Don’t believe everything you read in the daily newspapers. The current crisis at Ohio Ballet is not one of artistic merit as the dailies imply, but a financial crisis that has been at least in part manufactured by the dailies’ persistent negativity toward Ohio Ballet. When it comes to the current crises at Ohio Ballet, one needs to get a bigger picture by talking to the local dance community, both dancers and audience members, as opposed to relying solely on the local dance critics. The complaint we hear most frequently is that Akron and Cleveland are one-newspaper towns, with the result that Cleveland’s Plain Dealer and Akron’s Beacon-Journal act like 900-pound gorillas when it comes to shaping local perceptions. Unfortunately, these perceptions shape the marketplace.

Other than a brief period when Jeffrey Graham Hughes (present artistic director of Ohio Ballet, who followed founding director Heinz Poll) was brand new, his tenure has faced a persistent and often undeserved negative press. A very tangible result of damning the artistic direction of Hughes (reviews at times have seemed vicious) has been that audiences, especially in Cleveland, stay away in droves from what often turn out to be productions of considerable value, worthy of a more objective review, even praise. Local audiences need to open their eyes to the very real artistic merits of what Hughes has accomplished during his tenure of less than 7 years at Ohio Ballet. It would be more than nice if northeast Ohio could keep its remaining professional ballet company, an under appreciated jewel.

It is true that Hughes has yet to produce a choreographic coup comparable to Heinz Poll’s Elegiac Songs, and that his choreographic output is uneven. Like most choreographers, Hughes has both strengths and weaknesses, but there have been many times when a piece has been dismissed in the local news for merely specious reasons. ( e.g., in one of Hughes’ early ballets, one critic complained that a dancer portraying a Greek god wore a Spanish helmet) Other choreographers’ efforts for Ohio Ballet often suffer a similar dismissive fate. (e.g., Septime Webre’s Peter Pan, a hit with us and everyone we talked to, was derided as “mediocre” and a “kiddie show” by a critic in the Plain Dealer.) Was Peter Pan any more a kiddie show than Poll’s Jungle Book? Did you see Ohio Ballet’s collaborative production of Hamlet? Or were you put off by a Plain Dealer preview that wondered aloud if Ohio Ballet dancers could do it justice? We found Damien Highfield’s lead, indeed, the entire production, to be dark and brooding and spare and powerful… exactly what Hamlet should be, strongly danced, and well worth seeing.

The truth is that under Hughes, Ohio Ballet’s dancers became some of the strongest since the company was founded in 1968 - by far the best ballet dancers currently based in Northeast Ohio. Anyone who doubts that needs to review his or her own dance training (are we the only writers on dance who actually have any training to review?). Yes, dance performance is more than technique, but when a large and excellent company like American Ballet Theatre raids a little company like Ohio Ballet for a dancer, as recently happened, that company is doing something right.

Sure, we all had our favorite dancers and performances from the old Ohio Ballet under Poll, but the past should not blind us to the present. The Plain Dealer regularly refers to the old Ohio Ballet as “a jewel of a company” and the Beacon Journal, with which we are less familiar, has bemoaned the passing of the old, but such a resolute resort to the rose colored rear view mirror conveniently forgets the many limitations of the old Ohio Ballet when it came to actual ballet technique.

What we clearly remember is how the old Ohio Ballet functioned best as a virtual modern dance repertory company. Technical standards for the old Ohio Ballet suffered in the shadow of Cleveland San Jose Ballet’s fifty beautiful dancers. Admittedly, the old Ohio Ballet performed some Balanchine and Tudor, but it’s impossible to imagine them doing more than a pas de deux from an 18th or 19th century ballet. Less than a handful of the women possessed requisite strength and technique. We often saw uneven pointe technique as a problem among the women. Poll sometimes took the women’s corps off pointe for entire ballets. As for the men, in our opinion it was late in Poll’s tenure before the men’s corps rose to a really professional standard. We could go on.

Yes, we went to see Ohio Ballet under Poll, and we frequently enjoyed and appreciated what we saw, but it was not all flawless diamonds set in gold. Certainly we all have the right to subjective evaluation (what is one person’s hodgepodge of a program is another person’s evening of enjoyable diversity), but part of what is missing in the Ohio Ballet story is objective context. Although the new Ohio Ballet has performed many of the same modern dance choreographers as the old Ohio Ballet (Jose Limon, Lynn Taylor-Corbett, Laura Dean, Donald Byrd), comparing the new Ohio Ballet to the old Ohio Ballet is comparing essentially different things: the new Ohio Ballet is really a ballet company; the old Ohio Ballet was more a balletic modern dance company. Now that we have Verb Ballets doing Taylor, Parsons and even Martha Graham, even if Heinz Poll’s clone suddenly appeared on the scene, would he really fill a void?

Ohio Ballet’s Hughes has been accused of lacking artistic vision. To us, he has shown he has a clear vision of what he expects his company to be… and that is a ballet company with high technical standards that can do both ballet repertoire and small cast versions of story ballets (Raymonda and Coppelia from the classical, Turn of the Screw and Hamlet from the more contemporary) and brief journeys into modern dance and jazz dance —like other contemporary ballet companies worthy of the name. Northeastern Ohio would be considerably poorer minus this version of Ohio Ballet, a much under-appreciated, over abused jewel in its own right, which fills a niche no other area company can fill. Sometimes the case against Jeffrey Graham Hughes seems permeated by a strange odor of spite, though for what reason one cannot begin to imagine. That would be a sad reason for losing yet another ballet company.

From Cool Cleveland contributors Victor Lucas and Elsa Johnson hidden-email:ivparyfn@rneguyvax.arg? (:divend:)