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writerproblem193I had the extreme luck to end up seeing the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Jekyll and Hyde with a friend on short notice and as such I am full of thoughts. Many of these thoughts are ???? but I still did enjoy myself. You can see the trailer here which has at least a little of it!
It starts off with a framing device that will return throughout, that of the author Robert Louis Stevenson in bed and ill and basically about thirty seconds from death. At this time, a screen displaying the giant Jekyll and Hyde head logo and text was still down over the stage, making the visuals in the corner of the stage with the bed all muzzy and unclear. Thematically cool but my seat in the nosebleeds meant the logo was covering up part of the bed which made it even more difficult to see what was going on. This led to quite some confusion later.
I think it's an interesting concept and framing device to have the author in with the work, with first Jekyll and later Hyde haunting him and seeming to spring forth from his mind, but it ended up tremendously confusing throughout the first act and a bit of a time sink later. I think the ballet would have been a lot better served just sticking with his introduction in the first act and maybe his death at the very end instead of threading the author throughout, or kicking the author out altogether. The ballet was almost two and a half hours long and at many points it felt the length where I was going... okay but what does this mean? What on earth are they dancing about? Still?
One of the most effective moments though was the way the bed was shrouded in shadow with only a spotlight illuminating it — when Jekyll climbed out from beneath it, or slid under it from the front and then darted away in the darkness to begin working on his lab it very much did feel like the author was haunted by him, or that the character burst forth from his imagination and became "real", or that we were now transforming to storyland. Again however the length played against it, as throughout the entire ballet they would have a very cool and effectual bed slide... and then they'd get right back up and keep dancing. And then do another bed slide and I'd go "okay cool NOW the dance is over... COME ON??? AGAIN????" I think that was one of the biggest flaws is that the ballet felt like it didn't trust itself to stick its own landing and belaboured its point over and over again.
After Jekyll becomes the main focus we get a sort of pre-roll preview — oh look he's mixing beakers and drinking it and the music swells! Which... was also a little confusing because later he makes and drinks his concoction for the "first" time.
This ballet came with a printout — a full sheet of printer paper front and back, with a paragraph for each scene explaining what was happening. You can see it here! Even having read that, without being familiar with the story of Jekyll and Hyde at many, many points I felt hopelessly lost. Given the fact they had such a detailed synopsis you'd think they're expecting people to not know the story very well, which then means that most people will be baffled by this ballet? The whole thing felt like the ballet was biting off far more than it could chew and just often sitting there with its mouth full of meaty text going "oh fuck I'm a ballet I don't have dialogue how am I supposed to express this" and then the dancers would wiggle around for a too-lengthy time trying to convey the vibes.
We then move to the first real scene, set at a Victorian insane asylum. The lengthy notes on the website talk eloquently and "woke"ly about the roll of madness and disability in the story and how it has been reinterpreted so many times over the years. Some of it may be on me, as a grad student familiar with disability studies in that I see the word "madness" in that sort of context and think about mad studies, a sub-discipline of crip studies, itself under the umbrella of radical disability studies. To then enter into the asylum and see the patients as a many-bodied singular mass of "crazy" was a let down. I think with even a tiny bit more space in the choreography for individualism past "and then these random people do step A and these do step B and then we reverse" it would have been a lot better and kinder. Oh well.
The first scene starts off with a nurse all in stark white dancing alone on the stage. The patients, with metal beds, filter in and rearrange the beds and dance on and around them acting "crazy" while the nurse occasionally comes through and quells them with an attitude sweeping kick in their direction, or paces around heel-toe flat footed walking with her arms crossed. At every point I was thinking, "now is when the nurse will go on pointe to demonstrate how she is literally above them, or to add emphasis to her- nope okay she's going back to standing in the corner. Maybe this-" but not once does she. Madam, you are wearing those things strapped to your feet for a reason! After seeing Giselle somewhat recently with how deliberate being on pointe is in so much of it, it was a complete shock to see it not used at all, even in a dancer wearing themed-colour pointe shoes. Especially since all of the asylum patients were barefoot (or wearing flat nude shoes: nosebleeds) it would have been such a good little !!! of emphasis to have the nurse ever go up on pointe. But it was not to be.
