After tasting a dish containing rose petals, a young woman experiences an intense erotic awakening and runs off with a passing soldier. Another woman feels deep love for her sister’s child and develops the ability to nurse her child at her own breast. Lovers exchange passionate embraces that naturally flare up. Such magical events appear at regular intervals in her 1989 novel Like Water in Chocolate by Mexican author Laura Esquivel, now an inspiration for the ballet by Christopher Wheeldon. I am giving
American Ballet Theater Summer season opens The company premiered “Like Water for Chocolate” at the Metropolitan Opera House on June 22 and made its company debut at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California in March.
Co-commissioned with the Royal Ballet, this large-scale production (which had its world premiere in London last year) represents a new kind of experiment for American Ballet Theatre. It is a feature-length work that is not based on folk tales or literary sources. Although it is a past work, it is based on a modern novel and is a bestseller that was also made into a popular movie. It is expected to attract new audiences unfamiliar with ballet.
“For those unfamiliar with Balanchine’s great abstract and classical works, they might look at the poster and say, ‘Well, I’ll go see it,'” Wheeldon said. or”
The premiere comes at a time when ballet theaters, like many arts organizations, are struggling to regain their pre-pandemic audiences. The company’s last season at the Metropolitan Opera before the pandemic was eight weeks long, but due to the rescheduling of the opera, starting in 2022, the Metropolitan Opera’s season will be shortened to five weeks. And the tour was cancelled.
“People are just starting to go back to theater,” said Susan Jaffe, who took over as the company’s new artistic director in December. “What we’re trying to do is build on our weeks in New York and continue to be as present as we’ve ever been.”
“We are a story ballet company,” she added. “I think ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ is exactly what ballet theater should be doing right now.”
Esquivel’s novel succeeds by weaving together the wisdom of Mexican cuisine with a story of forbidden love set in Mexico’s turbulent times and beyond. mexican revolution. Readers were drawn to tales of female empowerment, tales of heroines using their ability to convey emotions through food to change their destinies, frank discussions of female pleasure, and a folksy tone.
The novel sold over 7 million copies in 38 languages and became one of Mexico’s highest-grossing films.
It was the 1992 film that caught Wheeldon’s attention. He was a young dancer who had just come from London around the time Like Water for Chocolate was in theaters. He had just joined the New York City Ballet and was feeling lonely and claustrophobic in his tiny New York apartment.
“I saw the poster for this movie at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and was hooked,” he said. It was all about the magical powers of the protagonist and the combination of ghost stories and this epic romance. ”
These elements align the film and novel with magical realism, a label that encompasses the branch of Latin American and world literature that fuses everyday events with otherworldly events. Esquivel recently said in a Zoom call from his office in Brasilia, where he serves as ambassador to Brazil. “I come from a culture where magic realism is part of everyday life. It’s not even magic. It’s just a way of conveying energy.”
Esquivel, whose approval and guidance was sought by Wheeldon throughout the process, describes cooking as a form of alchemy, a term that also applies to what Wheeldon did in translating her novel into ballet. “He takes us into rhythm, movement, a language of suggestion and interpretation that transcends words,” said Esquivel, who will attend the premiere in New York.
There are complex problems with such translations. Magic, on the other hand, is what ballet is good at. Otherworldly transformations and supernatural characters provide much of the atmosphere and mystery of his 19th-century ballets like “Giselle” and “Swan Lake.” However, in ballet, it is difficult to convincingly present a complex plot with multiple storylines, depicting a wide range of emotions and events occurring in multiple locations over a long period of time.
“Like Water” is set on a family farm in northern Mexico spanning 20 years from the time of the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. Some scenes are set in Texas across the border. There are six main characters, including the heroine Tita, her domineering mother, and two younger sisters, each with their own story.
And Tita has two love objects, her true love Pedro and an American doctor to whom she feels affection but has no passion. Additionally, a group of Mexican revolutionaries, various farm workers, two servants, and her two ghosts who appear intermittently. It’s a lot.
