John Wayne: new vision, new directions; Barbados-born John Alleyne takes Vancouver's Ballet British Columbia to thirteen U.S. cities this month.

To get from Vancouver, the headquarters of Ballet British Columbia, to Ottawa, Canada's political capital, and to Toronto, the country's economic center, you have to cross the North American continent and three time zones. Living beside the Pacific on the wrong side of the Rockies, Vancouver citizens are content to be left to their own devices and get on with things without having to worry about wearing the right aesthetic gear or making all the correct political noises. Fashion's imprimatur hasn't made much impression on this damp West Coast forest floor: you're valued for what you do. Not surprisingly, Vancouver is a city of artistic mavericks.

When John Alleyne--pronounced "Ahlane"--was offer the job of artistic director of Ballet B.C. two years ago, therefore, it seemed like a match made in heaven: a company aiming to establish a hard, glossy, nineties identity far removed from traditional notions of regional ballet and a choreographer with an audacious, iconoclastic approach to dancemaking.

For Alleyne, it was the gift an ambitious young choreographer dreams of. Nowhere else could he expect to be handed a ballet company and given carte blanche to shape its future. Nowhere else would he have such freedom to develop himself as an artist.

For the company, it promised the end to a period of jagged turmoil. Ballet B.C. had had a difficult birth and an even trickier adolescence. Launched in 1985 from the ashes of a failed Vancouver-based chamber company, it was directed initially by Annette av Paul, formerly of Montreal's Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. The British Columbia--born Reid Anderson succeeded her in 1987, after nearly two decades with Stuttgart Ballet, and when Anderson moved to Toronto in 1989 to become artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, former New York City Ballet principal Patricia Neary took over the reins.

Neary's stay in Vancouver was short but colorful--her flamboyant, top-down style of direction provoked management hostility and a company revolt--and she was succeeded in less than a year by Barry Ingham, a former Stuttgart dancer and ballet master in Frankfurt. Ingham's premature death from AIDS early in 1992 led to Alleyne's appointment that spring.

From its inception Ballet B.C. knew it had to offer something different in the world of Canadian dance. Canada already had three major ballet companies, and federal funding agencies were in no mood (or financial condition) to support another. Anderson and then Ingham developed a stripped-down, no-frills European look with a tart, contemporary directness: both men drew on their own backgrounds to build a company repertoire that now offers work by John Cranko. Jiri Kylian, and William Forsythe, among others.

Alleyne, then an emerging choreographer at the National Ballet of Canada, was an enthusiastic collaborator from the start of Anderson's reign; Alleyne was soon contributing a work a year to the Ballet B.C. repertoire. By the time he became artistic director, he was intimately linked with the company's artistic fortunes and contributing substantially to the creation of the company's image. (Jennifer Dunning, writing in the New York Times after the company's appearance at Jacob's Pillow last summer, called the company style "equal parts nerve and restrained theatricality.")

Born in Barbados, Alleyne was raised in rural Quebec from the age of four, and he began to dance when he was eight. Betty Oliphant, founder-director of Canada's National Ballet School in Toronto, took him under her wing when he was eleven (he is thirty-three now). He graduated in 1978 and joined Stuttgart Ballet.

The story of how he came to join that company is an interesting example of serendipity, but it also illuminates a crucial aspect of his personality. He arrived in Stuttgart as part of a European tour he was doing with the help of a Canada Council travel grant at the end of his student years. Seeing the company at work convinced him it was time to stop the technical training and start learning to be a performer, an artist.

Alleyne says, "I walked into the studio, and there were so many different nationalities at so many different levels doing so many different types of work that I knew this was an environment in which someone would view me as a dancer and not as a black person. That was different.

"Then the rep--I'd never seen anything like it ... and the spirit that comes off that stage. They really burned down that proscenium arch. And I realized that was my career, not standing at the barre with a teacher."

Marcia Haydee watched him take a class, and asked him if he could start work in the company the following day. He stayed for six years, to great acclaim. The 1981-82 Stuttgarter Ballett Annual called him "a dancer who has gone through the most astounding development ... a fantastic dancer; one cannot imagine the company without his elastic grace and spirited dance."

