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Obituary: H. Wesley Balk, who helped develop American style of operatic performance

When an opening-night audience booed H. Wesley Balk, he was ecstatic.

"I know they're awake!" he told the crew backstage after directing a radical interpretation of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" by the Minnesota Opera during its 1982-83 season.

Balk, who as a theater-arts teacher helped develop an American style of operatic performance, died Friday in Minneapolis of complications from Parkinson's disease. He was 70.

"He liked exploring new things, said Gail Bakkom, costume director for the Minnesota Opera who recounted Balk's reaction to the boos.

Balk, who was born in St. Paul and graduated from high school in Bagley, Minn., was with the Minnesota Opera for 17 years, part of the time as co-artistic director with Philip Brunelle, music director of Plymouth Congregational Church.

Balk joined during the company's second season in 1965, when it was called Center Opera. In 1968, he transplanted Mozart's comic opera "Cosi Fan Tutte" from 18th-century Naples to a small town in Vermont and dressed the cast in hippie-inspired costumes.

In 1971, his attempts to grab traditional forms and remold them into contemporary images continued with "Faust Counter Faust," which reinterpreted the tale of Faust bargaining with the devil to focus on modern man's lust for technological progress.

Though he delighted and angered people in almost equal measure, it wasn't until the 1982-83 season that he was booed.

"Wesley always wanted to stir things up,"said Kevin Smith, the opera's president. He succeeded by putting the heroine Lucia in a cage, watching her own story unfold as a psychodrama.

Smith credited Balk's concept of the complete singer-actor with helping to create a more fluid style of operatic performance that was uniquely American, as opposed to the more classic "stand and sing" approach.

Balk taught his methods as a professor of theater arts at the University of Minnesota from 1970 to 1995. He had resigned from Minnesota Opera in 1982, but stayed on as director of artistic planning for two years. He reconnected with the company in 1987 with the establishment of the Minnesota Opera New Music-Theater Ensemble. It evolved into Nautilus Music Theater, for which Balk was director of performer development.

"Wesley's gift has been his ability to observe, analyze, dissect and re-integrate the singer's five performing tools -- the mind, the emotions, the face, the voice and the body," wrote Ben Krywosz, artistic director of Nautilus, in a nomination for a McKnight Foundation award in 1998.

Balk taught performers to sing, act and move at the same time.

"This integrative skill is now expected by audiences, but rarely had it been taught as a separate skill until Wesley identified the descriptive approach and experiential exercises," Krywosz wrote.

Survivors include his mother, Winifred (Beg) Balk of Golden Valley, and a brother, Don Balk of Mounds View.