Choreographer on the Move.

Australian choreographer Stanton Welch has premieres scheduled this month in Houston and next month in San Francisco.

Stanton Welch, the affable Australian choreographer, has a hard time living down the descriptive young. Not that he considers himself old--he turns thirty this year--but the implication of "inexperienced" rubs him the wrong way. He may appear to be a newcomer, but, having created a dozen or so ballets, including an evening-length Madame Butterfly (1995) and Cinderella (1997), he isn't. Most of Welch's work has been for his home base, Australian Ballet; now companies in other parts of the world have started taking notice. In 1998 both Birmingham Royal Ballet and Danish Royal Ballet premiered Welch commissions. In Denmark, he loved the dancers and the audience, who were "thankful to see something different." Yet he also admits having been "definitely intimidated by the atmosphere of the place, coming from a company that's thirty years old to one that's three hundred years old."

Houston Ballet will premiere Indigo, its first made-to-order Welch choreography, set to two cello concertos by Vivaldi, on March 4; San Francisco Ballet will premiere his second, Taiko, on April 29. After the 1995 Maninyas, SFB's artistic director, Helgi Tomasson, was impressed enough to decide that "Welch deserved another look."

No wonder the Australian feels like a veteran, even though he has been choreographing professionally for less than ten years and didn't put on his first dance belt until he was seventeen. With his boyish charm, his ready laugh, and the infectious enthusiasm with which he demonstrates moves for his upcoming Taiko, Welch is the very picture of the artist as a young man. Ballet turns him on. Instead of thinking the classical idiom constricting, he sees it as a limitless playing field. "Critics in Australia constantly say that classical ballet is dead," he says. "How can you say that about anything that is still so living today? I don't find that I am restricted by classical ballet. Just because you have pointe shoes on a woman doesn't limit your work. You can bring anything to classical ballet; it's completely, exhilaratingly free."

Some of that innate sense that anything is possible was no doubt nurtured by a Churchill traveling fellowship, some of which Welch spent with his idol, Jiri Kylian, some on a stay in New York City. "I took every class I could--Horton, Martha Graham, African, jazz, tap--all that stuff that I can't do," he says. His uses of an extraordinarily liquid torso and deep-to-the-ground Grahamesque plies may have their origins in those classes and nightly excursions to "every dance concert I could find."

Another notable aspect of Welch's free-form approach to ballet is manifested in the way he choreographs for arms. Not only does he elaborate on the basic positions, he also packs his vocabulary with mimetic, modern, and pedestrian material, creating lines that are as often fractured and flingy as fluid and restrained. "It probably has to do with my muse in Australia," Welch admits after a moment's reflection. "She's an incredible dancer who can do just about anything, but her legs and feet are not that stunning. However, she has these incredible arms. I guess I just love dancers with beautiful arms."

Welch first drew the attention of American audiences when Australian Ballet brought his Divergence, which has been described as "brilliantly inventive" with "fiendishly difficult things to dance," to the Kennedy Center in 1994.

Divergence is a sexy neoclassical tutu ballet--although the tutus are robber and eventually are stripped away--in which the women are anything but elfin creatures. They are assertive and powerful, and they take charge, proving Welch's claim that the classical idiom can be very up-to-date and that "women work much harder than most of the guys do."

The latter point was certainly not lost on the UNited We Dance audience of his 1995 wild party, Corroboree, in which the women, with fierceness and energy, just about out-danced the men. They reminded one of Ginger Rogers, who did everything backward and in high heels and long gowns. These women did everything on pointe. The work, reminiscent of aboriginal art, performed in full-body paint (and not much else), proved to be the hit of the festival. It impressed Tomasson enough to commission Welch's first ballet outside Australia.

Setting Maninyas on SFB was something of a homecoming--Welch studied at SFB's school in 1989, having turned down scholarships from the School of American Ballet and American Ballet Theatre's school. Tomasson remembers him as a very gifted dancer. "After his year here," says Tomasson, "I invited him to join the company, but he wasn't ready. He wanted to go home."

Home is a family that includes parents, Garth Welch and Marilyn Jones, who were among the most prominent dancers of their time, and younger brother Damien, also a late starter, who is now a soloist with Australian Ballet. It was Damien who indirectly inspired Welch to reconceive the traditional version of Cinderella.

Welch loved the Prokofiev music--the majority of his ballets originate in ideas suggested to him by particular scores--but he hesitated, knowing that, given the heavy influence of the British ballet tradition in Australia, "whatever I did, I would be accused of stealing from Ashton."

