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
