Tom's Life Bits

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===== Dracula =====

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//Marcelo Martinez as Dracula and Lilyan Vigo Ellis as Lucy rehearse at Carolina Ballet's studio for the troupe's production of 'Dracula.'//\\

Published Sun, Oct 10, 2010 02:00 AM
Modified Sun, Oct 10, 2010 05:14 PM
'Dracula' revamped

RALEIGH Vampires are everywhere these days, from "Twilight" books and movies to TV's "True Blood," so it might seem a no-brainer for Carolina Ballet to program a new "Dracula." But the piece's origins and the challenges it faced on the way to its premiere this Thursday make its choice a little less predictable.

The idea came to artistic director Robert Weiss after the company's "Picasso" program last October did not do as well as expected. Determined to find a better fit for this season's October slot, Weiss remembered how surprised he was at the last performance of "Picasso" on Halloween night, when some audience members came dressed as witches and goblins.

"I thought, why not go with a seasonal theme," Weiss said, "and take advantage of the built-in interest?"

"Dracula" was an obvious possibility, but there were already more than a dozen ballet versions. Weiss had seen the most popular ones but didn't think any of them really worked. He turned to the 1897 Bram Stoker novel and found his inspiration there.

Weiss concluded the novel could be the basis for a successful staging and immediately thought of Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the Broadway, Hollywood and ballet choreographer who has created a dozen popular works for the company. Initially, Taylor-Corbett was not sure she could contribute anything new, but Weiss persuaded her to read the book, sweetening the proposal by offering a commissioned score from J. Mark Scearce, the Raleigh-based composer of four previous Carolina Ballet premieres.

Taylor-Corbett finally agreed after coming up with her own twist: She would focus on the women in the story.

"In most versions, the female characters are underrepresented, they're really just objects," Taylor-Corbett said. "I was interested in exploring them with a fresh look. Lucy is the more traditional female and is susceptible to Dracula, but Mina is forward thinking, more modern. She resists Dracula and, in my version, tricks him into the sunlight to destroy him."

Taylor-Corbett also makes Dracula himself young and sexy. "Drinking blood to him is like wooing," she said. "It's like he's saying 'You're going to love this.' I don't depict him as evil, really, he's just a force of nature."

The 75-minute piece is not linear, but a series of short scenes. "The aspect I embraced was the solving of the mystery," Taylor-Corbett says. "The characters don't know Dracula exists in the beginning, and you watch them try to figure out what is happening."

Although the ballet asks for strong character portrayal from the dancers, Taylor-Corbett wanted to avoid long scenes in which plot must be mimed, so she decided on a narrator in the person of Dr. Seward, who is called in to examine Lucy's mysterious illness. Playing the role is Broadway actor Alan Campbell, known locally for heading up the Hot Summer Nights series with his wife, Raleigh-born actress Lauren Kennedy.

The production employs a number of traditional theatrical effects, but a new element is the moving projections. Taylor-Corbett brought in Adam Larsen, a UNC School of the Arts graduate and now a New York-based projection artist, to create the designs.

Setting a musical scene

Scearce's music for "Dracula" will add atmospheric elements, specifically through the cimbalom, the Hungarian hammered dulcimer.

"When you hear it, it immediately takes you to that part of the world and the 19th century," Scearce said. The score for strings, winds, harp, percussion and cimbalom will be performed live, conducted by Alfred E. Sturgis.

Scearce had to approach the composition in an unusual way, because Taylor-Corbett was in China when he reached a crucial point in shaping the score. They communicated by e-mail and Skype, and Scearce sent her CDs for inspiration, including movie soundtracks and his own music. "She latched onto my bass concerto," Scearce said, "and said 'I have to have this.' Lynne heard the theme as a kind of calling by Dracula to the women, so music from the first movement became a unifying device."

It was late May when Taylor-Corbett completed the work's structure. Because the music copyist needed a month to prepare the parts, Scearce had only a short window to ready his score for the July 1 start of rehearsals. "I wrote it in 10 days," Scearce said. "I think it's the fastest I've ever written anything."

