Bard’s tragedies on their toes
Print Edition
SHAKESPEARE’S comedies are entertaining to watch for the witty repartee and playful plots, but it’s the Bard’s tragedies that have captured the heart of ballet choreographer Derek Deane.
“Comedies are just difficult to do in dance,” said Deane, who is returning to Shanghai in October with two Shakespeare classics staged with the Shanghai Ballet at the new Shanghai International Dance Center’s grand theater.
“I think a choreographer prefers a story where many different emotions are involved,” he said.
The British ballet master is producing “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet” as part of Shanghai cultural events commemorating the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death.
He said Shakespeare tragedies provide a rollercoaster of emotions, including love, hate, revenge and murder. The comedies need words to express feelings and conflicts, while the tragedies can play off the emotions of the characters.
“‘Hamlet’ is very word-based,” Deane said. “That worried me, so I decided to almost forget the storyline and concentrate on the individual characters and their relationships. By doing that, I am able to tell the story of this young man, from his father’s dying to his own death.”
“Hamlet” has been adapted for ballet much less frequently than “Romeo and Juliet.”
Previous productions included Russian choreographer Boris Eifman’s “Russian Hamlet” in 1999, set to the music of Beethoven and Mahler. It centered on the life of Tsar Paul, whose father Peter III was murdered in a plot involving Paul’s mother Catherine II and a lover. In 2000, American choreographer Stephen Mills’ “Hamlet” premiered, set to music by contemporary composer Philip Glass.
Deane’s production of “Hamlet” for the Shanghai Ballet first opened at the Shanghai Grand Theater in April, using a selection of Tchaikovsky’s music.
“I used Tchaikovsky because I think there are so many moods there,” Deane said, “Hamlet was very schizophrenic. He went from happy to sad, from being in love to losing love, from a good relationship with his mother to a bad one. His personality changed all the time, and I felt that I needed to convey that musically.”
In Deane’s way of thinking, Hamlet’s life wasn’t entirely doom and gloom. He loved his mother in a very disjointed way, but there was a heart there. So musically, he found Tchaikovsky’s works suited his production because the composer himself also had a disoriented life of problems and emotional turmoil.
“It can be soft, it can be gentle, it can be light and it can be fiery,” Deane said. “There are so many moods in Tchaikovsky’s music.”
The choreographer took the same approach to “Romeo and Juliet,” looking deeper into the two title characters and their personalities.
While some productions portray Juliet as an innocent, naive girl, Deane said killing yourself at age 16 hardly exemplifies naivety.
“That, for me, is a person who has determination and her own mind, so I was determined to create a Juliet that was sweet and young but also doomed by her destiny,” he said. “These two young kids killed themselves for love. That’s quite difficult at that age, so I needed them to be quite strong characters.”
He also highlights the plight of the Capulets — in need of money and willing to sell their daughter to a rich man. The poor girl was caught in a terrible family cage, which Deane tried to build within the story.
The set and costume design of his “Hamlet” was done by Lez Brotherston, who came up with the vision of a solitary Hamlet in a cold, empty room and dressed in modern clothing.
The other performers in the court wear period costumes. The visual effect is to separate the prince from his family and from time.
Deane’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” is based on the ballet of the same name by Prokofiev. The challenge for the choreographer was not to copy his own experience dancing in Kenneth MacMillan’s version at the Royal Ballet.
“Romeo and Juliet” is a neo-classical ballet, as opposed to the more traditional “Swan Lake” and “Nutcracker” ballets. Deane said he prefers ballets about real people instead of a swan, or a sugar plum fairy or a girl who goes to sleep for 100 years.
“You can play with the body in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ much more than you can in ‘Swan Lake,’ where you have to have purity of line, all the right shapes and perfect positions,” he said. “‘Giselle’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’ have to be physically and classically perfect, but with ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ it’s so much more about emotion.”
Of course, Deane is also an accomplished choreographer in classical ballet. He has restaged the three Tchaikovsky ballets as well as “Giselle.” He also directed his grand version of “Swan Lake” for the Shanghai Ballet, featuring 48 swans instead of the usual 16 or 24.
“I enjoyed doing the classical ballets because they take me back to my roots, my English upbringing, my Royal Ballet,” he said.
Ballet training has changed a lot over the years, he said.
“Very few people work on the upper body now,” Deane said. “Everybody’s working on the technique, the legs, the feet, how many turns can you do, how high your leg can go — all those sort of things. There’s very little concentration on shape and form and quality of movement in the upper body.”
Deane was trained in the Royal Ballet School and became a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet in the decades after graduation. He then retired from the stage and started a career as a choreographer. He was the artistic director of English National Ballet from 1993 to 2001. He has worked with Shanghai Ballet in several productions in the last 10 years.
“I was lucky to work with artists who have matured over the years, not just technically, but who really understood what I wanted to do,” he said. “It’s really good to work with people who have grown emotionally and artistically. It’s wonderful to see the Shanghai ballet progress and grow as a company and as individual artists.”
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