Francis Patrelle: going his own way.

For as long as he can remember, Francis Patrelle has been making dances. His first studio was the family living room in Bucks County, Pennyslvania, where he grew up, and his first teacher was television. There were two ballroom shows on TV in the ealy 1950s, and he would stand, glued to the set, watching them. Before long, he was making up his own routines and, with the girl who lived next door, performing them at sock hops. Catholic Youth Organization clubs, and synagogues. Eventually, "Little Frankie and Jeanine" landed a spot on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. A snapshot in the family album shows him beaming at the host's side, a pint-sized "star" in a blazer and bow tie. It was a maverick start for a career in ballet.

Patrelle's development as a choreographer was equally unusual. He came to ballet late, with an imagination already partly formed by vernacular dance and musical theater (its songs have inspired some of his best works). He loves story ballets and has choreographed versions of Firebird, Romeo and Juliet, and the full-length Macbeth that received its premiere in New York City last spring. Even in plotless works he reveals a sense of drama and characterization that harks back to ballet styles of the 1930s and 1940s. Although the danse d'ecole is his preferred idiom, he actually received his formal training in composition from modern dancers. His company, Dances . . . Patrelle, has the fluid structure of a modem dance pickup troupe and, like traditional modem dance companies, exists as a showcase for its founder's work. Lastly, he is that rarity in ballet--a choreographer who has never had a long-term affiliation with a company as a dancer.

Although he cares passionately about teaching, his own training was haphazard. It began at the onset of his teens, when the gigs for Little Frankie and Jeanine ran out. "Somewhere I had read that Fred Astaire had studied ballet," he recalls, explaining that at the time he intended to go into musical theater, "and I convinced both Mother and Dad that I should be doing it too." He took his first classes with William Sena in nearby Philadelphia, then worked for a couple of years with Michael Lopuszanski. Eventually, he received a scholarship from Barbara Weisberger, director of Pennsylvania Ballet, only to be told after a year in the company's school that she was taking it away because his legs were too short. "I was destroyed," Patrelle says.

At this point, Jean Williams entered his life. Director of Germantown Dance Theatre, she needed "eleven lords aleaping" for a Christmas show. Patrelle auditioned, and before the day was out had asked her for a scholarship. A superb teacher, Williams had nearly a dozen men in her classes, ballet as well as jazz. "Jean taught me to push the walls away in my dancing. She taught me to fill up the stage and dance `big,'" Patrelle recalls. "My first character role was Death in Valse Triste with Quitman Daniel Fludd, who later became an award-winning black composer. Jean had a great integrated company, and casting was color-blind."

Another pivotal experience came after finishing high school when he studied with Jose Limon, Alfredo Corvino, and Joyce Trisler at the Ramblemy summer dance camp in New Hope, Pennsylvania. They urged Patrelle to go to the Juilliard School. However, it took two years at Philadelphia's La Salle College, where he "couldn't walk into the cafeteria without being catcalled," to convince his parents in 1967 to let him go to New York City.

Juilliard was eye-opening. The studied ballet with Corvino and Antony Tudor; modem with Limon, Mary Hinkson, Betty Jones, and Helen McGehee; and composition with Lucas Hoving and Doris Rudko. New York City, too, was a revelation. He saw Graham works, as well as Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, and Tudor's Lilac Garden, which left a deep imprint on his imagination. He danced wherever he could--at Hunter College on a program of works by James Clouser, at the 92nd Street Y in a Luciano Berio piece that was "very avant-garde," at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park in a Peer Gynt that starred Stacy Keach and was choreographed by Trisler. And in his last year at Juilliard, Limon made the role of the Birth Boy in La Pinata on him.

It was at Juilliard, too, that Patrelle created his first ballet--for a choreography class with Tudor. "The first thing he had us do," Patrelle recalls, "was walk down the staircase as if we were Carmen. The second was choreograph on ourselves Adam meeting Eve or Eve meeting Adam. Then he said, `I don't want to see any of you until April'--it was then October--`and when you come back I want a full ballet.' Everyone thought he was kidding, and flunked. I did a three-movement piece to Scarlatti--three boys, a young girl, on the beach, and they raped her--and got a B. The ballet was probably horrendous, but I finished it. Martha Hill, who directed the dance division, wanted to include it in the concert that year. But Tudor rightly said, `Martha, they'll kill him. Nurture him.'"