In 1984 he returned to Canada as a soloist with the National Ballet of Canada, then directed by Erik Bruhn. Alleyne had begun to experiment with dancemaking in Stuttgart, but it was in Toronto that he seriously began to develop. Initially, he admits, his early ballets were "Stuttgart ballets." This is hardly surprising: when he arrived there, William Forsythe, Uwe Scholz, Pierre Wyss, Hans van Manen, John Neumeier, Jiri Kylian, and Glen Tetley were all familiar faces in the rehearsal room.

Alleyne describes Tetley, with whom he worked both in Europe and at Canada's National, as "a benevolent dictator. He demanded that we really investigate the role. He'd give you the character, tell you the research he'd been doing, but a lot of times he was silent, and he let you fail. At the end, you were not only grateful for Glen but you were also really proud of yourself for what he'd made you accomplish. There was a definite sense of ownership. It was the best experience of my life. He had faith in me to do something."

There were also fond memories of advice from Bruhn ("I'm going to give you this to see what you can do with it") and Haydee ("I'm giving you this and I don't need to see it done the way it was done before"). Alleyne calls them mentors who released his own creativity and put him in touch with the wellsprings of his art.

His influences from North America are primarily Canadian (he doesn't think much of United States choreography after 1970), specifically the choreographers of Montreal; a remarkable efflorescence there in the 1980s produced iconoclastic modernist stylists (Edouard Lock, Paul-Andre Fortier, Jean-Pierre Perreault) whose works embody the newly independent, highly politicized spirit of Quebec.

"I keep thinking something similar might happen in this part of the world," says Alleyne. "We get so fed up with being blocked off by that mountain that we say, |Screw it, we'll do our own thing.' But Quebec had the political impetus. Here there's just a lot of loneliness and isolation."

Parallels might be drawn between the Stuttgart company of the Cranko era--the little company that did--and Alleyne's ambitions for Ballet B.C. He prefers, though, to see similarities between his company and Kylian's Netherlands Dance Theater: "Of course, we're in Canada, and the aesthetics, the taste, the eye--they're different. But I do model a lot after that company. He's very open, but he has set a style. I'm trying to do the same thing."

Alleyne calls himself "a black person making art." It is a careful choice of words. He is certainly no militant polemicist beating a particular racial-political drum; often his works contain little in the way of message at all. But he believes that the choreography he makes is the product of all the influences that have shaped him. His blackness is one of those influences, though the depth and extent of that influence is something that he has only come to understand and appreciate comparatively recently.

He says he matured with no real knowledge of his black heritage. It wasn't until he was twenty-five that he was impelled to take any serious interest in finding out what his roots were. He blames the delay in part on Canada's pluralism, which simply absorbs the country's many minorities into its social mix (Canada's black population is a much smaller and far less politically significant minority than in the U.S.) and his education, which kept him for many of his formative years in the protected environment of Toronto's National Ballet School.

"It was a case of perfect assimilation," he says. "I was brought up in an environment that allowed me to interact with a particular group of people, but my education was Western European; a whole part of my personal history, my culture, wasn't there. Where do I exist in Western European history? The American dream? When things were being given out, I was in slavery."

He was not, of course, unaware of his color. He was the first black student to go right through the school. He was only the second black dancer to become a soloist at the National. And he was always acutely aware of audience reaction when he would make his entrance at a performance: "They would go, |Ah, a black man,' and I knew if I was able to take them from that moment, so that at the end they would not be so concerned about my color, I would have done something worthwhile."

It was Bruhn who first provoked him to look seriously at his roots. He told Alleyne about Katherine Dunham. "He said, |You don't know?' This was one of his greatest gifts to me." The need to learn was reinforced when Alleyne's mother fell seriously ill: "I realized her illness came from physical and mental exhaustion--battling all her life to hold on to a sense of self in an alien culture. And these were my parents, one generation before me, and I didn't know their story?" He shakes his head in amazement.

This quest has been a priority for Alleyne ever since. "I have had to look carefully at my life, at certain lies I have put onto myself, at the pressures. I have begun to get an understanding of why I used to put the weight of my entire race on my shoulders every time I went out onstage.