More of the macabre

Scearce also wrote the music for the evening's companion piece, "The Masque of the Red Death," a half-hour work based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story, choreographed by Weiss.

"I'd been wanting to do a ballet to 'Masque' since 1985, but never got around to it," Weiss said. "Back then I saw it as a metaphor for AIDS, but now I see it more universally about mortality and the fear of death. It's also about couples in love who must face the fact that life will not always be so pretty."

Scearce says the two choreographers are each brilliant in their own ways.

"[Weiss] is a philosopher poet," Scearce said. "He can give me an emotional hook in a single phrase. He told me he wanted the ending to also be the beginning, so we open on a funeral with spooky male voices singing a requiem from the pit. Lynne is like an expressionist painter, with spontaneity and improvisatory elements. She starts with fragments of visual ideas, then shapes and conforms the music to them, working right up to the last minute."

Weiss would like to catch the fancy of the under-20 crowd, and hopes the program will introduce them to ballet in a new way. "We just had a meeting in which the staff said they wished there was another word for what we do besides 'ballet' so it could be marketed without the stereotype some people assign it," he said.

Perhaps bloodletting and sex will do the trick, along with the company's call for audiences to wear costumes at the final performances on Halloween weekend.

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===== Ghouls are afoot at Carolina Ballet =====
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//Marin Boieru, Alan Campbell, Ashley Hathaway, and Attila Bongar in Carolina Ballet's 'Dracula.' It's paired with a production of Poe's 'Masque of the Red Death' at Carolina Ballet.//\\

Published Sat, Oct 16, 2010 02:00 AM
Modified Fri, Oct 15, 2010 09:37 PM

RALEIGH Carolina Ballet's Halloween-season program of new works based on classics of the macabre emphasizes the visual and the dramatic. Enhanced by cutting-edge technology and original scores, both pieces are geared to audiences beyond core dance fans.

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," a prince celebrates six months of avoiding the plague by throwing a lavish masked ball. The desperate merrymakers take little notice of a skull-masked figure, but when the prince demands the stranger's unmasking, it's Death himself come for them all.

Robert Weiss' half-hour version depicts the ball up to midnight, each hour danced in a different room, effectively represented by projections of varying decorations onto a wall of arches and stairways. David Heuvel's dazzling commedia dell'arte costumes add richness to Weiss' often angular and somber choreography, signaling the pall hanging over the festivities. J. Mark Scearce's score adroitly mixes courtly formality with melodic melancholy.

Timour Bourtasenkov's prince and Melissa Podcasy's duchess communicate the pair's kinkiness, while of the guests, Eugene Barnes and Lara O'Brian's acrobatically sensuous Arabian prince and princess are the most distinctive. Gabor Kapin makes Death's spins and leaps properly menacing.

Broadway and movie choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett has teamed with projection artist Adam Larsen to give a cinematic sweep to her hourlong condensation of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," a London street dissolving into an asylum cell or moonlit graveyard instantaneously, while nightmare shadows of bats and storm clouds play over them. She also employs classic stage tricks for disappearances and optical illusions, aided by Ross Kolman's spooky lighting and Jeff A. R. Jones' panels, drops and castle set.

Taylor-Corbett frames the story with narration by Dr. Seward, concentrating on Dracula's interaction with two women. Thursday's pairing of Marcelo Martinez's darkly handsome vampire with Lilyan Vigo's ethereal Lucy and Margaret Severin-Hansen's plucky Mina were the evening's highlights in their frankly sexual pas de deux. Alan Campbell gave Seward effective gravity and Yevgeny Shlapko's manic, fly-eating Renfield was a riveting example of acting through dance.

In attempting to include all the iconic moments in the novel, however, Taylor-Corbett asks for many elaborate setups that on Thursday made the staging rushed and clumsy. The many short scenes also give Scearce's appropriately atmospheric score few opportunities to flow and expand.

Still, the theatrically dramatic production holds the attention and is a satisfying example of how ballet can be stretched beyond its stereotype.

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