Festival Ballet Providence gains national recognition with this five-page article featured in the July 2006 issue of Dance Magazine!
Tough Love
Published By BILL GALE for Dance Magazine.
July 2006
Providence, RI -
“What is the problem?” the small,
reddish-haired man with the hornrims
balancing precariously on his
nose wanted to know. Springing into
the middle of a half-dozen rehearsing
dancers, he added, “You look very
uncomfortable. Why? Why?”
The speaker was Mihailo
(“Misha”) Djuric, artistic director of
Festival Ballet Providence. Born to
Croatian-Serbian parents, his pronunciation
turns “Why? Why?” into “Vhy? Vhy?”
Hesitantly, one of the dancers offers an answer:“There’s a lot of steps.”
“Ahh!” Djuric says. “Lot of steps. OK. Vell, go ahead
and try it again. If ve don’t like it, I change it.”
Above: Viktor Plotnikov’s
Loof and Let Dime,
a new addition
to the repertoire. Below: Emily
Bromberg as Cupid in Don Quixote.
The dancers, rehearsing as toreadors in Festival
Ballet’s version of Don Quixote, have been treated, if that’s
the word, to just a little of the carrot and stick technique
that has allowed Djuric—and a hard-working board of
directors—to transform a once moribund company into
one approaching national status. In his eight years in
Providence, Djuric, driven, sweet, hard-working, and
focused, has turned Festival Ballet, once mostly classical
with many story ballets, into a company where you are
likely to see quicksilver segues from classical movement to
Latino street styles. The dancers these days are thrown
across the floor and leap to their feet—something that
never would have happened before Djuric’s arrival.
Sprinkled with performers from all over—from Russia to
Venezuela—Festival Ballet’s dancing can be precise or hardedged,
but is more emotional, more driven than ever.
Festival Ballet Providence today is a reflection of its leader:
single-minded, tough, and determined to get better. Since
Djuric’s arrival, the company has gone from a budget of about $350,000 to $1.7 million. Student enrollment in the
school, which has relocated to Providence’s tony east side, has
risen from 100 to more than 500.
Above: Gleb Lyamenkoff and Guerrero in Viktor
Plotnikov’s Carmen
Festival Ballet’s improvement can be said to have begun
with the break-up of the old Yugoslavia. After a career as a first
soloist with National Opera and Ballet of Belgrade, Djuric
spent time in the United States to see how dance differed
here. He had fully intended to return to Belgrade, but when
war broke out in his homeland, his parents and other family
members urged him to stay away. Although he was a veteran
of the Yugoslavian army, he knew he might be drafted again.
In addition, he preferred the united nation in which he had
grown up. “I really felt Yugoslavian, not Serb or Croat. It was
the most confusing and depressing time of my life,” he says.
“Now, I call Providence, and the United States, my home.”
He took over Ballet New England, a small company in
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1991. His success there put
him on Festival Ballet’s candidate list after the death of the
company’s co-founder (with her ex-husband Winthrop Corey)
Christine Hennessy in 1998.
Above and Below: Misha Djuric in rehearsal: “Every little mistake
on stage shows.”
Djuric came to Providence and loved it. “The energy of
the board and the city impressed,” he says. The board liked
him, too. “When we checked references,” says Debbie Leach,
then chairwoman of the board, “he was the only guy I heard called a ‘genius’ by more than one person.” Djuric moved to Providence,
bought a house, and began to transform
Festival Ballet into a fully professional
company.
He is also, board members point out,
a man unafraid to share the spotlight.
Recent strong dances have come from
two horeographers associated with
Boston Ballet: Viktor Plotnikov and
Gianni Di Marco. Both brought Festival
something new. Plotnikov’s premiere
Loof and Let Dime was a hard-edged ballet
featuring women and men in cohesion
and collision. Di Marco’s Azucar, to
the music of Latina great Celia Cruz,
had boys and girls light and flirty, young
and strong. The contrast between the two
new dances showed the wide range of the
new Festival Ballet.
Di Marco is an unabashed fan of
Djuric: “He is a risk-taker. We have had
problems, sure. We are artists. But we
have always been able to work them out.
He’s brave.”
Jennifer Ricci is the last pre-Djuric
dancer at Festival Ballet. A principal,
she is small, olive-eyed, and quicksilver
on the dance floor. Ricci says that
Djuric takes her to another level.
“Misha can be tough, but he brings out
the best in you. He’s heightened this
company tremendously.”
Another veteran dancer in the company
has a different reaction to that tough
guy quality. “Sometimes I think he’s too
strong,” the dancer says. “He can yell at
you to a point where you are frustrated. It
may make some people improve. But
some give up. I think it would be better
with more positive reinforcement.”
Asked about this, Djuric says, “There
is a part of me that is always unhappy. I
say, ‘I can do that better. They can do that
better.’ I always think, ‘How can I benefit
someone? How can I push someone?’