The initial impetus for this ambitious enterprise, which he recalls as "a nightmare to choreograph, with three acts and all those waltzes for thirty couples," came from a small local production in which his brother danced Dandini, the Prince's assistant. "I just didn't like the prince," Welch remembers, laughing, "and I also didn't think that all these rich people were very nice. I thought that she should marry Dandini."

This Cinderella is no shrinking violet but a tough little cookie in a gamine haircut who gives as good as she gets, socking her stepsisters (two travesty roles) when she can get away with it. And it is Cinder, as she is called, who takes the initiative for the first kiss, when she and the shy Dandini sit on the stage apron, like two kids on a dock, dangling their feet into the orchestra pit. Her father is a drank, her stepmother is cruel, and there is no fairy godmother. Instead, Welch, apparently inspired by the Brothers Grimm, in whose version Cinderella finds her gown on her mother's grave, has her dressed by her mother's spirit and a dark band of fiercely leaping ghosts. It's a scene more funereal than festive.

Welch's other full-length ballet is also a family affair. "Years and years ago, Frederick Ashton wanted to do Madame Butterfly," he explains. "So John Lanchbery condensed the Puccini score for him. However, it never happened because at that time the music was still under copyright. Butterfly is also the first opera I ever saw with my father, who told me that one day he was going to do a ballet on it. It never came about, and so I did it. Opera fans will be offended by the lack of voices, but dancers deserve the chance to dance to Puccini's gorgeous music."

How did Welch set the opera's most famous aria, Un bel di? "It's a big pas de deux between [Cho-Cho San] and Suzuki at the beginning of the second act. It actually looks quite good," he says, clearly pleased by the memory.

As a teenager, Welch dabbled in theater and dreamed of becoming a scriptwriter. That may have something to do with the fact that storytelling is important to him. "All of my ballets, even those that don't look like they do, have a plot," he affirms.

Sometimes the stories are fairly easy to understand. Of Blessed Memory (1991), Welch's third ballet, which won the 1992 Best New Choreography award from readers of the British magazine Dance and Dancers, deals with leaving one's mother. Red Earth (1996), which has the hardscrabble look of Dorothea Lange's photographs of the Great Depression, pays homage to the exhausting life of Australia's rural pioneers.

Unexpected plot twists may occasionally emerge. In Maninyas, for instance, which, in Welch's words, deals with "how people reveal themselves more and more as they get to know each other," he created a particularly tempestuous duet for SFB's Yuri Possokhov and former principal Elizabeth Loscavio. At one point a group of dancers creeps onto the stage in Welch's trademark deep plies like a fog invading the land. When the air clears, Loscavio has been sucked away, and Possokhov is left to continue his partnering with a new woman, Julia Adam.

It was while watching Maninyas that Ben Stevenson, artistic director of Houston Ballet, whose 1980 Four Last Songs was on the same SFB program in 1997, also decided to commission a work from Welch. "I saw his skillful use of the classical vocabulary," says Stevenson, "and liked the dancers' energy and the way they enjoyed dancing it. He does a nice mixture of classical and modern, and I thought that our dancers might enjoy his choreography too." Welch describes Indigo as a "very classical" work for eight dancers wearing costumes he designed ("sophisticated studio wear").

As he had with Tomasson, Welch gave Stevenson a number of scores from which to choose. "Other choreographers tell you exactly what they want," Tomasson observed. "Stanton is so fresh and so full of ideas that apparently it doesn't make any difference to him." Tomasson chose "Taiko" by the Australian percussion ensemble Synergy, in part because he hoped that Welch might feature SFB's men.

Taiko, which in rehearsal looks as if it uses men and women on an equal footing, is inspired by Tokyo. "It's the most modern city in the world," says Welch, "where you walk down the street with big TV screens going twenty-four hours a day, and then you have a group of monks walking down the middle of the street, chanting prayers."

In group rehearsals Welch works swiftly, in a focused but relaxed manner, often demonstrating moves full out while paying attention to refining the gestures--both Asian and frantic urban ones--all the while stressing visibility from the audience's perspective. Pas de deux rehearsals are looser, more of a collaborative process, in which Welch accepts suggestions and has the dancers work out their own solutions. "Pas de deux and solos are very personal, and dancers need to be comfortable and feel natural in what they are doing, so they have to partake," he explains. "But then, unfortunately, I go away and make the executive decisions and come back to tell them, no, I don't like this and I don't like that."

Although Welch is still a member of Australian Ballet, his duties as a resident choreographer have reduced his performing. "I was talking with Mark Morris the other night" he said, almost wistfully. "I wondered in the back of my mind whether I should ask him for a job." It's not likely to happen. At press time, two more American ballet companies had already approached Welch about creating ballets for them.

Rita Felciano is a Dance Magazine San Francisco correspondent.