuttgart Ballet. Haydee seemed interested but caused a public outcry in Stuttgart, where things have not run smoothly since she assumed additional commitments as artistic director of Ballet de Santiago in Chile. At the moment Haydee appears to be using the Berlin offer to bolster her Stuttgart contract. So the general manager of the Deutsche Oper has hired Ray Barra (Haydee's erstwhile partner in Stuttgart and a free-lance ballet master) as temporary artistic director, until the end of the 1994-1995 season.

Things don't look much better at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in former East Berlin, which director Daniel Barenboim is desperately trying to make the number-one opera house in Germany. The ballet company, definitely the best of Berlin's three - thanks to the high standards of interim codirector Martin Puttke - now has Michael Denard, the ex-etoile of the Paris Opera, as its artistic director. Most observers, however, consider Denard just a stand-in for Maurice Bejart, who is listed officially only as an advisor but who in reality controls the ballet from his faraway base in Lausanne. Bejart was responsible for last season's top premiere, the double bill of his Nacht/Verklarte Nacht and Miraculous Mandarin, imported from Lausanne - and Bejart again has been announced as choreographer of a new full-length Scheherazade.

Roland Petit has staged the evening-length Dix, or Eros and Death, a ballet based upon paintings by Otto Dix, the famous artist of the Weimar Republic, but this ballet looks more like a chic revue from the Champs-Elysees than a comment on a Berlin heading blindly toward the Nazi abyss. Anyway, the Denard-Bejart-Petit connection is regarded skeptically by local observers-after all, Bejart is already sixty-seven and Petit is seventy (should Haydee join them in 1995, when her Stuttgart contract runs out, she will be fifty-six).

At the Komische Oper, situated also in former East Berlin, the ballet company calls itself Tanztheater, but this represents just a continuation of the Cranko-MacMillan type of dramatic production, with an additional dash of social criticism. For many years the company was run by Bernd Kollinger, the managing director, with Tom Schilling as chief choreographer. As the German Democratic Republic's preeminent ballet ideologue and Marxist-Leninist, Kollinger was forced to resign after the collapse of the East in 1989, while Schilling was pensioned off when he turned sixty-five. Doris Laine, former prima ballerina of the Finnish National Ballet, was installed as artistic director - and has now attained the ripe age of sixty-three. No choreographer herself, Laine first brought in Flemming Flindt, who staged his Three Musketeers, considered generally an expendable operetta-style production that has aged badly. Nor was Laine more successful with her second try: commissioning a full-length Circe and Odysseus ballet, choreographed by Arila Siegert to a specially written score by Gerald Humel. Siegert, who originally hails from Dresden, was once the GDR's foremost contemporary dance soloist, but has enjoyed little success with bigger works. She is now in charge of the dance company at the Dessau Theatre.

With the start of the new year, the Komische Oper acquired a new general manager from Koln, Albert Koat, who has engaged the director of Tanz-Forum Koln, Jochen Ulrich, to restage his production of Coppelia (based on the original E.T.A. Hoffmann story, rather than on the Nuitter/Saint-Leon libretto). Further plans include the staging of a Wozzeck ballet by Birgit Scherzer, a former dancer with the company, who had been ousted by Kollinger and is now the highly successful artistic director and chief choreographer of the ballet at the Saarbrcicken State Theatre.

Ballet in Berlin is very much in a state of transition at the moment, and it is impossible to guarantee that the artistic directors in charge of the ballet companies at Berlin's three opera houses today will still be in their positions at the beginning of the 1995-96 season. The strongest person working on the Berlin ballet front at present is undoubtedly Martin Puftke, director of the State Ballet School in former East Berlin, and it would not be astonishing to see him promoted to a different position in the Berlin ballet hierarchy in the near future.