Tea For Tutus | Blair Puente (right) puts the kettle (and the top hat) on in Alice in Wonderland. Photo by ivan karabobaliev
DETAILS
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Presented by Alberta Ballet. Choreographed by Edmund Stripe. Jubilee Auditorium (11455-87 Ave). Fri-Sat, Mar 27-28 (7:30pm). Tickets available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca).
Sometimes you have to make the tough calls. If things aren’t working, changes need to be made. And from the 2006 to the 2009 production of Albert Ballet’s Alice in Wonderland, something needed to be done.
“The last time we did Alice in Wonderland, we used cups from Ikea for the tea party and I have to throw them offstage,” starts Mad Hatter Blair Puente when I ask him about the challenges of putting Alice in pointe shoes. “I get a little into my character, and my aim was never so good to begin with. I actually lobbed a cup high enough and hard enough that the two stage technicians could not catch it because it was just sailing over their heads far off into the wings. It managed to land on the ankle of another dancer and it put her out of the show for the rest of the week.” Ouch!
So how are they handling the sailing ceramic this time around? “They’re re-casting cups this year,” he laughs. “They might be a little gentler in cases of freak flight.”
Other than that, the ballet is just as fantastical as the previous production, with a little more polish, says Puente, who gets to don the topsy-turviest of top hats for the second time. “There is another little production nightmare,” Puente says. “I’ve had to go in and get [the hat] re-touched-up, re-formed, refitted four times this year, because I have to take it off at two points in the ballet: I have to catch a cup in it and then wear it with a cup in it — and it hurts, by the way. It still has to stay on well enough that I can dance and turn and look upside down [in it].”
Nobody ever said bringing magic to the stage would be easy. It did, in fact, take a few adjustments to extract Wonderland from its world of words and give it dancing shoes. Having a silent Mad Hatter, for example, my seem strange considering his fondness for speaking in riddles, but according to Puente, the riddles are just emblematic of the type of person he is, not essential. In dance, he simply takes the frenetic energy the Hatter would otherwise put into speaking and injects it into his movements. And thanks to some tricky lighting, Wonderland comes complete with a disappearing Cheshire Cat and a growing and shrinking Alice.
It all sounds wondrous — just heads up for flying crockery.
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