"The next step is to get it out of the theater and into the streets whenever troublesome situations come about, and they do--oh, yes, they do. I have to, then and there, take the responsibility. It gets to the point where you're dealing with race, color, sexuality ... All I know is it's made me a hell of a lot more tolerant and a lot more intolerant of intolerance. Because if you don't respond it's just going to continue."

It has also influenced him as a choreographer. "Certain things inside have been touched, like pods, certain emotions have been exploded." He doesn't believe it shows in any overtly didactic way in his choreography, but he knows it is there. What he calls the aggressive partnering for a woman that upset some observers in his ballet Time Out With Lola was inspired by a desire to celebrate the strength of his mother's survival in white society.

Alleyne's essential seriousness is balanced by an irrepressible vitality of spirit and a relishing of artistic adventure. He is consumed by the art form's stylistic, aesthetic, and expressive possibilities; and he has been taking apart movement, costume, and structure to see what they might look like in other configurations. His vision is often filmic and disjunct: movement sequences flicker along like video clips. Titles are, at best, enigmatic (Go Slow, Walter; Interrogating Slam: Flying to Paris). And there are no sacred cows; classical technique is stretched, distorted, exaggerated.

Asked about his style, he says, "I keep on assuming that it's changing, that it's growing. There's a definite virtuoso aspect to it, a definite physical aspect, a very structural aspect . . . but I also expect dancers and the audience to contribute. That's a big thing--accessing someone's subconscious. If you say, well, audiences can't handle this. I say, you don't want me. I cannot accept the idea that dancers and audiences are incapable of grasping what goes on. Why has Ballet B.C. come so far so fast? Because they broke the rules. They didn't accept the idea that audiences were ignorant. Because they're not."

In an era when mass entertainment is often prized over the long-term and the long-lasting, this is brave talk, and it presupposes an audience of wit and intelligence, willing to bring something other than its sweet tooth when it enters the theater, precisely the kind of audience Alleyne believes his company draws. The Canadian choreographers he has commissioned for the company reflect this belief: both Christopher House (a new work in 1992) and James Kudelka (1993) are rising young stars of North American choreography who refuse to compromise their artistic explorations by talking down to their audiences.

In any North American ballet company, the artistic and business sides of the operation are so interlocked that an artistic director ignores the business aspect at his peril. In Alleyne's case, the pressures of directing Ballet B.C. meant that he didn't choreograph for a year after his appointment.

But choreography is his life as an artist, and the chance to choreograph on a stable group of dancers was one of the reasons he jumped at the chance to run Ballet B.C. "For most free-lance choreographers, after you've done your third work with a company, they want someone else, so you have to keep moving on and changing. I wouldn't have not taken the position. But I said at the beginning, if I'm not able to choreograph, I will stop directing."

Last September, at the beginning of a new season, therefore, Alleyne returned to the studio and made a new ballet. And what he discovered was that the intensity of the relationship he had developed with his tight little group of seventeen dancers had changed the dynamics of his dancemaking. They bad survived so much upheaval and uncertainty together that "an enormous amount of exchange, interaction, freedom" was possible.

Another reason for their closeness lay in the fact that (following the example of Tetley and his other mentors) he has always relied on the intelligence and ingrained training of his dancers to bring to his ballets depth, inflection, and personality. The creation of his new work, The Archeology of Karl . . . A Romantic Adventure, based on the life and spirit of Beethoven as expressed in the composer's late string quartets, became a company-wide collaboration. Each dancer created a collage of researched materials expressing personal feelings about the issues the work addressed. Alleyne was becoming, in turn, a liberator himself.

"All the inhibitions that you normally find in the studio don't exist in this company," says Alleyne. "There's no fear, so there's enormous trust. Stuff just flows out, and you're not thinking, Is this right, is this wrong. It just is. We are more of a team than I ever dreamed was possible."

He treasures a note prepared by dancer Miroslaw Zydowicz during the communal process of discovery that went into the creation of The Archaeology of Karl. "Do not ask, What does it mean? any more," wrote Zydowicz. "Look into yourself for an answer. Close your mind, open your heart, and read through your soul."