Ballet tale still resonates
Tale of seduction and intrigue among powerful people remains relevant today
Seduction, deceit, greed, revenge.
That’s the sort of dark stuff that has seen Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses — or Dangerous Liaisons — adapted at least four times to film alone, and again to theatre, opera, television and radio.
Revolving around nasty adult games played between egotistical, idyll aristocrats, it’s the sort of tale that must have encouraged the rest of France to call for a revolution a few years later. But two centuries later, could it translate to the ballet?
That’s the question that the Norwegian National Ballet posed to Jean Grande-Maitre back in 1999 when he was still making his name as an avant-garde choreographer in Europe. At first, he wondered if it was even possible to adapt “such a psychological story,” but eventually decided that dance was “the perfect art form” for the tale.
“When you go to a ballet, especially in today’s technological world, the idea of seeing almost nude people moving and emoting in front of you hits you in a visceral way that other experiences can’t. This plot isn’t really about the erotic, but sex is a weapon characters use to get what they want.”
He realized the show’s staging would need to be unconventional.
“A theatre set designer gave me the idea to weave two worlds into the ballet, one world upstage with period costumes that appears from time to time like a period play, and then on stage, to
transpose what was just said into dance. That frees the dance from simple pantomime and allows me to liberate the choreography into the energy of seduction.”
As he heads into his 16th season as artistic director of Alberta Ballet, Grande-Maitre is caught up in the show he last directed in 2008, bringing a whole new set of moves to the dance, and hybrid innovations to staging this “erotic thriller.”
“When I first studied the book for six months, several things interested me. First, the idea of seduction. I don’t think there’s a more erotic art form than dance when it’s well done. Beautiful bodies. Then, the idea of the body resisting seduction, suddenly being overcome, and abandoning one’s self. The difference is that the plot is dominated by a woman.”
For those unfamiliar with Dangerous Liaisons, the complicated intrigue is set in motion when the manipulative, widowed Marquise de Merteuil concocts a scheme to dishonour her ex-lover’s new fiancé in a soon-to-be-arranged marriage with a girl named Cécile. She challenges her friend Vicomte de Valmont to seduce the girl, but Valmont and Cécile both have competing interests.
No one cries “sexual harassment” in this story, but it’s more timely than you might think.
“It resonates so much with what’s going on today, from Harvey Weinstein to Donald Trump and the whole sorry lot. Looking at the story, you see this intrigue between powerful, rich people, court people, politicians, and how reputations are destroyed and wars are fought in higher circles of power. ”
The period play is lit behind the stage scrim. Those spoken scenes cue the fluid exposition of the dancers up front. Some dancers will alternate shifts as costumed actors, working with Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit theatre director Denise Clark, who performs as the scheming Marquise de Merteuil.
RETIRING LEAD
For lead dancer Nicole Caron, there’s a bittersweet irony in the fact that the final role she dances before “retiring ” from her 16 years with Alberta Ballet is actually the youngest character in the story of Dangerous Liaisons, Cécile. It’s her second spin in the role.
“She’s supposed to be a 15-yearold girl,” notes the dancer, “and when I first danced the role, I was a girl. This time I’m a more mature dancer trying to be a 15-year-old, so you have to go back and grasp this young, pure innocent love. It’s amazing how these emotions and feelings and movements come back.”
The reality of such physically demanding work is that most dancers hang up their shoes in their mid 30s, though Grand-Maitre asserts that “she’s so young and vivacious, it’s a perfect role for her.”
“I’ve always been attracted to dance for the love of movement and being able to express myself in music and movement,” Caron chuckles, “but dance isn’t an easy profession to grow old in.”
She has certainly gone through her share of ballet shoes — over 1,000 pairs, by her estimate, in 100-plus productions, from the title role in Carmen to Desdemona in Othello, to the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker, one of her favourites. She’s put in some 500 performances of that ballet alone in a handful of Canadian cities and also danced in the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremonies.
Caron has been teaching dancers here for seven years now and will continue doing so after a move to the West Coast.
Born in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Caron was seen dancing around the house whenever music was heard. She started lessons in Toronto at age three before her family moved to Vancouver two years later. Her initial ballet training in Richmond was followed by Canada’s National Ballet School, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and American Ballet Theatre in New York. Caron’s career highlights included the challenges of Grande-Maitre innovative pop ballets, tied to the music of Joni Mitchell, k.d. lang, Elton John and others.
“In a dance career, it’s so nice to have that variety, going from classical to neo-classical to contemporary ballet.”
She was happy to go out as Cécile in Dangerous Liaisons.
“It’s a great role, a lot of dancing, and quite steamy in parts. We do about five pas-de-deux and it really gets you, physically and emotionally. When you’re on stage, it’s almost like having an out-of-body experience and you’re no longer yourself, you are this character. ”
NEW RESOURCES
Grand-Maitre says it’s “the most complex show I’ve ever done” on the staging level, with over 400 cues. And while Dangerous Liaisons is a re-mount for Alberta Ballet, that didn’t stop him from re-working the choreography.
“When you go into the studio, you suddenly have these gorgeous people in front of you, these athletes of god who are emotional and super-intelligent. So you create with them and you work with their character and their modernity and then you work the sensuality, that energy into it, into that living clay. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to be in a room with great dancers and you want to work with them to shape the choreography for them.”
The director’s final ingredient in this neo-classical hybrid is the music itself, a soundtrack created by his colleague, Claude Lemelin, which draws together works by composers of the past half-century such as David Hykes, Giya Kancheli, Arvo Part, Gavin Bryars and others. Some of the pieces even use antique keyboards like the clavichord, another direct echo of something you might have heard in France in another age.
For Grand-Maitre it works to the same goal: “It all helps me to modernize the ballet.”