Behind the Scenes
/Creating a new ballet remix—with a lot of help from the past
By Hannah Bontrager, June 2020
During this time where we’re all in our minds instead of the studio, we’re digging deep into conversations about the BFan creative process. One of the questions we’re asked MOST is: HOW DO YOU DO THIS?
The answer is, it’s complicated. There’s usually an idea that comes forward, sometimes written on a napkin (The Odyssey with live looping electric violin, 2015), or brainstormed across a picnic table (Cleopatra with the music of Beats Antique, 2019), or even on the way to a completely unrelated OSF touring appearance (Cinderella in a 1960’s prom, set to billboard hits, 2012). When it’s time to move the idea from napkin to reality: our process begins, in earnest. NOTE: In an upcoming blog entry, we’ll post our commitment to amplify the voices of BFan’s cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary artists and collaborators. We’re talking a lot—stay tuned.
Before we launch into an exposé of our process, we think it’s important to say that we didn’t “invent” artistic referencing; we’re not the first ones to use it, and we’re not saying it’s necessarily the “best” way. For time immemorial, artists of all mediums have referenced each other. Stravinsky was influenced by Russian folklore and then jazz. Van Gogh influenced Picasso. Socrates influenced Plato. Electro-swing remixes Duke Ellington. We’re definitely no Stravinsky, Picasso, Plato, or Ellington(!). But, like these great artists, our creative process often intentionally references the past.
Part I: Freak out
After we come up with a concept for a performance, we freak out. In fact, my mom and I ALWAYS have at least one conversation entitled “How can we possibly do this?!” Usually, at this point in the creative process, someone ironically stops one of us in line at the grocery store and says “An electro-swing Alice in Wonderland?! I can’t wait to see what you guys do!” And we say with one of the emoticon faces with all teeth (AND IN ALL TRUTH), “We can’t wait to see what we do with that, either!”
IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT BEFORE, THIS IS TRUE.
Part II: A lot of research
Meltdown completed, we move to (extensive) contextual, historical, cultural, and movemental research. We invite experts to our meetings and into the studio. We talk. We learn. We read. We also watch everything we can. Our research stage includes:
Historical research
Literary research
Social dances of the culture/period
Cultural dances and other theatrical or martial arts forms of the culture/period
Other, more traditional or “classical” tellings of the story in dance, music, theater, or film
We also research and play with innovative and intriguing lifts/movements/motifs from great world choreographers, classical and contemporary, to see how a feeling or an energy translates. Like musicians learning music from other composers to evolve something “new,” our team learns together in this way.
Part III: Moving in the studio
We collect our research in what we call our “Planning Database,” which functions sort of like a Pinterest board/digital Vision board/Idea box. This database includes: The characters we’ve chosen // Motifs we’ve chosen to emphasize // Our working scenes list // The music we’re considering matching to each scene.
When it’s time to move into the studio, we share this database with our team. What happens next is a messy artistic process involving playing, building, and editing. Sometimes, we infuse the choreographic process with source material, immersing and engaging BFan’s team of artist-performers directly in the research/inspiration process. We explore and play. In many cases, the final work that evolves out of this exploration process references, tributes, and recycles the source material. Some of these reasons include: Historical and cultural accuracy (e.g., when telling a story about another culture, like Celtic folk dancing in Dragon & the Night Queen); Humor (e.g., “quoting” The Nutcracker “Waltz of the Flowers” scene in our trippy version of flowers dancing in Alice in Wonderland: Remix); or as our own (humble!) homage to another great artist.
Here, we thought it could be meaningful to uncover and share how an incredibly wide range of historical work shows up in Ballet Fantastique’s work to fuse, remix, and reference important voices from the past in our own storytelling.
See for yourself
From hundreds of moments, here are six iconic examples of BFan’s aesthetic source material and movemental references in action. Enjoy!
ABOVE: Cinderella: A Rock Opera Ballet Set in 1964 prom scene: Reference material drawn directly from Dee Dee Sharp's "Mashed Potato Time" TV music video (1962) and converted on pointe for the Stepsisters at Prom. Our Prom scene was also inspired by the feeling of the Mambo! scene in Jerome Robbin's West Side Story for Broadway (1957). Throughout the ballet, we referenced other social dance forms of the time (including The Twist), as well as classical ballet versions of the classical ballet Cinderella (including the Gennadi Ledyax 1960 Bolshoi Cinderella)—especially for the Twist. We loved the feel of Twyla Tharp's remixed ballroom dance scenes with Baryshnikov (1984) for some of our partnering work.
ABOVE: Nevermore: Tales from Edgar Allan Poe — Death scenes: “Annabel Lee,” drawn from Frederick Ashton's Marguerite & Armand death scene, one of the greatest of all time (England's Royal Ballet, 1963). “Fall of the House of Usher” aesthetic drawn from Roger Corman’s 1960 Fall of the House of Usher cult classic film (with Vincent Price). Gustavo was inspired in his interpretation of Roderick Usher by Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker (2019)
*Note: While this choreography has been used with paid permission from the Ashton Trust, we regret our typographical omission in the Nevermore performance program; the corrected Nevermore world premiere program is linked HERE.
Alice in Wonderland: Remix Queen of Hearts bad girl scene: References the articulate, bossy girls of classical ballet: Black Swan variation from Swan Lake (Kirov Ballet Marius Petipa, 1895) and "Finger Fairy" variation from Sleeping Beauty (Kirov Ballet, Marius Petipa, 1890), remixed with stylizations from Madonna's "Vogue" (1990).
ABOVE: American Christmas Carol — Fezziwig's Party scene: Includes excerpts from Miss Mildred Melrose's Piccadilly Cabaret's "Real Black-Bottom Dance” (1928).
ABOVE: Cleopatra — Temple of Isis scene: Studied reference material from Layla Taj for Youssef Zada, Egyptian Ambassador, Consul Temple of Isis, reconstructed by Ms. Taj from the Ptolemaic Dynasty (as published/shared in 2017).