Daniel Pelzig: new kid in town.

Daniel Pelzig, the new resident choreographer for Boston Ballet, ended his first season last May with a batting average of 1.000 in a town that is not used to home-run heroes. The two premieres he created for the company--The Princess and the Pea and Nine Lives--have been enor-mously successful, as have the dances and movement he devised for the Huntington Theater's revival of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe last January. In passing, Pelzig last fall had also served as choreographer for Boston Lyric Opera's production of Gounod's Faust before settling down to revise parts of Boston Ballet's megaproduction of The Nutcracker.

The Princess and the Pea, one of a three-part, evening-long work based on stories by Hans Christian Andersen, was the hit of last season's opening series. The nearly forty-five-minute work, set to Gustav Holst, was a fractured fairy tale for twenty-three dancers; Pelzig's characters included a flat-footed princess, a nerdy prince who wears glasses, and a tribe of twelve cavorting mattresses. The result was that rarest of entertainments, a truly funny ballet.

Pelzig says that he asks himself a series of questions before he begins to work: "What is the story? What is interesting about the story? The Andersen story ran only a page; what about expanding it, creating a cast of characters and a plot? I sit at home. I listen to the music. I get images in my head that drive the story. I never come into a studio with steps, or arrows and patterns. I let the dancers define the movement. Everyone contributed to the storytelling."

After rethinking some of the segments of Nutcracker to try to preserve the health of the corps de ballet, which must give fifty performances of the company's holiday bonanza, Pelzig set to work on his contribution to the spring series, "Hot & Cool," three new works in the contemporary mode. Nine Lives, set to songs of Lyle Lovett, is a succession of vignettes based on characters from the pages of a supermarket tabloid. The joy of the spoof was seeing svelte ballerinas like Marie-Christine Mouis in a get-down, sexy adagio and Paul Thrussell as the laid-back cowpoke. It looked as if Pelzig had uncovered the alter egos of the classically trained dancers. "The characters you saw dancing up there are who the dancers really are," Pelzig says.

Credit Bruce Marks, artistic director of Boston Ballet, for recognizing talent when he sees it. Pelzig caught his eye when the choreographer took the gold medal at the Boston International Choreography Competition in 1994 with an abstract ballet entitled Cantabile, set to Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1 in D Major. Within a week after the competition had ended, Marks had asked Pelzig if he would be a resident choreographer for Boston. "I hired Danny on the basis of Cantabile," says Marks. "It was a dramatic work without a story. I recognized his great musicality, his understanding of stagecraft. These things made me feel he needed a place to work on his ideas.

"I think a choreographer in residence begins to create a style for the dancers. It brings out the best in them. Someone creating continually on the same group of dancers can help them find their voices. There's a great model in the Balanchine-Robbins combination at New York City Ballet. I think we've found our Robbins. Danny understands theater very well."

Boston Ballet has had a history of choreographers in residence, stretching back to Samuel Kurkjian and Ron Cunningham with E. Virginia Williams, the founder of the company, and Bruce Wells, who had served in a variety of capacities with Williams, Violette Verdy, and Marks before leaving to join Pittsburgh Ballet. Marks, who wanted a gifted dancemaker to create ballets that would be unique to Boston, had not found a suitable replacement for Wells. "I'm looking for another chore-ographer in residence. We could use two of them," he says.

Pelzig was in the midst of a thriving career when he got the Boston offer: "I had just finished the summer at the Santa Fe Opera," he says, "and my opera career was taking off. Yet my training was as a classical ballet dancer. Even with the theater work, I made very sure to find places to do a ballet, even if it didn't pay much money. But since I'd spent the bulk of my career in musical theater I had very few contacts in the ballet world.

"When Bruce presented the opportunity to me, I said to myself, 'Take it, take it.' I've always considered myself a classicist."

Always is a relative word for the forty-one-year-old native of New York City, who did not set foot in a dance class until his junior year in college. Pelzig was born into a family he describes as "extremely liberal." When his father, who was a doctor, died around Pelzig's fifth birthday, his mother went back to school to become a biology teacher. Pelzig attended the U.N. school until fourth grade, then spent his high school years as a self-described math and science whiz at Valhalla High School in New York's Westchester County. He enrolled as a science major at Montreal's McGill University, pigging out on physics, chemistry, and biology courses in his freshman year. He transferred to Columbia University because "in May they were still shoveling snow in Montreal." He graduated from Columbia in three years with a degree in cellular biology.

During junior year Pelzig enrolled in a dance class at Barnard College to fulfill the gym requirement. "I was always interested in dance as a child," he says. "My three sisters studied ballet at a local studio. I was not allowed to take dance classes because my mother thought it an unhealthy atmosphere for a young boy. Now she loves what I'm doing.

"We have home movies of us dancing around our living room. I would put on my clown suit and dance with them. My sisters now look at the films and say, 'You were better than we were.'"

His teachers at Columbia included Nancy Mapother, who was trained in Cunningham technique, and Sandra Genter in ballet. "The minute I started classes at Barnard I wanted more," Pelzig recalls. He added classes at the New Dance Group studios with Celene Keller, Margot Colbert, and Ana-Marie Forsythe, who taught Horton technique. But the intensive work was yet to come.

