Any ballets by Ibsen

[bart]

I was afraid this question might be lost where it was posted -- on a totally unrelated thread.

Ibsen and ballet.  An interesting juxtaposition, redbookish -- and not impossible.  Sorry that this is off-topic, but here's my question.  Other than Peer Gynt, have any of Ibsen's plays been used as the basis of a ballet, as Birgit Cullberg did with Strindberg's Miss Julie?

How about other serious playwrights: Shaw, Chekhov (Month in the Country, of course), Shaw, Synge, Pirandello, O'Neill, Brecht, Williams, Miller, Beckett, Pinter, etc. etc.

[Alexandra]

Does Strindberg count? Birgit Cullberg's "Miss Julie" was a huge hit in the 1950s and 60s, a staple of the repertoriies of the Royal Danish Ballet and American Ballet Theatre (which performed it through the end of the 1970s.) (Miss Julie, a snippy young lady, is raped by her butler on Midsummer's Eve. Domination! Class warfare! Suicide!

There was also a version of "Streetcar Named Desire" (by Valerie Bettis, I think) that was an ABT hit -- Nora Kaye and Igor Youskevitch (never saw it, alas).

There must be some Chekhov but I can't think of any now (I believe "Month in the Country" is Turgenev).

I can't resist pointing out that the first Nora in "A Doll's House" was Betty Hennings, who was trained in the ballet school of the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, and danced leading roles in several Bournonville ballets

[bart]

Woops! Sorry for the error. And it's a play I've actually seen.

Thanks for the information on the ABT Streetcar, Alexandra. I really regret missing that one. Nora Kaye was, I assume, Blanche. Having seen her in The Cage, I can imagine lots of really effective scene chewing.

I just thought of another. Roland Petit choreographed (and danced ) Cyrano de Bergerac for his Ballets de Paris. Moria Shearer was Roxane. I recently saw the last 10 minutes or so of this on Classical Arts Showcase -- a 1960 taping narrated by Maurice Chevalier. Not much dancing, but Shearer was astoundingly beautiful though over-wrapped in black calf-length gauzy material. Cyrano got bopped on the head with a plank as he came to visit her. No plume, or panache, though Petit put in a few very lovely courtly steps and gestures in an attempt at cheering her up. Then his hat fell off and she saw the bandage he had wrapped around his head. He began to stagger (that plank was more effective than we thought at first)and looked surprised in silent-movie style. Stagger ... courtly steps ... bigger stagger ... fewer courtly steps. You get the idea. Finally he fell into her arms. Then she dropped him. Autumn leaves fell from a tree center stage. The end.

[Alexandra]

I made the same error in print! Woke up at 2 a.m. and realized it and called the desk and they corrected it for the very late editions

The Danes did "Cyrano" too. It was very popular, but didn't survive a change of (company" direction (it was one of Kronstam's greatest roles, and I wish I'd seen it).

[chrisk217]

Does Chehov's Aniuta count? It's a short story not a play.

It was choreographed by Vasiliev, on music by Gavrilin and there exists a Russian tape of him and Maximova in it.

I have been trying to locate the short story for some time now because, curiously, I could not make out very much about Aniuta's character and the drama from the ballet. It's somewhat flat dramatically.

You may have seen the very uplifting (pun intended) pdd in the Essential Ballet(?) compilation. Maximova must have been more than 50, but from a distance she looked like a teenager.

[redbookish]

My comment on an article I'm writing having inadvertantly sort of started this thread, here are my viewings: a regional company I see a lot of in Germany (in NRW) has done Peer Gynt, Taming of the Shrew, and Alice in Wonderland. I've seen the Australian Ballet do Anna Karenina and of course, Romeo and Juliet! And (19th C theatre historian alert), Giselle appeared on London stages in the 1830s as a play/melodrama, with a bit of dancing in it. More about that on the 19C dancers thread.