SEX, DEATH AND GAMEKEEPERS
Lady Chatterley, Giselle will ignite ballet stage with innovative interpretations
There’s an old joke about religious puritans forbidding sex standing up because it might lead to dancing.
English choreographer Cathy Marston is unlikely to endear herself to such people with her newly commissioned ballet Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the world première of which opens Les Grands Ballets’ 2018-19 season in October. It is based on one of the most celebrated erotic novels in world literature and, previously, one of the most maligned.
It wasn’t until 1960 that D.H. Lawrence’s 1928 classic was officially cleared by the English courts of being an unlawful obscenity that might deprave, as one prosecutor notoriously put it, one’s wives and servants. (Canada had to wait until 1962, when it was successfully defended in the Supreme Court by McGill University professor and poet F.R. Scott.)
But Lawrence’s tale of upperclass Constance’s earthy dalliance with Mellors, gamekeeper on the Chatterley estate, is about much more than sex. As Marston points out before rehearsals at Les Grands’ Wilder Building base: “It’s about the way industry and the mechanical world were really encroaching on nature. And, of course, the war has been part of that.”
The third point of the love triangle is Clifford Chatterley, left wheelchair-bound and impotent by his horrific experiences in the Great War.
Speaking of the novel’s sexual content, as well as its barrage of F-bombs, the one-time director of Switzerland’s Bern Ballett says: “To be honest, that’s not the main point of interest for me. Those words are only shocking when you think of them as having been written 100 years ago. These days you’d have to go to territory that isn’t, in my opinion, appropriate for this story to get the same kind of feeling of shock about sexuality. Especially here in Montreal. I don’t think there’s much that would shock people here.”
Instead, Marston — whose forte has been to create ballets
based on literary classics as varied as Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities, Lolita and Ibsen’s Ghosts — has been attracted to other words in the book.
“There are so many lovely words in Lawrence,” she says. “There are some beautiful ones about the people in the mining village being like elementals from the earth. So I started thinking: What is coal? Well, it’s living stuff that’s been pressed down and down, which is kind of like the working class of the period.”
Despite suffering from a heavy cold, Marston is soon up on her feet demonstrating some of the movement she has devised for the corps of 30-odd dancers supporting the main characters.
“I thought: What if I think of the group as coal and follow the industrial process of coal?” says Marston, grabbing at imaginary chunks of the black stuff. “First it’s violently hacked out of the earth. Then it gets transported, so I thought of the image of the women loading these heavy sacks onto the little trolleys. I wanted to open with the context that the men are coming back from the trenches and the women are picking up the pieces. And then you think of the next stage of coal, when it starts to burn, and that’s obviously an image of passion and sexual desire.”
So, yes, we’re back to sex, which is inescapable in any consideration of Lady Chatterley’s Lover — though, as Marston says, definitions of what is sexy are likely to vary from person to person.
“Someone said to me during rehearsal: ‘Are you asking her (Constance) to be sexy?’ I thought: Well, what is sexy? Sexy is subjective. To be perfectly honest, there’s one scene where Mrs. Bolton (the Chatterleys’ live-in nurse) is taking care of Clifford. It gets very sexy between them as well, in a strange maternal way, and there’s this scene where she’s undressing him and putting his pyjamas on and washing him. Actually, that’s as sexy as anything else, if we’re going to use that word.”
One of the things that makes the novel so groundbreaking — and, for many years, so unacceptable — is how it largely tells its story by the various ways Constance and Mellors have sex.
“It’s sort of a shame not to be able to make it a two- or threepart evening,” Marston says. “There are five duets in the piece, but there are many more encounters in the book, and Lawrence so carefully charts the emotional and physical journey of this couple. I love the book for that.” Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A young woman is emotionally torn between a gamekeeper and a member of the upper classes. But in Giselle, the points of that love triangle are differently disposed, the virginal title character falling for the aristocratic Albrecht while gamekeeper Hilarion, her betrothed, broods on the sidelines.
Despite being one of the most-performed ballets in the repertoire (there’s a Les Grands production heading our way in April), overfamiliarity is unlikely to be a problem in the version from South African choreographer Dada Masilo, which opens the Danse Danse season Tuesday.
As with her version of Swan Lake, which visited Montreal in 2016, the Soweto-born choreographer’s rendering of Giselle (she also dances the part) mixes classical ballet with African dance, and Adolphe Adam’s luxurious score with thunderous percussion and whoops.
“After my versions of Romeo and Juliet, Carmen and Swan Lake, Giselle was the next one in line, and I really wanted to improve my storytelling with this one,” Masilo says in a phone call from Johannesburg. “It was challenging because I wanted to retain as much of the narrative as possible, but I also wanted to put it in the context of rural South Africa. What I wanted to do was to just tweak some things.”
One of those things was the celebrated climax of the ballet — look away now if you want to avoid spoilers — where a ghostly Giselle, having died of a broken heart, saves the grieving Albrecht from the clutches of the weird sisterhood of Wilis.
In Masilo’s version, she reveals, “Albrecht isn’t forgiven — he is killed by Giselle. I knew that wasn’t going to sit so well with a lot of people, but I went back to the original narrative behind Giselle. The Wilis are these spirits who have been wronged. They’ve been jilted at the altar, so they’re angry and they’re heartbroken and they want revenge. In the classical ballet, they are usually pure, dressed in white, fragile. But in the original story, they’re strong and vicious and dangerous. Looking at the way the world is now, I find that a lot more relatable.”