Federico Fellini's Amarcord, choreographed by Luciano Cannito; Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, choreographed by Toni Pimble, artistic director of the Eugene Ballet Company; "Anaïs," a choreographed distillation of Henry & June by James Canfield, artistic director of the Oregon Ballet Theatre. All three ballets are derived from films and were created in the past 15 years by choreographers in Europe and the United States. For them and a younger generation of choreographers such as Trey McIntyre, who is working on a danced retelling of The Red Balloon and a ballet based on Sixteen Candles, feature films provide, as McIntyre puts it, "contemporary stories as worthy of telling in this form as Cinderella was a hundred years ago."
Back then, story ballets were generally based on literary works: folk and fairy tales, mythology, and epic poems. Cinderella was first danced onstage in 1818, but Perrault's rags-to-riches story of the kind and beautiful young girl exploited by her grasping stepsisters was redone by the Bolshoi to Sergei Prokofiev's score in 1945; it was an obvious choice for the erstwhile Soviet Union, where story ballets were routinely put to political use. It fell to Sir Frederick Ashton to create the archetype for so many of today's productions, and, no small thing, Britain's first evening-length ballet.
Both Coppelia and The Nutcracker are derived from dark stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Sleeping Beauty is another Perrault fairy tale, and Le Corsaire is based on Lord Byron's poem of the same name. There are literally dozens of ballet versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and nearly as many of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Denmark, August Bournonville, a contemporary of Marius Petipa, choreographed A Folk Tale about changelings and trolls. And the tales of compatriot Hans Christian Andersen have provided librettos for scores of choreographers, even that master of "pure," less programmatic, dance, George Balanchine.
Today, audiences still hunger for stories, both the familiar evening-length classics -- Swan Lake, Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, and the likeand such Russian spectacles as Le Corsaire and La Bayadère, recently mounted by the Boston Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. New versions of those repertory staples also abound. But called upon to restage The Nutcracker, some of today's choreographers -- for better or worse -- add elements from the movies to appeal to young audiences. Pimble's three-year-old version for the Eugene Ballet has some distinctly Disneyesque pirate mice and a two-sided Christmas tree on a revolving set, one side with the Stahlbaum family's bourgeois party ornaments, the other decorated with the rodent-pleasing cheese rinds and half-eaten sausages of Clara's dream. Boys in particular love this interpretation of the Tchaikovsky-Petipa classic, but Canfield's Wizard of Oz-influenced production appeals to both adults and children while still maintaining the traditional story. Act One's dancing mechanical toys accompany a shy Marie on her travels through the snow to what is in this case the Russian imperial palace, just as the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion escort Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. In the context of the ballet, this is more workable than Pimble's pirates making Clara walk the plank in a touch so reminiscent of Peter Pan, you wonder if you have wandered into the wrong fairy tale.
But it's not just cinematic touch-ups of literary classics that sell tickets. Audiences are demanding new scenarios, thus ballet renditions of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Dracula that owe as much to cinematic versions as they do to the literary sources.
Nashville Ballet Artistic Director Paul Vasterling's short take on the Bram Stoker novel is not based on a single film, but the title character is made up to look precisely like the vampire in the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, the German production that was the first in a long series of Dracula movies, Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 lavish version being the most recent.
"I am always interested in achieving the seamless quality of film in the ... transitions in my work," Vasterling says. "Simultaneous action, cutting quickly from one scene to another or back and forth ... you'll notice it specifically in my Dracula in the scene where Renfield does his thing [i.e., goes mad]. During that very physical solo, Jonathan and Mina are upstage actually advancing the plot. She is discovering information about and against vampires and revealing it. It is a sort of pantomimish scene, and I wanted to de-emphasize it. It is very important for me not to use (or minimally use) pantomime in my choreography. I always aim to tell the story directly via movement or situation."
That is certainly the way stories were told in the silent-film era, when plot was advanced through movement and acting, not pantomime, which in ballet is a set vocabulary of gesture. "There is a wonderful simplicity in silent films," the choreographer Todd Bolender commented last summer, while his Souvenirs, a tribute to the stars of that era, was being restaged for Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet for performances this April. "You have to get the point across with movement because there is no script." In Souvenirs, the dancers must use their faces as well as the rest of their bodies in order to echo the all-important camera close-ups of the silents, which required the actor's face to "speak" in the same way that an arabesque with yearning arms extended toward a partner "speaks" in a pas de deux.
The use of film techniques and the borrowing of specific film performances in the creation of ballets is not new; movies have had a profound influence on choreographers since the first decades of the 20th century, when Sergei Diaghilev and his collaborators were inventing modern ballet. Parade is the 1917 work that the dance historian Lynn Garafola argues initiated modern ballet. Now in active repertoire at the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, it has a libretto written by Jean Cocteau, choreography by Léonide Massine, and a heroine called the Little American Girl, partly based on Pauline, who, played by the silent film star Pearl White in The Perils of Pauline, famously overcame such heart-stopping dangers as a speeding train about to pulverize her as she lay helplessly tied to the tracks. The British choreographer Antony Tudor adored Pearl White and, like Ashton and Agnes de Mille, was a dedicated moviegoer in London in the 1920s. Tudor was a pioneer in making use of film techniques to create the neurotic atmosphere that pervaded many of his ballets and to suggest the passage of time. In her biography of Antony Tudor, Donna Perlmutter writes of Dim Luster, a dark ballet about the raveling of relations, "What Tudor managed to do then as he had with other ballets ... was summon his cinematic powers. A master of lighting, he suggested time lapses with blackouts and identity confusion with imaginary mirrors."
Many of today's choreographers go to movies the way yesterday's read poetry and stories, so it is no surprise that feature films become source material for their works, to create what Canfield calls abstract narrative. Even today's Russian choreographers are finding material for stories in American film. Boris Eifman recently premiered his troupe's take on Some Like It Hot in New York.
Not every movie, however, no matter how beautiful its imagery or universal its tale, makes a good ballet. Cannito's Amarcord is visually quite wonderful, but as a dance it adds nothing to Fellini's brilliant film. Pimble's Beauty and the Beast, on the other hand, with its dancing statues echoing Cocteau's talking statuary and Shiva-like disembodied hands holding candelabra, combines the surrealistic magic of the film with the appeal of the fairy tale in a truly original dance. And Canfield's "Anaïs," in which he limns the sexual interplay between the Millers and Anaïs Nin that is the subject of Henry & June, is arguably a far better work than the film, compressing into just over 10 minutes two hours' worth of rather uninteresting erotic action.
Sixteen Candles, the ballet, has not yet been made, but McIntyre has given it a lot of thought. It will be based on the 1984 Molly Ringwald comedy's subject, the universal struggle of "an adolescent girl to find her voice in the world. To be an individual adult human being ... to be heard." In the film it is an adolescent boy who hears the heroine when her parents do not (they forget her 16th birthday, hence the title), which is the stuff of eloquent pas de deux, trios, and quartets.
Maybe the metaphor extends further. Because, like an adolescent who has waited to be acknowledged by a venerable grown-up medium, film is proudly taking its place at the ballet, and that place is center stage.
Martha Ullman West is a dance writer in Portland, Ore., and a senior advisory editor at Dance magazine.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 49, Page B17
