RALEIGH, N.C. — After carefully trolling the North Carolina Museum of Art’s “Monet in Normandy” exhibition, seeking inspiration for a new dance, the choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett ended up using a painting not in the show: Monet’s “Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” That’s right, Monet’s — not Manet’s better-known 1863 painting of the same title, depicting a languid luncheon party of four, including unabashedly naked women, but Monet’s more decorous 1865-66 scene of a luncheon party of a dozen or so ladies and gentlemen, elegantly dressed.
“Whenever the word Impressionist is used, most people think first of Claude Monet, who depicted nature in a subjective and innovative way,” she said. “Conversely, his studies of people seem objective and detached. I wondered about ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.’ Who were these people, about to sit down outdoors to enjoy a meal together? What had they been doing moments before? What were they feeling?”

The dance that resulted from her musings, “Picnic on the Grass,” will be the first part of the Carolina Ballet’s “Monet Impressions,” opening Jan. 11 at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. The program, which also features “The Gardens at Giverny,” by Robert Weiss, the Carolina Ballet’s artistic director, coincides with the final weekend of the museum’s substantial Monet exhibition, an astute piece of marketing for both organizations.
Having collaborated successfully with the museum six years ago on a Rodin show, when the Carolina Ballet performed “Rodin, Mise en Vie,” Margo Sappington’s evocation of the sculptures, the company found in the Monet show another chance to broaden its audience and commission a work. “Anything that might bring in people who wouldn’t normally go to the ballet is a good thing,” said Mr. Weiss, known as Ricky, a gruff-voiced former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet.

Having doggedly built the Carolina Ballet from scratch since it was founded in 1997 on the initiative of a Raleigh native, J. Ward Purrington, Mr. Weiss is no stranger to the need for strategies of all kinds in the tough, underfinanced world of classical ballet in the United States. “We raised a million and a half before we actually gave a performance in the fall of 1998,” he said. “Now our budget is $4.6 million, and that is really hard to raise in an environment where there’s no ballet tradition.”

Mr. Weiss and his colleagues have nonetheless managed to create a subscription base of 4,400. They are presenting seven programs in 2006-7, which will keep his dancers working for a respectable 32 weeks. He estimated that 70,000 people saw the company last year, but he said he constantly worried about having enough money to produce quality work and invite talented choreographers.

Relatively few choreographers have tried to translate directly the subject matter or narrative content of a painting or sketch into the content of their ballets. The founder of the Royal Ballet in Britain, Ninette de Valois, created several pieces based on specific artworks: William Blake’s “Job,” “A Rake’s Progress” by Hogarth and “The Prospect Before Us” by the caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson. Other choreographers — Kurt Jooss, Jean Borland and Herbert Ross among them, and more recently, Ms. Sappington, Michael Smuin, Gillian Lynne and Mr. Weiss — have done the same, but for many choreographers an artwork might be too explicit in its own terms to be a fruitful source of creativity.

“If you pick a really strong work of art as your starting point, trying to live up to it is an extraordinary challenge,” Ms. Taylor-Corbett said on the phone from Las Vegas, where she was staging a theater piece, “Hats.” “And when you are using a well-known artwork as a basis, there is a shared knowledge with the audience, and their expectations are perhaps higher.”

Ms. Taylor-Corbett, who has created six works for the company since 1999, found Mr. Weiss’s idea intriguing. After viewing scores of paintings, she chose Monet’s “Déjuner,” two panels of which are in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. (A study of the complete painting is at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.)

Monet’s life provided Ms. Taylor-Corbett with imaginary answers to her questions about the painting. Her ballet explores the painter’s relationships with his ailing wife, Camille; his future partner, Alice Hoschedes, the wife of his art dealer; and their respective children and friends. For the score, she chose Poulenc’s “Sinfonietta,” adding three sections from his chamber music.

For the 19th-century costumes Ms. Taylor-Corbett recruited the designer William Ivey Long, who is much sought-after for Broadway and the mainstream stage, but has also created many costumes for ballet. Persuading him to participate in a project with a limited budget in Raleigh might have seemed a long shot. But Mr. Long — who worked with Ms. Taylor-Corbett on the 1999 Broadway show “Swing!” — grew up in South Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and says he is passionate about supporting local activities.

“I jumped at the chance,” he said. “I think that Ricky has done an extraordinary job of creating a ballet company out of nothing. I’m also proud of the museum for their blockbuster exhibitions. I know I sound a bit Pollyanna-ish, but I think it’s terrific that all of this is going on in North Carolina.”

As for his commission to create costumes evoking the figures in Monet’s painting, he said, “It’s daunting, frightening and presumptuous.” Mr. Long and David Heuvel, the costume designer for Mr. Weiss’s “Gardens at Giverny,” faithfully referred to the colors and textures of the choreographers’ chosen paintings, but Mr. Long said he “took advantage” of the varying hues shown in different reproductions of the painting to use shades he preferred. “Having limits like this makes you more creative,” he said. “It’s like the budget issue; you just make it happen.”

The company’s resident set designer, Jeff A. R. Jones, created a painted translucent scrim that can overlay either of two painted backdrops to suggest a changing Impressionist landscape without recreating each painting. For “Picnic” a drop of a tree trunk and leaves, created from woven strips of fabric for additional texture, is suspended over a hazier backdrop, evoking part of “Le Déjuner sur l’Herbe.” For “The Gardens at Giverny,” Monet’s rose arbors and waterlily paintings are evoked.

“The waterlilies had always looked like upside-down tutus to me and the flowers are like women, alluring and scented,” Mr. Weiss said. “For a ballet choreographer, of course, that’s a natural.” After a visit to the Marmottan Museum in Paris two years ago, he began to pore over reproductions of Monet’s paintings. “I lived with the images that I wanted to use for a while,” he said. “The roses, the irises, the waterlilies at night, the pond reflecting the clouds.”

Mr. Weiss said having these strong visual images in mind when he started to work had made a significant difference. “I choreographed in a far more minimalist fashion than usual,” he said. “Usually I make very dancey things, but here I wanted to make beautiful images that are dance in a different sense.”
The eight-part, hourlong “Gardens at Giverny” is set to music by Debussy and Chausson. Debussy’s “Après Midi d’un Faune” “is in every documentary on Monet,” Mr. Weiss said, slightly ruefully. “But now I know why. It just sounds like Impressionist painting.”

In rehearsal Mr. Weiss’s strong dancers looked impressive in his dreamy, flowing sequences, which use 29 of the company’s 32 members. Ross Kolman, the lighting designer, sat watching. “I’m enthralled with the idea of taking such strong images and somehow translating their essence through this work,” he said later. “Looking at the exhibition, you can almost feel the mist in the air, the light. There’s nothing extra; it’s all essential.”

Mr. Weiss said he hoped that audiences would feel the same. “Monet teaches you to enrich the way you see,” he said. “I’m hoping that when the costumes, light and dance come together, we can do something similar onstage.”