Peter Quanz Weblog

A Ballet Underway

This week I had a great surprise: there is a beautiful cover of snow on the ground. To most people this would be more of an annoyance than something to be excited about, but the snow reminds me of home in Canada. I’m in Chemnitz, a German city of 300,000 people near Leipzig and Dresden. The past few weeks have been a little on the heavy side as I’m midway through setting the choreography for my first full evening work, Charlies Kreuzfahrt (Charlie’s Cruise in English). So far I’ve done most of the first Act and parts of Act II. Seeing the snow this week was just enough of a change of scenery to motivate me and find a second wind.

My first personal contact with the company was more than three years ago when I came to see Torsten Händler’s version of The Nutcracker. He had seen my work and offered me a full evening premiere with his company of 23 dancers. This could be a triple bill with three short pieces or a full evening work of my choice. Needless to say, I was slightly stunned at the opportunity before me.

After more than a year of looking for THE idea, I developed an interest in the silent film medium. This lead to a voracious reading of any material related to the 1920’s. I studied art history, sociology, the development of dance in this period and became more excited about the relevance of the 1920’s behaviour to today.

© Sabine Haendler-Garlipp

During my reading I found a legend about film stars in the 1920’s who set out on a weekend cruise that ended in a murder that has been shrouded in mystery ever since. After more research, I wrote a libretto for a ballet using my interpretation of this legend.

Once the libretto was underway and throughout its many versions, I began to look for music that would tell my story. Eventually it became clear that the best option was to have music arranged to suit my needs and it was suggested that I use themes from Cole Porter.

In the summer of 2003 I was in Winnipeg to visit some friends in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and I approached Tadeusz Biernacki, Associate Music Director and Conductor for the company, about a possible collaboration. He was enthusiastic about the idea and for the next two weeks we worked on setting out the structure for the first scene of the ballet as a trial to see how we could cooperate.

Every morning I would present him with the theme that I had chosen for the next section and we would then discuss the length of the section, the meter and the feeling. Tadeusz would improvise at the piano using the theme and slowly we would try and find a musically interesting and suitable structure for my ballet.

It was immediately clear that Tadeusz is an exceptionally gifted musician. His impeccable command of music theory, history and style, his perfect pitch and his years of experience within the ballet combined to make him the ideal collaborator for the new score.

Following these successful first few weeks in Winnipeg, I flew to New York City to meet with the Directors of the Cole Porter Literary Trust in order to gain permission to make a new arrangement suitable for the ballet. The Trust granted permission and since has been extremely supportive when I needed sheet music from a song that was hard to find.

In total we have used twenty three songs from Cole Porter’s extensive oeuvre representing thirty six years of his career. We have included many well known songs such as Anything Goes, Night and Day, So In Love, Love for Sale as well as two songs from one of Mr. Porter’s earliest shows Hitchy-Koo in 1919.

One of these early songs, Bring Me Back My Butterfly, borrows a theme from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and in turn tells the tale of a girl who is torn between her love of two men. In the ballet I have used this music for a pantomime in the 1920’s film style that tells a similar story. However, when seen in the context of the ballet, a performance within the performance, it makes a comment on the love triangle that has formed between the three main characters.

I have tried to select the songs not only for their musical character, but also for the text that some people in the audience will remember as they listen to the melodies. We will not have any singers, but for those people who know Cole Porter’s music, the text in many places will add another layer of meaning to the story on stage. Well, at least that is my hope!

Throughout the past year I had four trips to Winnipeg to plot out the structure of the ballet. We recorded every section (either in mp3 format or on my laptop) as we began to clarify the details. You cannot imagine the thrill the first time that I heard a complete piano recording of my future score. When you work on a ballet like this, you spend a great deal of time, often in very small moments throughout the day, applying various observations from life, art and thoughts to the fictional lives of your characters. You somehow see these people as family and want to know what they would be like as people. Therefore, when I heard the music for the first time these ideas, sometimes glimpses, other times very clearly developed, became overwhelming. I then had to wait six months before starting rehearsals.

While I waited to get into the studio, Tadeusz worked late nights to orchestrate everything and produce the parts. He not only works a full time job for the ballet, but he is Associate Director of both the Manitoba Opera and the Saskatoon Opera, director of several choirs in Winnipeg, a piano teacher and he also has a family. I was told that he took his laptop into the Nutcracker rehearsals and would work while corrections were being given. Apparently, these were very productive working sessions.

At the beginning of December Tadeusz was working at top speed, but he was not yet ready to send the full score. I made up my rehearsal plan with the first rehearsal December 10^th and asked him to send a few sections by email so that we would have the exact music. Every day I would receive a few pages in an email and three weeks later I had the complete first act. Act II arrived in January when Tadeusz sent the entire orchestral score and all the individual parts. I checked the UPS tracking site many times and was frustrated at the length of time that an innocent box of music took to clear customs in Köln. There have since been some adjustments and we are in the process of reworking part of Act II, but I am happily going into the studio everyday and trying to get more of the ballet done. At the moment most of Act I is finished and I am partway into Act II. We start stage rehearsals February 17 and my goal is to have everything finished except the parts which require the set. This will give us three weeks to clean and develop the story further before the premiere.

© Sabine Haendler-Garlipp

One of the more difficult aspects of managing a project of this size is the task of making the daily schedule. In a short ballet it is not difficult to go through everything most days. However, when your work has an hour and a half of dancing, you have to set some parts aside while you go ahead with new material. It is an art to decide how long a Pas de Deux can be left alone without having to become familiar with it again. Mise-en-Scène is forgotten very quickly if neglected. The dancers here have been performing three different ballets, one of them being The Sleeping Beauty, along with five or six musicals and operettas. There have been some weeks where I have only been able to work with the entire company for two and a half hours in the week. Most of the soloists are here only for the ballets and so I have time to get soloist material finished. However, the corps de ballet works very hard, but has a lot of repertoire to remember. Sometimes they perform six nights a week in different productions. They have also started rehearsals for Falco Meets Amadeus, a musical, which premieres six weeks after my ballet. In this production the dancers have to sing and so they must have the appropriate lessons. As I mentioned, the scheduling is complicated, but I do somehow get the time I need.

Some choreographers like to have long days where they can really get through a lot of material. I have found that it is hard for me to make new steps for more than two hours and three hours is my maximum. I am therefore lucky that the company rehearses in the morning and the evening. The afternoon is useful for meetings, going to the gym, preparing the next rehearsal or for sleeping.

We have just under six weeks until the premiere March 12. The second round of costume fittings happens in two days and there are still some shoe traumas to attend to. Eventually the details will work out.

The theatre’s staff has done their best to make me feel at home. A few weekends ago the Head Dramaturge for the theatre took me to the Czech Republic for a mid afternoon tea. Torsten Händler and his wife Sabine Händler-Garlipp have gone out of their way to clear up any language problems, to allow me to talk through ideas and difficulties and they have also shown themselves as very warm people that I will enjoy as friends for years to come. I was very lucky that they gave me this chance, and it has been a real gift that they have held my hand along the way.