Dance Magazine: In the closing scene of The Handmaid’s Tale, choreographed by Lila York for Royal Winnipeg Ballet and based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, peace washes over the stage. Arvo Pärt’s celestial music accompanies the lead dancer in a seamless, spiraling solo evocative of a cloud-borne dream. In the book, the central character’s fate is left ambiguous, but York chose to leave the audience with a sense of hope and possibility. She wanted to give the viewers a way out, she says, after the intensity of Atwood’s cautionary vision of a world without autonomy or reproductive rights.
3 comments:
Dance is such a unique art form that can be applied to so many stories and tell tales in a different way. Joined with words, dance and movement can create a whole picture for an audience. It can be a beautiful speculation of artistry and sport that can stretch the audience perception of what real life consists of. On the other hand, dance as a solo form is graceful, athletic, and intuitive to human nature. The audience has to follow the story in a different way than when words are being spoke on a stage. They are guided by a different type of hand through the director, and I feel like dance is more open to interpretation than some other forms of art. An interpretation of The Handmaid’s Tale is an interesting take on the story that has been told through writing and note television. I always find it fascinating what takes directors can pull from an already established story that makes their take fresh beyond the medium they are using to tell it.
Admittedly I do not know much about what goes into creating a ballet and that's why I decided to read this article. Overall I found it interesting. I didn’t even know that there were people out there who are adapting modern literature into ballets. I love that choreographers and adapters are using more modern literature to tell stories through dance because sometimes I feel like the stories typically told by ballet are very old. And those stories have value as well but I am glad to see that the art is not stuck in the past. I have never thought of dance as telling a story but I love when Marston talks about how you can choreograph through a story can help you get into some ideas better than when you choreograph a dance solely based on those ideas. Essentially I enjoyed this article because It reinforces the idea that telling a story can be a valuable platform for sharing ideas and that was really important idea to me.
It is a profound direction that ballet’s have begun to take contemporary text and transform it into a visual story. When I first clicked on this article, my biggest concern was how some of these concepts would be Communicated to the audience in a non-speaking way. of course one of the answers to that is simply using audio recordings of some of the text from these novels but in many other ways it is able to be communicated through the movements and emotions of the dancers. I am surprised to hear that it took upwards of a decade to get some of these ballets produced: I'm not sure of what the traditional timeline is of creating a new ballet.
The other day in class we were having a similar conversation about operas and how so many operas are more than 100 years old and the content is really unpleasant when broken down. but some of the newer tellings of operas are based on very violent, tragic stories like Matthew Sheppard and Emmett Till. I did not see CMU production of Considering Matthew Shepard.
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