You’ve got to challenge. I am still trying to
explain myself to the dancers. If I give a
bad comment it’s not that I don’t like
them, that I don’t love them. But I need
to be honest. Every little mistake on the
stage shows. It is you in your bare skin.”
Djuric is speaking from his cluttered
desk, from which he can see the
main rehearsal studio. The view is a
reminder that the dancers are never far
away. Leaning forward, he says that
these days he can take the technical
competence of professional dancers
pretty much for granted; it’s emotion
and ideas he’s looking for.
“I prefer dancers who think and dancers who offer ideas.
The dancer who needs to be spoon-fed . . .” He lets the
thought hang, shrugging his shoulders. He wants a company
not much bigger than the current troupe of 19 and 3 apprentices— 20 to 24 dancers max. The Providence metro area has
about 1.1 million people and probably can’t afford anything
more. “The point now,” he says, “is to get better".
As for Djuric himself, “I’m always a dancer,” he says. “I’ve
finished that phase of my life, except for a little character dancing.
But my passion is to move. I must do it. You can tell a story
that way. The heart is stronger than the brain.”
In the rehearsal of the toreadors, after informing his
dancers that he might change the choreography, Djuric
joined the dancing. Making the music himself (“la de, dah,
dah, dah-DAH”), he led them through the movement. He
beamed when it ended. It seemed his happiest moment in
the non-stop three-hour-plus rehearsal. “You need to be subtle, guys, much more subtle,” he said.“Give just a hint of hip-swinging. Try to be every woman’s
dream,” he said with a small, satisfied smile.
Former dance and theatre critic of the Providence Journal, Bill
Gale writes for various publications and publishes theaternewengland.com.
LETICIA GUERRERO
HEATING UP THE STAGE
Leticia Guerrero in Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante.
It was a typically gusty New England spring afternoon
when Leticia Guerrero was called from the class she
was teaching at the Sally Gould Dance Center in
Billerica, MA. The man on the other end of the line didn’t
waste any time.
“Can you learn ballet in one hour?” he demanded.
“Who is this?” Guerrero asked.
“What you care who is this?” the caller said. “Can
you learn in one hour!?”
“I thought, ‘Ahh, this must be Misha,’ ” the diminutive,
Venezuela-born Guerrero says. Today she can laugh about
the April 2003 call. But that evening she raced the 50 miles
from her home in Boston to a Providence theater, arriving at
9 P.M. just in time to solve a crisis. She learned the part of
Billie Holiday in Djuric’s new dance toDAY in the lobby as
the rest of the cast was rehearsing onstage. A leading
dancer for Festival Ballet Providence had departed unceremoniously
the day before opening night. Artistic director
Misha Djuric immediately called Guerrero, and the rest is
local legend.
“Misha messed up my hair,” Guerrero says, “threw
a huge red dress on me, and pushed me onstage. He
said, ‘If you don’t remember, improvise.’ ”
A dancer who exudes emotion and passion, Leticia
Guerrero has always been a hard worker. As she herself
says, she’s not the prototypical ballerina, being
short and lacking great extension and having feet that
are “not so developed.” But onstage she moves with
darting intensity. She projects a sexuality and
dynamism that change with each role. Her big brown
eyes reach to the people in their seats, imploring them
not to miss her flavor.
Guerrero, 36, left Caracas in 1986 to attend summer
school at Boston Ballet. She spoke no English but could
rely on an aunt living in Boston. From then on, it was a
gypsy-like life, dancing with Massachusetts’ North
Atlantic Ballet, Michigan Ballet, and Minnesota Dance
Theatre (“I don’t know what happened—I kept going
from cold to colder”), and then Charleston Ballet
Theatre in South Carolina. She returned to Caracas for
five years with Ballet Nuevo Mundo until the ascent of
the populist president Hugo Chavez, whose regime supports
the working classes at the cost of the arts. “We
stopped getting paid; I had no apartment,” says Guerrero, who now speaks fluent English.
Returning to Boston, she danced with Jose Mateo’s
Ballet Theatre of Boston and then Colleen Cavanaugh’s
Cadence Dance Project in Providence. Now she dances
many lead roles at Festival Ballet.
Guerrero talks about the moment when the curtain
rises. “The feeling it gives you, I can’t explain it. You’ve
done all the hard work and then it starts and you get
to show what you’ve done.”
Guerrero’s husband heads Boston’s aquatic programs,
and they have a 4-year-old daughter,
Gabriana. Has motherhood changed things? “It does
make a big difference,” she says. “There is more
responsibility. Obviously, Gabriana is my life so I want
to take care of myself even more. I don’t know if I
dance differently, but the emotions are different. I don’t
inhibit myself from expressing anything. Now, I really
know what life is”—B.G.