Patrelle speaks of Hill with great fondness. He recalls how she fought for the student deferment that kept him out of Vietnam and how she got him readmitted when he left Juilliard after being hired by the Ailey company and then fired because he was "too short." It was Hill, too, who brought him back to Juilliard after a stint in Spoleto with John Butler, a season with Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre in Swan Lake, and an eighteen-month gig as Mickey Mouse in Disney on Parade. Francis," she wrote, "isn't it time you stopped being Jack and the Beanstalk and came home to Juilliard to choreograph?" Patrelle returned with the title of "staff choreographer." Hill gave him dancers, studio space, and three years to prove himself. It was a golden opportunity, and in the end he had more than half a dozen ballets to his credit. "Without Martha Hill," Patrelle says simply, "I wouldn't be a choreographer."

He showed his work at showcases that were open to invited guests, such as Mary Giannone, a modem dance choreographer who had graduated with him from Juilliard. In 1974 she recommended him to Madeline Cantarella Culpo, director of Berkshire (now Albany Berkshire) Ballet, who was then upgrading the company and looking for works to stretch the dancers. Thus began the ten-year collaboration that made him a professional. He set two of his Juilliard pieces on the company--Three, a plotless work to a fantasia by Irving Fine, and By the Waters of Babylon, a retelling of a Bible story to a two-piano score by Andrew Thomas. Most of the ballets that followed had a narrative thread, sometimes even a full-scale story.

Within this narrative framework, his approach was far from conventional. In his 1983 Firebird (he is offering a new version this season), he dispensed with the Russian fairy tale, reconceiving the ballet as the Christ legend. He describes the setting as "futuristic," with men and women in dervish skirts, the Chosen People behind bars, and a tableau that recalled Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. "There was a beautiful moment," he recalls, "when the Firebird led the Chosen People from captivity under a huge swath of red light." He took lesser but still daring liberties with Romeo and Juliet (1982), making heavy cuts in the Prokofiev score, eliminating the tarts, and giving Juliet real steps to dance in the soliloquies of the last act. Structurally, and dramatically, Patrelle's version is one of the best around.

He thinks very carefully about plots. There is nothing in Romeo--or in the more recent Macbeth--that, as he puts it, "doesn't come from Shakespeare." His first concern is dramatic clarity, or making the action intelligible; his second is dramatic logic, or making it coherent. Once in the studio he typically sketches out a scene, "blocking" it like a theater director and finding the dance themes for the individual characters; the refinements come later. He uses many kinds of gesture, from ballet mime to the theatricalized gesture of the actor; even steps can be gestural, as when the ghosts of Macbeth's victims surround his partner in crime with avenging kicks in ecarte. Even in ballets without a plot, he treats the interplay of the dancers as the germ of a dramatic situation. Thus, in Beloved/Memories (1987), he contrasts the memory of unbridled passion with the manners of a decorous present, while in Country Dances/The Hunt (1992), he probes beneath the surface of social ritual for hints of private emotion. Like Tudor, he sees the individual always in relation to society.

Not all of Patrelle's story ballets are straightforward narratives. In Anyone Can . . .! (1994), subtitled "An Artist's Biography," he weaves fantasy and flashback into the tale of a young man caught between a love for dance that society will not accept and sexual desires that he cannot explain. Set to music by Stephen Sondheim, it is closer to a theater piece than a dance piece. Singers appear onstage, sometimes as doubles of the dancers, at other times as their interlocutors. For Patrelle, the lyrics are as important as the music. Indeed, in Sondheim's songs and in those of Stephen Foster, Harold Arlen, and Cole Porter--which Patrelle has also used--he finds the vernacular of American musical theater raised to high art. "It's our American lieder," he says.

By 1986 Patrelle felt that it was time to show his work in New York City. For several years he had been teaching at the old Christine Fokine studio (now Ballet Academy East) on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and among his students was a woman, whose privacy he prefers to respect, who put up $50,000 for a season at the Riverside Dance Festival. The concert was a sellout. He had first-class dancers: Carlo Merlo, Miriam Mahdaviani, Judith Fugate, and Merrill Ashley from New York City Ballet; Fugate's husband, Mehdi Bahiri; and John Meehan, who had just partnered Ashley in a chamber version of The Sleeping Beauty. "She came," says Patrelle, "because she wanted to dance with John. They had a wonderful partnership." He paired them in Come Rainicome Shine, a work about the tangles and triumphs of love that was set in a boxing ring and danced to Judy Garland songs. The piece was sexy, glamorous, and a sensation.

