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When you think of Grimm’s collected fairy tales, images of Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty usually come to mind. But the Brothers Grimm also recorded some of the darkest stories underlying German folklore with some often-disturbing imagery. Their work as folklorists and academics came at a time steeped in early-Romantic fascination with the highly imaginative, placing the dark and eerie alongside the fantastical. For that reason and many others besides, Grimm’s fairy tales have long been a source of artistic inspiration in a variety of media.
Such was the new fantasy ballet on offer from Alberta Ballet at the Jubilee Auditorium Thursday night and continuing throughout this weekend. Titled simply as Grimm and danced predominantly as an ensemble effort with some glorious moments for the principles, the company as a whole deserves loudest praise for performing the new work with exceptional ease belying its hidden complexities. The audience came away with a well-crafted debut by Italian Teatro della Scala dancer and emerging international choreographer Stefania Ballone.
Invited by Alberta Ballet artistic director Francesco Ventriglia to create a new fantasy ballet, the story and movement seemed to unfold from Ballone’s own inner experiences, kinesthetically re-imagined, and at times accessing with seeming ease some of the darker parts of her own subconscious mind. But the new piece, with its many broad tableaus, could just as easily have been about any of us, whether describing our fondest wishes and dreams or unearthing our worst nightmares.
With enveloping music by Taketo Gohara reaching back appropriately to classical synthesizer scorings, Malgorzata Szablowska’s deeply moody lighting, and costume designer Eleonora Peronetti’s often effective monochromes, the creative team sewed together fragments of Grimm’s stories into a well-unified, highly imaginative witches’ brew.
The evening was as involving as it was at certain points jarring and arresting. But that is often the point of dreamscape dances taken from the darkened Romantic undergrowth of the collective unconscious. The adaptation of Grimm’s stories, re-fashioned in piecemeal narrative, came together very well in Ballone’s imaginative hands.
The story is simple enough and revolves around a young girl, Aura, born in a darkened wood but who loses her mother when she dies in childbirth. The plot twists from that point forward between charming naiveté and tableaus of harrowing coming-of-age. While Act I’s vignettes are punctuated with an assortment of Grimm characters both whimsical and tyrannical, like the Frog Prince, The Bremen Town Musicians, and some menacing dwarf miners complete with flashlight hats, it is Act II which speaks boldly with a blended vibe of some of the more contemporary approaches found in modern dance that have been around for the past 40 years or so.
Pricked at the end of Act I by the spindle of three fatal Spinners, Act II successfully depicted Aura coming to terms with her inner nightmares through some striking scenes: nine body-stockinged women each with an extended Rapunzel braid dancing in creepy unison in front of a burnt orange scrim, or the company returning as green-teal dwarfs again, menacing the audience as though meaning to haunt our sleep. Although that penultimate tableau went on perhaps a little too long, it served the purpose of showing that even from the worst of nightmares, one is bound someday to awaken.
Sure enough, at the ending, the back panel initially projected what looked a lot like a Klimt Viennese expressionist piece, complete with customary darkened woods, but Szablowska’s lighting transformed what was once a nightmare into a lovely daydream. Ballone’s choreography, in parallel, was beautiful, even lyrical in places while Gohara’s score, set in soothing thirds, accompanied an elegant lift amid a rhapsodic duet, evocative of Aura’s awakening maturity and rebirth.
The rest of the ballet had its moments of beauty, too. An important Act I highlight that charmed was the Frog and the girl with the ball, which emerged into a very sensitive trio. But my favourite Act II dance, one that depicted Aura’s fondest dream, was the remarkable and striking duet with her mother. As the lighting transitioned through blue hazes and deep aquas, the scenes grew only more complex in both movement and music, signifying the depths of Aura’s imagination about a mother she never knew.
Despite sinister stepmothers obsessing over skin-deep beauty accompanied by all-black sycophants, it is the world of the Prince and his beloved whom each of us sincerely hopes for, showing us the truth about our deepest desires to see Aura whisked off her feet and into a new dreamworld.