In the middle of Carolina Ballet's 2006-2007 season, billed as a "Season of Your Favorites," the Raleigh-based professional ballet company is premiering "Monet Impressions," Jan. 11-14, at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, to coincide with the North Carolina Museum of Art's "Monet in Normandy" exhibit.

This highly anticipated program will include a new ballet by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, Carolina Ballet's principal guest choreographer, and a new work by artistic director Robert Weiss.

This is not the first collaboration between the N.C. Museum of Art (NCMA) and Carolina Ballet. Robert Weiss used masterpieces from the museum as inspiration for the tableaux in his widely acclaimed Messiah, and in 2000 Carolina Ballet presented Margo Sappington's "Rodin, Mis en Vie" to complement the successful Rodin exhibit at the NCMA.

Taylor-Corbett has selected Monet's "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe" as her inspiration for "Picnic on the Grass," a work depicting the relationships among 12 people who gather on a sunny afternoon in the forest of Fontainebleau, set to the music of Francis Poulenc.

Raleigh native and Tony Award-winning costume designer William Ivey Long worked with Taylor-Corbett to recreate these images through his designs for the costumes.

Since the company's first season, the Triangle area has come to expect great things from Taylor-Corbett, who has created ballets for Carolina Ballet that are diverse, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining from "Carmina Burana," "Cabaret Evening," "Lost and Found," "Love Speaks," "Carolina Jamboree" and "The Ugly Duckling."

On the other half of the program Robert Weiss has choreographed a ballet inspired by Monet's famous "Water Lilies" and his paintings of other gardens at Giverny, to music of Claude Debussy and Ernest Chausson.

He has once again called upon David Heuvel to create the costumes for this piece.

Heuvel (costume production designer at Ballet West in Salt Lake City) has become a Carolina Ballet institution with his costume designs for "Swan Lake," "Cinderella," "Firebird" and "Tempest Fantasy."

"This has been an incredibly exciting project to work on," says Weiss. "It is what makes ballet so special, being able to draw inspiration from so many different art forms. Having the Monet exhibit here in the Triangle allows patrons to see the paintings and then relive them as they come to life through the dance, the scenery and costumes."

The schedule of performances is as follows: Thursday, Jan. 11, Friday, Jan. 12, and Saturday, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m.; Saturday, Jan. 13, and Sunday, Jan. 14, at 2 p.m.

Ticket prices range from $16 to $55, and there is a $10 student rush ticket a half hour before each show. For further ticket information, patrons should call the Carolina Ballet box office at 919-719-0900 or Ticketmaster at 919 834-4000.