rewriting stories for ballet

[Guest dancing_frog]

I was wondering how you go about rewriting things for ballet. I have found a couple of stories that would make great ballets, but I don't know how to write them (or anywhere or anyone to try them out with).

Thanks in advance!

d_frog:cool:

[Morris Neighbor]

I'm a bit confused: are you an aspiring choreographer dealing with potential scenarios, or are you writer hoping to imitate Jean Genet?

In the latter case, you will soon starve from lack of work (Diaghelev being long dead), so I will deal with the former. I can offer one essential directive, from Balanchine himself: "There are no mothers-in-law in ballet." Keep it simple, focus on the emotions that can best be expressed in movement, rather than words, and structure the plot in an arc. And oh yes, work it out with a company of brilliant dancers!

[Estelle]

Morris Neighbor, I'm a bit confused about your answer: what's the connection with Genet and Diaghilev? As far as I know, Genet's only link with ballet was Janine Charrat's "'Adame Miroir" around 1948, which isn't much. Perhaps you meant Jean Cocteau (who did write quite a lot of ballet plots)?

[ronny]

Dear dancing-frog,

I want to encourage you and applaud you for your aspiration to create more magic. My suggestion is to just go ahead and use your imagination and picture the story as you would want to see it. It isn't important to know everything at the outset of a project, just go ahead and if the thing has magic in it then the help to complete the dream will come along as it is needed. Just have fun, go ahead with your idea and take it as far as you can with or without help and see what happens.

I have to confess that I am certainly not a ballet expert, just a new fan, so I can't give real specific advice on it, but I do know about dreams and I do know that dreams can come true.

[BalletNYC]

Mostly a lurker here...but I feel as if my most recent project qualifies me to respond. Alas, I am a person whose artform tries to communicate without words so please forgive my lack of writing skill...

I have just completed the first production of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", a full-length adaptation of the Washington Irving story for the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. The journey was a long one with a very high learning curve, but an even higher sense of reward. As of today, the ballet has already been licensed for performance by Wes Chapman's Alabama Ballet and I am in negotiation with several other professional companies around the U.S. (which I will of course keep confidential until I have signed contracts).

The process was a long one, stretching over about a 3 year period, and was the result of my desire to create a work that did several things. Firstly, as an artist, I wanted to address an area of dance that I had yet to fully explore - narrative based ballet. I have to admit that initially I had to question my motives: was I selling out to ticket sales and hopes of career development; had I forgotten what it was like to be the third villager from the left in the back row; was there any benefit to yet another full-length ballet? What I discovered was this, IT IS POSSIBLE to bring in an audience, expand the horizons of the dancers (even the third villager from the left) and add another work into the cannon of full-length ballets as long as there is integrity in all of the millions of details. In the end, I no longer had any questions about my motives.

Secondly, as a male in ballet, a had been keenly aware that the majority of the full length ballets female-centric (a new word, but you get the idea) in their base. I wanted to create a work which would not only give the principal male (Ichabod) the spotlight, but would also be a work that young boys would be interested in going to see, and ideally, encourage a new crop of young male dancers.

Finally, I do want to expand the ballet audience. The bottom line is that except in some very specific ballet markets (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Miami, Philadelphia, Kansas City) the repertory programs aren't attracting audiences. And, I don't believe it is because there aren't fantastic works being produced. I believe it is because dance as an art form isn't something that many people have the opportunity to grow up with and, therefore, are not inclined to attend a performance of something that they don't understand. I guess what I am talking about is a gradual education of an audience and a balance in the repertory that both invites in new audience members and feeds the avid fan.

Okay...enough of that...now onto the process...

As I started with before, the process was one that took place over about three years. First was the search for a story that would fit with into my needs and yet be succinct enough to make an easy transfer to ballet. Also a consideration was whether or not the story was one that was going to be tied up by a publisher or a trust - this one was not. Finally, as I said before, I wanted a story familar to potential audience members, but broad enough to allow for interpretation by myself.

After coming across "Sleepy Hollow" I began the massive task of editting the story down to its skeleton - separating what needed to be there to get the story across from what was too detailed to be able to potray through movement and mime only. After probably 6 months of putting this together I had my first draft of the libretto. To cut the chase, draft number twelve is what finally wound up on stage. Between one and twelve took weeks and months of hashing and rehashing. I kept a copy of the libretto by my bed and would awaken in the middle of the night to jot down ideas or notes that came from somewhere in a deep slumber.

Next in the process came the music. All along I had been assembling music from classical composer when an angel came to me. This angel was a board member at CPYB who had a friend who was a composer. I met the composer, Lanny Meyers, here in the City and we began to talk. He had scored music for a number of animated films - winning 5 Emmy Awards in the process - and was interested in the project. Now the work really began. We both came to the conclussion that it would be best to score the ballet as if Lanny were scoring a film - that is to say, I broke my libretto down into about 60 individual "instances" for Lanny to score. Lanny went about developing themes for each character based on our conversations and then began to score the instances. Editting, re-writing and making changes in a very similar way to how I had originally developed the libretto. Now he recorded the entire score on piano and I could get on my way to dealing with sets costumes and, oh yeah, choreography.

I worked with each of the collaborators in much the same way. Gillian Bradshaw-Smith did the set designs and a combination of CPYB costume staff and my frequent costume collaborator, Sebastian St. John, designed and built all the costumes.

