Biography|John Neumeier — The House Where Cranko Made Him a Soloist

John Cranko's Stuttgart company was the place an American with a literature degree became a working European dancer.

Neumeier arrived in 1963, after a year at the Royal Ballet School in London and classes with Vera Volkova in Copenhagen.

Marcia Haydée and Ray Barra had noticed him in London. Cranko hired him into the Württemberg house at Oberer Schlossgarten 6.

The Grosses Haus, Max Littmann's 1912 court theater, is still the stage of Stuttgart Ballet.

In that pit and on that stage Neumeier rose to soloist and began to make his own dances for the Noverre-Matinees.

Cranko did not treat the young American as a threat. He let him take outside work and still kept a role waiting.

When Neumeier was due in Frankfurt on 1 December 1969, Cranko asked him to stay long enough to finish Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew and to dance the part on the company's American tour.

That is how a dancer leaves a company: not in a sulk, but with a comic role Cranko had built on his body.

Stuttgart in the 1960s was the workshop where story ballet learned to do without fairies.

Cranko's Romeo, Onegin, and Shrew put psychology on pointe. Neumeier absorbed the lesson and spent the next half century applying it to Mahler, Bach, and Shakespeare.

He came back to this house as a guest after Cranko's death, with The Lady of the Camellias in 1978 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 1983.

Those later premieres belong to another chapter. The 1963–69 years are the ones in which an imported soloist learned how a company is run from the inside.

The colonnade on the Eckensee is the same façade he walked toward as a newcomer.

Photo: AngMoKio, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons