What Fools These Dancers Be! | Fairies, Greek lovers, and hapless actors collide (gracefully) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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Presented by Alberta Ballet. Choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon. Jubilee Auditorium (11455 87 Ave). Fri-Sat, Nov 7-8. Tickets available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca)
When I think about what it would take to convert William Shakespeare’s from a play to a ballet, the conundrum I find most pressing (and potentially dangerous), is the fact that Bottom is magically transformed into a donkey. It’s got to be hard to dance with an ass for a head.
“That was a lot of work,” agrees Alberta Ballet artistic director Jean Grande-Maître with a little chuckle. “It’s a large head and he has to do a pas de deux — he has to lift her, promenade her, keep her on balance and he can’t even see her. It’s quite an impediment to have such a long nose. We had to rehearse with the mask on continuously so that the dancers could get used to it and they could adapt to each other and find ways to make the pas de deux work.
“There’s little peepholes,” Grand-Maître continues, “but he’s basically seeing the floor, so it’s very hard for him not to end up in the orchestra pit or to drop a ballerina. It’s always a very touchy one, and I can tell you whenever that pas de deux shows up during performance my toes kinda curl up in my shoes ’cause I get a little bit nervous.”
However, Alberta Ballet is happy to risk sending one of its dancers tumbling into a tympani if it means bringing back one of its most successful productions for its fans: Christopher Wheeldon’s adaptation of . According to Grand-Maître, Wheeldon is probably the most important ballet choreographer working today and in order to stay relevant, the company must perform his pieces. It helps that it’s a beloved comedy, accessible to both children and adults, fitting nicely into Alberta Ballet’s Shakespeare cycle.
Midsummer is now firmly rooted in the company’s history as they have performed the piece twice before. This third time around will give audiences a chance to see how the dancers (and the company itself) have grown. Even though they’ve presented the piece before, the sets and costumes are still rentals, which led to a tutu-snafu in preparation for November’s show.
“The costumes were a problem because they had been sold to another ballet company and they were performing in those costumes on the same nights we were performing in Calgary and Edmonton,” Grand-Maître says. “So we rented two different productions from two different ballet companies: San Francisco Ballet and Pennsylvania Ballet. Then we laid all the costumes out in the studio one day with my ballet masters and tried to adapt the two productions so there would be a homogenous look, so it would not be noticeable that we were mixing productions together. Then we actually had to get costumes out of our Romeo and Juliet production, our Othello production, and our Cinderella production. Basically you have five different ballet productions on stage costume-wise.”
They need so many costumes because every role is double-cast, just in case injury or infection strikes. While the company is always prepared for dreadful scenarios, what Grand-Maître didn’t count on was the unpredictable nature of joy.
“Opening night in Calgary, the lead dancer who was supposed to perform Oberon, Jonathan Ollivier, his wife started to go into labour,” he says. “She was having a baby opening night. She phoned him up an hour before the curtain went up and the baby was born before intermission. So at the last minute there was an enormous amount of cast changes and people filling in for other people just to be able to let our Oberon be there for the birth of his child.”
That’s the excitement of the live performing arts. You don’t get to feel the adrenaline that sweeps through a theatre anywhere else. “It’s very contagious energy in an auditorium,” Grand-Maître says, “because people are laughing together and crying together and there is something that reconnects a community to itself and to life and the beauty of life.”
And if that doesn’t get your attention, there’s always an outside chance that Bottom with fall bottom-up into the horn section.
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