The ballet which is about 90 minutes long, was choreographed in about 8 weeks - all to that piano recording and with a lot of crossing of fingers in terms of how sets and tech were actually going to work. I worked chronologically through most of the ballet and spent quite a bit of time prior to being in the studio with the CPYB dancers on developing a few steps that I thought would help to define each of the major characters. In about the 6th week set pieces and partial costumes started appearing in the studio and the pieces began falling into place. Also about this time the orchestra began recording the music.

Skipping way ahead...it all came together opening night and was the most artistically rewarding project I have ever undertaken.

Alan

[ronny]

Bravo, Bravo, Alan, not only for your accomplishment but for this highly interesting and clear post. You have given me a lot of information that I have been wondering about recently about the possiblility of creating a new ballet and I also have been thinking a lot about ballet promotion. I am just a new fan, but I have been telling all my friends that the only difference between a person who loves ballet and those who don't is simply becoming familiar with the musical score and some grasp of the story line.

Ballet is far superior to any other entertainment form that I know of, but it has this odd little quirk to it... if you are not familiar with it, then it may not seem all that appealing to you to begin with. It is just a matter of seeing it a few times or even just hearing the musical score a few times and then it becomes a completely different situation. I hope that your production will get enough exposure to make it a classic.

Seems to me that PBS should be interested in something like this... after all, how often is a great new full lengh ballet created? Its sounds like a very monumental event to me.

Thanks for giving the details of your experience... very, very interesting.

[Victoria Leigh]

Alan, GREAT post and really fascinating information! Thank you for sharing that, and congratulations on the great success of your work! I hope that it will be performed by a lot of companies and that we will all get to see it in the near future!

[Leigh Witchel]

Hey Alan -

I'm glad that Sleepy Hollow went well. I'd like to take a portion of what you wrote and use it as a springboard to a second discussion - but please keep on with this one as well.

From Alan's post

Secondly, as a male in ballet, a had been keenly aware that the majority of the full length ballets female-centric (a new word, but you get the idea) in their base. I wanted to create a work which would not only give the principal male (Ichabod) the spotlight, but would also be a work that young boys would be interested in going to see, and ideally, encourage a new crop of young male dancers.

There's a lot of discussion material here. One of the reasons I think that older classical ballets get tweaked so often is to accommodate male dancers' natural desire to display their technique. How do people feel about this? I recall a brief solo for Junker Ove in "A Folk Tale" that to me was pretty obviously cobbled from music meant for a mime passage. But then again, when you were watching a dancer as interesting as Kenneth Greve, you wanted to get to see him dance. When have people seen good examples of incorporating advanced male technique into a classic and when has it crossed the line? For me, Nureyev's '92 Sleeping Beauty for POB crossed the line and then some. The Lilac Fairy was banished from Act III and even from the awakening - it was All Prince, All the Time.

Alan touches on an issue that particularly resonates with dancers in smaller companies with fewer performances. If you're a man in Giselle, and you're not Albrecht, Hilarion or in the peasant pas, you're carrying wheat and maybe doing a mazurka in the first act. There isn't much for the men to dance. Add to that only doing 3-4 performances, and the creeping defensive trend towards more and more full length ballets and you've got some miserable, stifled men in your company. One solution, which Alan is trying, is new repertory. New repertory is always risky - look at Pied Piper, which I think was created for exactly the same reason, to afford opportunities for ABT's ever expanding roster of virtuoso demi-caractere men.

It's interesting to think of ballet as "female-centric" - I yearnnd for more male corps de ballets roles to dance (and that's what I think Alan meant, richer roles for men) but hey, who's doing the choreographing? Whose vision is out there on stage? Women haven't had all that much input into ballet choreography yet. How female-centric can an art form be that's more or less run by men? (But that's another can of worms, isn't it!)

I'm going to split this post off to a new discussion. Alan, I'm so pleased you de-lurked, please keep posting! It is so valuable to hear from people in the trenches.

[BW]

Alan, thank you so much for your very interesting play by play on putting together The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - I've always loved that tale...saw it advertised in Dance Magazine, heard about it through a friend and would have loved to have driven down to see it but it was just a bit too far for an evening's visit.

It seems to me that it would be a perfect story to use for ballet - and I think your idea about drawing people to ballet and giving them a gradual education by exposing them to stories that will entice them and then teach them that there is so much more going on in this art form. As you wrote:

I believe it is because dance as an art form isn't something that many people have the opportunity to grow up with and, therefore, are not inclined to attend a performance of something that they don't understand. I guess what I am talking about is a gradual education of an audience and a balance in the repertory that both invites in new audience members and feeds the avid fan.  

Please keep us posted, and as Leigh urged - keep on posting on here!

It's very exciting to hear firsthand from someone who in the process of doing this kind of work. Many thanks!

P.S. Just so you know there is a bit of a dicussion going on about this over on the Discovering Ballet Forum.

[Morris Neighbor]

First of all, my apologies to Estelle: I was indeed thinking of Cocteau, not Genet, and I thank her for the correction.

As for men in classical dance, I agree that they're in short supply, but I urge caution in changing the established canon. Every addition and modification to "create" more male dances is a distortion of the historic record.

To cite an extreme case, "Les Sylphides" was not conceived for the Trocs!