The Corella Effect

Philadelphia Ballet Artistic Director Angel Corella is celebrating his tenth-year anniversary, and this season, artistically and at the box office, proved to be a particularly strong one. The regular season ends with George Balanchine’s ‘The Prodigal Son,’ a ballet adaptation of the biblical story, and Frederick Ashton’s ‘The Dream,’ after Shakespeare’s comedy.

“I can’t believe I got here when I was 38…and now I’m 48,” Corella said incredulously (with a wry smile) in a Zoom interview in late April. “It’s funny because when I started here, people told me, ‘well this process usually takes a while…for a new director to make big changes, to put their imprint on the company.’”

First steps

Angel had admired Pennsylvania Ballet during Roy Kaiser’s nearly two decades heading the company. But when Kaiser suddenly announced that he was stepping down in 2014 after the Pennsylvania Ballet’s 50th season, there were also rumors of behind-the-scenes organizational problems and low morale among the dancers. When Corella was named director with just months to prepare, as the dancers were returning from summer break, it was announced that Kaiser’s artistic team had been let go.

It was an added layer of pressure, but Corella was ready. At the time, Corella was the recently retired superstar principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. He was also the founding director of the Barcelona Ballet in Spain, which folded after the Spanish government didn’t make good on their funding commitment.

Despite the backstage drama, Corella reshaped the season ballet line-up but, crucially, he scrapped the first production of a ballet set to Beethoven’s 9th for a mixed-bill called ‘Press Play’ with ballets by Alexie Ratmansky, Jerome Robbins, Christopher Wheeldon, and Balanchine. It was a gutsy move that paid off.

At the time, he told me, “I had expected the transition would be slower, but, from day one, boom, the dancers just lit up and understood the vision I have for the company.”

But the reality was, though, Corella’s vision for the company would take longer to achieve. “I thought I could do it all in a year or two. And I definitely felt I rolled my sleeves up and tried to do it all as quickly as possible. But, of course, it took time,” but now I think we can see, in the 10th-year anniversary, we are in the place where we can actually say – This is the kind of company that I was looking to build.”

Step back

After the initial flush of success faded, three years into his directorship, many of the dancers called it quits. Some had already been planning to leave; some were not on board with the direction the company was going in – namely moving away from being so closely identified with Balanchine’s repertoire and technical training. Several joined Miami City Ballet, also, as PA Ballet once was, bound to Balanchine’s aesthetic and technique. By 2017, almost half of the dancers – at the time, with a roster of 40-50 – exited. Corella recruited and expanded the ranks with a diverse international group of dancers. Corella was bringing in a new artistic team, as well. It was more than a makeover; it was a foundational restructuring. Corella expanded the technical titles of dancers – principals, soloists, demi-soloists, corps de ballet, apprentices, but also shuffled rankings in rotating casts during performance runs and gave corps and apprentice dancers more on-stage opportunities. A practice that especially strengthens the technical prowess of classical ballet companies.

Dancing over the abyss

Of all the challenges Corella navigated in the last ten years, he said, like many performance arts leaders faced as well was the impact of the Covid pandemic. “Yeah, a lot has happened, but I think that the most intense part is probably that was the pandemic. But it was the biggest challenge for all of us to be able to survive and to be able to keep the dancers healthy and continue working remotely and create 11 ballets for video and digital media. During this time Corella decided to change the company’s name from Pennsylvania to Philadelphia Ballet. And with Executive Director Shelly Powers advanced the development of the company’s new studio and performance theater on Broad St. The groundbreaking was in 2022, but the opening has been determined.

Classical Ballet 2.0

Corella said for him ‘the baseline’ is being in the studio every day with the dancers, “to really get to know the company,” His principal focus has been and still is working directly with the dancers up and down the ranks. And attract new audiences in a time of daunting fiscal realities in the performing arts. Corella’s belief in the marquee draw of the classical ballet canon. At the same time, he knew that he had to do more than dust off these warhorses, however seemingly popular they remain; they can’t be staged as museum pieces forever. He streamlined the storytelling and in the case of the season opener this year transformed Bizet’s Carmen into a two-actor working closely with conductor Beatrice Jona Affron in expanding Bizet’s score. Each year you can see subtle refinements in the company’s ultimate warhorse Balanchine’s production of The Nutcracker, but, by design, can drift into theatrical pageantry, Corella’s streamlining and conductor Beatrice Affron musical pacing keep it much more animated. So committed to its success that Corella has the wherewithal to attend every performance. This past year brought stronger ticket sales and audiences were responding. In March two weeks after a two-week run of Giselle, the company was back in the Academy for a ‘Dance Masterpieces’ program with works by Alvin Ailey, William Forsythe, and Twyla Tharp, contemporary works that are traditionally a harder sell than the story ballets but played to near full houses.

Corella stresses technical craft, interpretive artistry, but he also encourages dancers ‘to go for it’ to feel liberated within the movement. And they did that with abandon in Tharp’s ‘In The Upper Room.’ Which is 45 minutes of high-velocity fusion of post-modern ballet fused with Tharp’s idiomatic choreography. Corella said by the final performance of the run when the curtain came down the cast literally collapsed on the stage.

“For the dancers to do these masterpieces from these particular choreographers was a dream come true. You could see their joy even in the studio during rehearsals …their excitement of doing these masterpieces. And now with the same energy with ‘The Dream’ and ‘Prodigal Son’ .” Corella says that his dream is that audiences will come to see Philadelphia Ballet just for the fact that we have an incredible quality of dancing and quality of repertoire, so that no matter what ballet we are presenting, people will want to see it. ”