FRANKENSTEIN REANIMATED
Alberta Ballet gives beastly role a modern twist
Based on the version of Frankenstein’s monster that most of the world is familiar with, he would seem an odd fit for a ballet dancer.
Lumbering, graceless and green, the big-headed beast is everything that a dancer is not. But, as with many aspects of how the character has cartoonishly evolved in pop culture over the past century, this interpretation is vastly different than the one author Mary Shelley introduced more than 200 years ago with her gothic-horror classic.
“She describes him as like a panther being able to run up mountains with great speed,” says Zacharie Dun, who will be taking on the role in Alberta Ballet’s adaptation of Frankenstein. “He is an entity that is very much not what you would normally think of Frankenstein’s monster.”
Which doesn’t mean he starts out panther-like. Part of the evolution of Alberta Ballet’s Frankenstein, which opens Wednesday at the Southern Jubilee Auditorium, involves the creature becoming less and less discombobulated as the play progresses. But he does start out as a bit of a mess.
“Those neurological connections that we take for granted as humans, just being able to move each finger one by one and stuff like that isn’t there,” says Dun. “He might want to walk but a leg gives way and he can’t control that. And then, mentally, he’s just been cast into this. He just so confused and so disconnected from his mind and body. That’s been the way we approached the character at the start of the ballet. As the ballet goes on, he finally starts understanding, starts putting the smaller connections together. The last solo that we have in the ballet is one of the most
graceful things I think I’ve probably danced in my career.”
It’s certainly the biggest role Dun has had to date with Alberta Ballet. Now in his third season with the company, he arrived in Alberta fresh from stints at the Queensland Ballet’s young artist program in his native Australia. As imagined by artistic director Jean Grand-maitre, Alberta Ballet’s version of Frankenstein is innovative while also paying reverent tribute to Shelley’s original vision. Which means it’s all doubly daunting for a young performer dancing his biggest role for the company.
“I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into because it was a new creation, a completely new ballet,” Dun says. “All I knew was that I was very excited. Jean has such an artistic mind and he’s done some darker ballets in the past. The way his mind works is so fascinating, it was very intriguing to see what he had in store. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew it was going to be one of those shows that I was going to come out of it and need to make a chiropractic appointment every day.”
While Grand-maitre’s initial plan was to keep it in the 18th century, it was eventually decided to transplant the tale to modern times. He also moves the setting from Europe to modern-day Mar-a-lago, Fla., Boston’s Harvard Medical School and a meteorological station in the Yukon. A modern classical score has been employed and the creature itself has been given a startling makeover, looking absolutely nothing like the popular vision Boris Karloff first embodied in the 1930s. While Dun says the look is a touch more elaborate in promotional videos and the cool cinematic trailer Alberta Ballet produced for the show, the version we will see onstage is still alarming.
He still has the fearful green eyes, exposed muscles and astonishingly lengthy coif, which comes courtesy of what Dun calls the “Beyonce wig.”
“I look at the photo sometimes and I don’t even look like myself,” says Dun. “I think that transformation, when you can see that about myself, it’s like I’m not Zac anymore. It’s a total transformation and I think that is something that will definitely aid the performance.”
Still, it was the dancer’s unique look and style that convinced Grand-maitre that he was perfect for a new rendering of Frankenstein’s reanimated corpse.
“He’s not only the tallest dancer in the company, which is helpful, he’s also the most flexible,” he says. “I call him the giant spider: long, long legs and long, long arms and an extremely co-ordinated dancer.”
Grand-maitre admits his first thought was that he couldn’t base a ballet around the lurching beast he remembered from the early Hollywood monster films. But, like Dun, he returned to Shelley’s original text and envisioned a monster who became more refined and co-ordinated as he evolved, despite experiencing nothing but cruelty from most of the people he meets.
It was a significant challenge, but paled in comparison to the bigger obstacle of moving the entire story to the modern era. This, of course, affected the music, scenery and costumes, but also the movement, Grand-maitre says.
“When the designers suggested that to me, at first I was terrified because I had been imagining a period piece in my head,” he says. “It’s very hard after months and months of thinking about it in a certain way and you have to change everything. Choreographically, people won’t move the same way. They are people from our time and people who are supposed to be modern, so I can’t fall into the usual pattern of classical ballet with the pantomime and all that kind of narrative storytelling through dance. I have to do something completely different and envision people in our time and how they work in laboratories, how they travel and how they connect. Instead of letters, it will be text messages. Everything had to be redesigned in our head once we decided to make a transposition. It’s been scary and thrilling at the same time because I’ve never done anything like that.”
That said, the cautionary themes Shelley introduced in her original work seem custom-built for our modern era, he says.
“The whole precept is that Victor Frankenstein very slowly gets chewed away by this monster who takes away all his hope and all his loved ones from his life until he is destroyed and receives the ultimate punishment for moving science in a direction it shouldn’t go,” Grand-maitre says.
“I was just reading last week that at Yale, they brought a pig’s brain back to life. They reactivated a pig’s brain. You see it happening. That’s why we thought transposing it to our time may even be more believable because we are almost there now.”