After graduation, Pelzig was advised to seek out Richard Thomas and the late Barbara Fallis, former ballet dancers who ran a highly regarded studio in New York. They were willing to take on men who were late bloomers. "I pointed a foot and Dick Thomas gave me a scholarship," Pelzig says. His overarticulated feet with incredibly high arches would become his "bread and butter" as a young dancer.

"I stayed with them for ten years," Pelzig recalls. "At first I took ballet fundamentals and beginning ballet. I sat at the desk and punched cards, swept the studio, and went downtown with them for family dinner at night. Dick Thomas was my first teacher and absolutely my mentor. He certainly became a substitute father for me. He introduced me to opera and taught me table manners.

"The Thomases were a great balance for each other in teaching. He'd give a solid class, all technique-no dancing in his class. Your arms were always in second position, everything was done forward and back. I studied only with him for two or three years. He kept saying I wasn't ready for [Barbara's] classes. Then he said, 'You are ready.' In her classes she had the most incredible breath and ease of dancing. It was really her classes that taught me how to dance," he says. He remembers standing in the back row and watching the dancers who came to study with Fallis: Merrill Ashley, Christine Sarry, Sean Lavery, Judith Fugate, Heather Watts. "It was like a lesson just to watch these people," he says.

Pelzig danced with the small troupe fielded by the Thomases, then joined American Ballet Theatre II in 1981. A friend in the company of the Broadway revival of West Side Story asked Pelzig to audition because they needed a replacement. "I was hired as a swing and understudy for Broadway, then went into the company for the tour to Europe," he says. "I liked it better than straight ballet. When I first auditioned I was the most balletically articulate of all the dancers. I thought I was great-like I'm wearing sneakers and jeans and I could point my toes and stretch my legs. In the course of doing the show I realized that wasn't what it was all about. There's a person here and a story that needs to be told. Trust that you have the technique and don't show it off. It needs to be sublimated to character. It was a huge lesson learned for me."

Thomas was not only Pelzig's mentor as a dancer but also pushed him into choreography. He recalls, "When I was studying, he would yell at me all the time, 'Your brain is going faster than your body. You're so smart you are not taking the time.' I was always an observer." Agnes de Mille picked up on Pelzig's habit when she cast him in a revival of Brigadoon at New York City Opera. After watching a rehearsal she told him, "You dance beautifully, but perhaps you could concentrate on your own performance and not watch everyone else." Pelzig says, "She was right." Later he would choreograph the fiftieth-anniversary tour of Oklahoma.!, creating the dances in his own style, but--as he puts it--"referencing her work."

The choreography assignments began while he was performing. He choreographed five operas during two seasons (1982 and 1983) for the Sarasota Opera, also performing and singing the role of Mercury in Orpheus in the Underworld. (Pelzig says he is a reliable second tenor. He began studying voice when he was cast in the musical theater productions.) In 1984 Thomas asked Pelzig for a ballet for his troupe. The result was Eight Folk Dances, set to traditional Romanian folk music. Thomas then recommended him to Barbara Weisberger for the Carlisle Project, where Pelzig created a series of ballets from 1986 to 1990.

Pelzig says, "Ernie Horvath, who ran the Carlisle Project with Barbara Weisberger, was very supportive of my work, and Merrill Brockway has been another source of encouragement. I was doing ballet after ballet to music by Saint-Saens, a full-length to Brahms, and Britten." The Brahms work, Like Melodies It Passes (1988), was later set on Atlanta Ballet.

At the same time, Pelzig was developing a full-blown career in musical theater, choreographing for touring companies, summer stock, and regional theaters: My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and Privates on Parade, off-Broadway. He was hired as choreographer in residence for the Santa Fe Opera in 1993. (His performing career had ended in 1987 because of a back injury.)

While Pelzig says he "feeds off the work," his schedule for 1996-97 is not for the faint of heart. He worked over the summer on a Kurt Weill revue that opened in September at Cincinnati's Playhouse in the Park and will continue in October at St. Louis Repertory Theater. Boston Ballet opens its season this month with the premiere of his descended the Hudu Zephyr on a bill with Paul Taylor's Company B and Elisa Monte's VII for VIII; a large-cast work, its score at press time was to be music performed by the Empire Brass Quintet. Rehearsals for a new piece for ABT Studio Theater begin in November for a spring premiere.

In the spring he'll create another big ballet, set to Mozart's Symphony No. 29, finishing up his Boston assignments at the Huntington Theater with a revival of Stephen Sondheim's Company, directed by his longtime collaborator, Larry Carpenter. Then will work on dances for Tulsa Opera's April production of The Merry Widow.

Pelzig is happy to be simultaneously working on these different choreographic strains of his career. "I seem to be the only choreographer working in all three venues. But in reality, I did not make my name in one area before taking on another. I consciously try to keep three parallel careers going. They are three very separate worlds, but the higher I go, the more they converge," he says.

Contributing editor Iris Fanger is former director of the Harvard Summer Dance Center; she writes on theater and dance for The Boston Herald and other publications.