At this point Jekyll and a friend of his enter and at this point I begin realizing that this ballet is chewing unsuccessfully on a textbook. The synopsis says "arguing" and that somewhat comes across but mostly its them darting past each other doing spins with big arms. Where is the mime. Ballet has mime. Start with the argument, the pointing, and then escalate to dance. As I said to the friend with me, one of the reasons I like ballet so much is that it is able to express so much. When you can't say something with just your arms, you get to use your legs too, get your whole body into the communication. But when you're starting from a place of "and who are these guys and why are they wiggling around" you're not expressing anything!
Jekyll then selects someone for an experiment, they are locked in a straight jacket and put in a chair, and he pours something down their throat. When let out of the straight jacket after, they collapse. Jekyll looks bummed and off he goes. This is the point at which my greatest confusion began -- in the earliest scene, the author was wearing a loose white shirt just past the crotch and grey leggings. I never got a good look at this. All the asylum patients in this scene were wearing loose white nightgowns that hit the knee. For the entire first act there was this guy in a big white shirt wandering around looking very thoughtful and I was like... is that the ghost of the patient that Jekyll killed haunting him? Is that Hyde? What's going on??? I only upon reviewing the summary at the intermission realized it was the author and was immediately let down because that in my opinion is the most boring choice.
As well, throughout the ballet the dancer playing the author was... I think it was to indicate he was exhausted and dying and ill but it just came across to me as sloppy. Especially compared to the dancers for Jekyll and Hyde who he danced alongside, it looked like they'd accidentally cast a guy a few levels below the skill level and it was too late in rehearsals to fix.
Jekyll then retreats alone to his lab and is bummed out and dances a little about how frustrated he is, then goes and makes and drinks his potion for the first time. This is the point at which I remembered that there was no music composed specifically for this ballet, and it uses music from many different composers. This was a huge failing of the ballet I felt, as at many points the music was repetitive or one note — granted I have hearing issues that can flatten music, but several portions sounded like minutes long chopsticks — the same note repeated with some background, or worse, a lengthy section later in the ballet that just sounded like some sort of hurricane alarm? Not to compare it to my favourite ballet again, but Giselle uses motifs without seeming to just wholesale repeat the music. This ballet... it just needed more work. More time, more money, more specificity to itself and someone willing to say "no that's enough I think we should move onto the next dance now".
The set though was absolutely fantastic. There was a black mirrored wall/curtain that would come down at thematic moments, and a mirrored archway where Jekyll would be seen behind, limned in red light, and later Jekyll and/or Hyde would retreat through that mirrored door into the depths of the mind. Really, really effective stuff!
We move onto one of the better scenes of the ballet, where Jekyll is walking the streets feeling all weird and fucked up and demonstrating his character by giving money to a poor beggar child. The corps in the background walking by with umbrellas will freeze and unfreeze while Jekyll isn't looking at them and form big blobs of open umbrellas as he continues to feel tremendously weird.
Eventually he makes it to the party at which point I almost said aloud "oh thank god the corps are here". I'm a huge, huge fan of the corps and think they can add SO much to the ballet. These may have been soloists, to be fair, but oh my god some really cool partnered dancing and I was like oh finally I am seeing A Ballet again. Mrs. Carew, Katie Bonnell on the night I saw, was an absolute standout. She was wonderfully light on her feet and was lifted wonderfully and came down like it was nothing at all. And acting!
The costumes though... The mens costumes were fantastic. Full suits but they still moved in them so well. Some of the female costumes were good as well, like the nurse, but most of the women were just in... ballet dress dot jpeg or at least that's how they seemed from a distance. Mesh neck or thin straps. Where are the long sleeves? The pizzazz? The unique silhouette? It could have added so much. Alas the soloists cannot last forever. Nellie, Jekyll's fiancee, gives him a cane and some cool dancing. She was also a delightful dancer! Then, off to the bar: prostitutes version.
