Arts & Entertainment | denvergazette.com: Val Caniparoli has always been a fan of film noir.
“I loved those dark, scary stories,” the renowned choreographer recalled. “They always stayed in my mind. Years later, when it came to things like Jekyll and Hyde, I knew I could do it.”
Wait. Did he mean turning it into a ballet? Yes he did.
4 comments:
I love Jekyll and Hyde and honestly I think it’ll make an absolutely amazing ballet. I’m so curious to see how they would choreograph Jekyll confronting Hyde. One thing about me that I’m a bit ashamed of is that I love the Jekyll and Hyde musical. Not from a storytelling standpoint. I think it does a pretty poor job at translating the iconic short story to the stage. That being said, I think the music is so so so good. I love it. I also love the vibe of the production. From what I read about the ballet it seems as though it does preserve that vibe which is very exciting. I’m surprised this ballet managed to keep going. It was one of the shows that was hit by covid. Most of those shows weren’t able to recover and just shut down forever. However, the Jekyll and Hyde ballet managed to come back and continue despite getting shut down during covid.
By now we all know my relationship with dance. So naturally here we are. One of the things that got me into the production side of ballet, was seeing ballet adaptations of classic stories. As much as the Nutcracker is cute, I prefer to watch and be involved with something unique. I first got into adaptations when I found Christopher Wheeldon. He has adapted multiple stories for the ballet stage; Alice in Wonderland, The Winters Tale, and An American in Paris. It is inspiring to see less high-profile companies (compared to The Royal Ballet and Broadway), to be doing new adaptations. Immediately after this, I will be going to YouTube to watch clips of this production. This production, despite not being LGBTQ, could have significant benefits for the queer community. As the story has two same-sex main characters, Jekyll and Hyde, they have a large pas de deux at the end. This production can provide an example how same-sex dancing is able and can be mainstream.
THIS IS SUCH A COOL IDEA. I’m not a dancer myself, though many of my fellow dps are, but I love watching dance and find it so fascinating. Maybe I’ll get involved with dancelight sometime. Dance is so cool and surreal to me in so many ways, as it’s absolutely gorgeous and comes in so many different types of dance and also I feel dance is the utmost visceral way of expression, and can be so incredibly intimate. It’s amazing how a largely nonverbal medium can express so much, dancers are incredible at communicating with their body and I admire it so much. Jekyll and Hyde seems to me like such a complicated story, however would be so interesting to be seen interpreted as a ballet. I didn’t realize that it’d been written in 6 days! And Ramirez’s comment on being truly vulnerable is so interesting, as Jekyll is supposedly the ‘sane’ or ‘normal’ one in certain versions so would probably be extremely vulnerable as he has all of these thoughts and emotions about what is happening to him and what he is doing.
While I would not say I love the story of Jekyll and Hyde, I am quite fond of it. I enjoyed reading the book by Robert Louis Stevenson in high school. In fact it was one of my favorite books I had to read in high school english. Prior to last spring I had not seen the musical version. But my highschool had taken the number “Murder, Murder” to a competition a few years ago. Fortunately I had the opportunity to see it when I went on an accepted visit to a school. I was surprised at the quality of the show, especially since it was at a college. I would like the opportunity to see it done professionally too though, as I think it would be interesting to see the contrast. I was surprised to hear that this story was turned into a ballet, I would actually love to see this as a ballet. I think that it could be very powerful when done well. Reading the article in its entirety has only deepened my interest in this production and I hope I will one day get to see it.
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