Wheeldon, who directed two Tony Award-winning Broadway musicals (“An American in Paris” and “MJ The Musical”) has longtime collaborators, designer Bob Crowley and composer Joby. I asked Talbot for help. Together they devised a style of storytelling that emphasized fluidity and forward motion.
Production Stage Manager Daniel Ventimiglia said “Like Water” was the most technically challenging work the Ballet Theater has performed on stage. “There are a lot of elements that need to be perfectly combined with the music,” she said. “Backstage choreography is incredibly complex.”
Drops and set pieces come and go in a continual stream, driving action in a dizzying pace and evoking changes in both indoor and outdoor locations. Nearly constant lighting changes suggest close-ups, dissolves, changes in focus, and passage of time.
“There are far more lighting changes in this production than in the other ballets of the season combined,” Ventimiglia said after rehearsals. “During the show, I’m constantly talking and giving directions.”
At the Royal Opera House in London, the theater has computerized equipment and cues could be programmed and executed automatically, but in New York, as in California, everything must be done manually. . About ten stagehands pull ropes to raise and lower the flies.
The ballet is “very cinematic,” Wheeldon said. “Scenes are short, with a very clear storytelling flow from start to finish, with few moments of pure dance. Dramatically, every moment of the piece informs the next.”
The protagonist often develops body language like wordless acting and reaction, somewhere between dancing and simple gestures. “It’s almost like theater without words,” Wheeldon said. Movement evokes conversation, discussion, secret missions, cooking, and at one point, food poisoning.
“It’s not always about what is the most dizzying and original step I can think of,” Wheeldon said. It’s about what the step is to let go,” he said. The most technical choreography is saved for a series of important pas de deux and large celebratory group dances.
In some ways, Talbot’s music resembles film music more than traditional ballet accompaniment. “I think it’s the closest thing to composing for a silent film,” said Talbot, who was working on the actual film score from his home in London. “The music is kind of at the forefront of what’s going on on stage.”
Like Crowley, a designer inspired by Mexican landscapes, textiles and modernist architecture Luis Barragan, Talbot wove Mexican elements into the musical setting of the ballet. He collaborated with Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra (who conducts the ballet’s New York performance) and guitarist and composer Tomás Barreiro, referring to musical forms such as the Mexican developed the sound world of Danson Wapango (Northern folk style for guitar, violin and voice), Teponaztoli (a type of drum), bamboo flute, guitar, and ocarina. Barreiro plays guitar on stage during ballet.
“Alondra and Tomas have helped me understand this wonderful and incredibly rich Mexican musical tradition,” said Talbot.
But the dance vocabulary is exactly Wheeldon’s own. There are big group numbers that suggest the down-to-earth rhythms and rhythms of folk dance, but the steps aren’t drawn from the Mexican folk tradition. (Some may see echoes of his scene in his 2010 New York City ballet “Estancia” or his “Winter’s Tale” folk his dance .)
By avoiding the traditional steps found in Mexican dance, he said, “it gave me more freedom to build my own vocabulary.” Furthermore, “I also wanted to be sensitive and avoid going in the direction of cultural appropriation,” he added.
Like most ballets, Love Story’s arc unfolds through a series of pas de deux, better known as Wheeldon’s art. “Each pas de deux has a very different temperature, reflecting different stages of their relationship,” he said of the lead couple whose forbidden romance is thwarted at every turn. Partnerships became more and more fraught, and intimacy consultants were brought in to make sure everyone was comfortable. (Above ballet theater website, this work is accompanied by parental advice, and children under the age of 13 are advised to exercise discretion. )
Cassandra Trennery, who will be playing Teeta on the first night, said in an interview that she felt freed to express her passion more openly than usual on stage. “I feel like I can be a complete, complex and interesting woman on stage,” she said. “I think this is a step in the right direction for ballet.”
This romance, along with the ballet’s cinematic extension, fits Wheeldon’s desire to attract a new and possibly different audience. “Sometimes people get scared because they don’t know exactly what ballet is,” he said. “But they think it can be a theatrical and dynamic experience, so maybe they can bring in new audiences. Maybe they can experience ballet through a more approachable art of storytelling.”
