BLOODY BALLET
Dracula delves into love and death
Garlic. Mirrors and sunlight. A crucifix and holy water. A wooden stake through the heart. These are the traditional ways to ward off vampires. But if you’re a ballet company on the hunt for a box office hit, you’re more likely rolling out the welcome mat for the undead than stoking the fires to burn any fiend at the stake.
Enter Sir Ben Stevenson’s Dracula, a tried-and-true story ballet, so lavish when it debuted in 1997 at Houston Ballet, the production budget was pegged at more than a million dollars. At the time of its premiere, the New York Times review swooned saying this Dracula “looks like a million.”
Nearly 20 years later, Alberta Ballet’s artistic director Jean Grand-Maître hopes Stevenson’s Dracula has just the right mix of lust and drama to sink its fangs into audiences and seduce them back into the theatre to mark the company’s 50th anniversary season.
“To create new story ballets, you have to find a new narrative work that is interesting to people, that can work with a large corps de ballet and that can be danced to symphonic music,” explains GrandMaître.
Dracula fits the bill in so many ways.
“It’s a story as old as dance. The theme itself is quite physical — love and life and death all very closely united. We know people today are very intrigued by the immortal figure, whether it be superheroes or True Blood. There is a mix of reality with mysticism in popular culture.”
With the selection of the right narrative ballet for Alberta audiences and company dancers, Grand-Maître says he was looking for a choreographer with an extensive track record of successful story ballets. Sir Ben Stevenson, now in his 80s, grew up at the Royal Ballet, among the great ballet pedigree of Frederick Ashton, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn.
“Ben came to Houston and while he didn’t found it, he did make the Houston Ballet the company it is today, which is one of the best in North America. When you look at how he built a ballet company in Texas, you realize how he really understood how to take European culture, the ballet from the royal courts, and bring it into the state of Texas and build this extraordinary company that today can dance anything.” says Grand-Maître, clearly inspired by Stevenson’s success, looking to him as a mentor on how to make ballet accessible and at the same time as an example of how to push the art form and dancers in new directions.
Dracula first enticed Stevenson’s imagination in the early 1990s, when he was contemplating with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the American Ballet Theater about what story would lend itself to the making of a next generation of narrative ballet classics.
Francis Ford Coppola’s American romantic horror film was on the big screen at the time.
Grand-Maître describes Stevenson’s Dracula as a spectacular, theatrical experience. Danced to music by Franz Liszt, the ballet places the bulk of the action in Dracula’s castle, and in a dark, atmospheric forest near a village in Transylvania.
Riffing off the gothic, classical ballets of the 19th century such as Swan Lake or Giselle, Stevenson features a large corps de ballets of Dracula’s undead brides flying in the air, “all looking exactly the same to an extraordinary visual effect.”
Grand-Maître says there’s plenty in Dracula to get the blood pumping for his dancers on stage, too. Duets in Dracula are some of the hardest ones veteran company dancer Kelley McKinlay has ever done.
“He has to look like he’s superhuman. He has to lift people, effortlessly, and throw them around like a vampire.”
Lead ballerina Hayna Gutierrez returns after having a baby last season to dance the female lead, Flora.
“She is back and really biting into it,” Grand-Maître laughs.