BRINGING BACK A CLASSIC
Ballet Repertory Theatre to stage ‘The Little Mermaid’ at KiMo
Last year, Katherine Giese saw “Disney’s The Little Mermaid” and it triggered an idea. “We originally did ‘The Little Mermaid’ in 2016 with Ballet Repertory Theatre,” she says. “It premiered then and I thought about revisiting it.”
After a few months of reworking, Ballet Repertory Theatre of New Mexico is again staging “The Little Mermaid” for three shows. The shows are at 2 and 7 p.m. Saturday, March 23, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 24, at the KiMo Theatre in Downtown Albuquerque.
Giese, BRT executive director, was able to have time with choreographer Alex Ossadnik, who choreographed new pieces for the ballet.
“I like Alex’s version,” she says. “Our ballet isn’t the Disney version at all.”
“The Little Mermaid” is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, which tells the story of a young mermaid who is willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul.
The Little Mermaid dwells in an underwater kingdom with her widowed father, her dowager grandmother, and her five older sisters, each of whom had been born one year apart.
When a mermaid turns 15, she is permitted to swim to the surface for the first time to glimpse the world above, and when the sisters become old enough, each of them visits the upper world one at a time every year.
When the Little Mermaid’s turn comes, she rises up to the surface, watches a birthday celebration being held on a ship in honor of a handsome prince, and falls in love with him from a safe distance. A violent storm hits, sinking the boat, and the Little Mermaid saves the prince from drowning. She delivers him unconscious to the shore near a temple. Here, she waits until a young woman from the temple and her ladies in waiting find him. To her dismay, the prince never sees the Little Mermaid or even realizes that it was she who had originally saved his life.
Giese says she looked at the repertory and figured out how to stage the ballet with the dancers in the company.
“It’s not easy,” she says. “We were fortunate that Alex was in town and he choreographed a piece to play to the strengths of the dancer portraying the Sea Witch.”
Giese says there are lovely undersea visuals with stingrays and mermaids.
“The most elaborate dancing is up on land,” she says. “There’s a scene that is very aerobic. It’s nonstop and the dancers are all breathing hard.”
Giese says there’s a scene called the social club and that’s where the humor comes into play.
“There’s a group that are a little more gossipy,” she says. “It’s a ballet within a ballet.”
There are 33 dancers in “The Little Mermaid.”
Giese says the youngest dancer is nine, while the oldest dancer is in her 60s.
“We have new parts and have a few more kids,” she says. “It’s not a huge production. Instead, we have two schools of fish and they are our youngest dancers. In addition to dancing, they are puppeteers because they have these fish that are on dowels that they have to move around as they dance.”