Two years later he founded Dances . . . Patrelle. Financed on a shoestring, the company produces one concert a year, with dancers hired by the season. The size of the company varies with the repertoire. Last year, for Macbeth, it was unusually large, with ten principals, three soloists, and more than a dozen children. The individual dancers also vary from season to season, depending on the repertoire and their availability. Nevertheless, over the years a Patrelle family has developed. At the nucleus are dancers such as Leda Meredith (of Jennifer Muller/The Works) and Alan Hineline, who have been with the company for years and frequently act as rehearsal assistants. Other key members have been Fugate, Bahiri, Donald Williams of Dance Theatre of Harlem, and, more recently, Darla Hoover and Deborah Wingert (both formerly with NYCB). Cynthia Gregory, the company's principal guest artist until her retirement, holds a special place in Patrelle's affections; he created several ballets for this loyal company friend, including Fuoco e Fiamma (1990), in which she portrayed Lucrezia Borgia, and Clara (1992), in which she played another larger-than-life woman, Clara Schumann. City Ballet's Peter Boal inspired another dramatic work centering on a historical figure, Adieu with a Handshake (1989), about the painter Vincent van Gogh and set to Debussy.

In other ways, too, the company is like a family. Rehearsals are relaxed, with the dancers free to contribute ideas that often become part of the work. In Macbeth, for instance, it was Wingert's idea to drop the crown into the witches' cauldron just before the Prologue ends, and Meredith's to do a hand-circling gesture when Lady Macbeth blows out the candle in the Sleepwalking Scene. Patrelle's collaboration with costume designer Rita B. Watson dates from his Berkshire days, while his musical collaborators are colleagues from the Manhattan School of Music, where for the last fourteen years Patrelle has taught movement to singers and staged the dances in operas. The children who dance in his productions come from Ballet Academy East, where he also teaches, and several of his board members take class with him. Their financial support is crucial to the company, as grants and ticket sales do not cover production costs. In many ways, Dances . . . Patrelle is like a regional company, a mom-and-pop organization that just happens to be located on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

This localism may well explain Patrelle's isolated position within the ballet world of New York City. Although he has presented work here for nearly a decade, he still remains an outsider. Apart from Joffrey II Dancers (which commissioned American Dreamer), none of the city's major companies have invited him to choreograph, despite the fact that he works regularly with their dancers. Moreover, the taste of his core audience, more conservative than that of the dance world at large, has forced him occasionally to play it safe. In contrast to his earlier practice, he now tends to avoid twentieth-century music apart from works by popular American composers and familiar scores like Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. For Macbeth (a project viewed by some members of his board as risky), he turned to Tchaikovsky, piecing together an excellent score from seven of the composer's symphonic works. He speaks, only half in jest, of staging a Nutcracker with lots of children: "Imagine all the tickets we'd sell."

A gifted teacher of young children, Patrelle emphasizes in class what distinguishes his choreography onstage--steps. He gives flic-flacs and entrechats sixes to his ten-year-olds, and virtuoso movements of all kinds to the adults in his ballets. He loves traveling steps and uses them liberally, and he invariably puts women on pointe. Although he sometimes borrows from other idioms (in Macbeth, for instance, he gives Fleance a "modern dance" pivot), at heart he is a ballet traditionalist, keeping to old ways. His pas de deux present the ballerina, and his vocabulary respects the distinction between male and female dance. He has great esteem for Italian technique, which he studied with Corvino and Tudor, and continues, in modified form, to teach. "I love the epaulement," he says, "and I love the port de bras." Their gestural potential as well as their expressiveness easily lend themselves to his choreography.

"This is what I'm happiest doing," he says during a rehearsal of Macbeth. As a choreographer, Patrelle has no desire to turn the dance world upside down, take ballet into the twenty-first century, or revise the grammar of classical technique. He simply wants to make dances--beautiful dances with marvelous dancers that charm the eye and touch an emotional chord in the audience. This goal is certainly at odds with today's postmodernist sensibility. But then Francis Patrelle has never been one to follow artistic fashions. Even in the family living room he was going his own way.

Contributing editor Lynn Garafola's Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, is now available in an Oxford paperback