Again a big woohoo to the corps and to seeing many dancers onstage at once! The choreography absolute shone here because what the dancers were conveying was very simple and straightforward: it's horny time! You can convey difficult concepts with ballet but you have to start from somewhere recognizable. Also, there were a lot of male corps dancers in very skimpy outfits, all flirting with Mr Carew and draped over him and each other the whole time. Queer ballet! They did little pas de deux bits while the heterosexual dance couples did! Completely delightful.
We also see someone in a main character dress be forced out, Rowena, the new girl. Jekyll saves her from the menace of another man and then with the influence of Hyde, begins to menace her himself. This again was another delightful scene, with dance done very well with lots of grasping turns and lifts that really put the emphasis on how much Rowena was controlled by him. I was a little disappointing in Rowena's dancer, however, as she often felt... mushy? If a step ended in an arabesque there was no pause, no flourish, she'd just barely hit it and then move on. A charitable read is that this was direction because the character is uncertain and new but again it just read as sloppiness. Especially compared to the effortless grace of Mrs. Carew in the previous scene it really stood out!
Jekyll realizes he's got the evils coming on and books it home, Rowena following him but not entering after him. There is some more dancing inside, where the summary says "the author unleashes Hyde" but when I was watching, not knowing who this guy was I was just like... is this Hyde? There was a very, very effective switching scene where Hyde comes out in a plain white mask which then gets transferred to Jekyll and he steps behind the mirrored door with the mask held in front of his face. End of act one!
I've already said much of what I want to about general patterns in the ballet but: act 2. Hyde goes out to the regular bar and seduces Nellie. This one rules, with the soloists around also doing some dancing, some very effective acting ie Hyde just shoving other people out of the way, including Nellie's father, to get what he wants. I prefer Hyde's choreography in general, to Jekyll's because it's much more powerful and therefore conveys so much more — there is able to be communication through the dance, through the slow and steady steps, that Hyde is full of power and menace and everyone else is an afterthought in his pursuit of what he wants. We also get the very characterful moment of Hyde running into the same beggar child as Jekyll did earlier and he just beats him to death with his cane. Subtle, Hyde is not, but it's great!
There is then an overly long hallucinatory interlude which is interesting but would have been so much better served with better music and some cutting. It's too long, and what it's trying to convey is muddy at best. A lady in a pure red dress — many appear in the hallucinations dressed entirely in red ie red umbrellas — but since it's in red and all the dresses are fairly uniform ballet dress dot jpeg, especially from the nosebleeds, I'm not... sure who this is? She does a bunch of running back and forth on pointe to which I'm like again, finally on pointe to convey something! The show notes say this is Nellie, the fiance slash person Hyde was seducing. That's thematic and good but again, if your costumes are so simple people are mostly told apart by colour, you can't monochrome red them for impact and expect the audience to realize who you're referring to! The most effective part of this is when Hyde is surrounded by children in red, the accusation of the child he killed. There is only one child in this ballet: that is clearly who is being referred to. Success!
And a picture of Nellie, to illustrate the costume choice:
I can't remember if this happens here or a bit later and the synopsis is unhelpful, but the most effective scene in the entire ballet is when the corps return in their asylum nightgowns, now drenched in red at the bottom. They surround Hyde and dance with him and mimic him, and he mimics them -- he is not so different from them. The formations are odd as well, with a ragged circle and corps members lingering outside the circle so it almost looks like a triangle for a moment. This is how you do disorganization and imperfection in dance — it is so clearly purposeful and looks very interesting!
The hallucination ends and we return to Jekyll who is now sat in his chair reeling. Four of his friends enter and again I'm absolutely begging this ballet to remember that mime exists because they kind of just come on in and start doing little leaps with swinging fifth arms like whoa! something is up! Yes, I say to them, but what is up, who are you, and why are you here? Some of this again is that I am in the nosebleeds and the only distinguishing feature I can see is one teal vest but if you're making a ballet you really do need to communicate what's going on to everyone, not just people who are fortunate enough to afford good tickets.
They eventually give up and leave, other than one who remains to do a final sort of... you good bro? Again I am begging and weeping for mime because the synopsis says that the friend asks to see the transformation/the potion but in practice what happens is Jekyll just kinds of gets up and chugs it and I was like... okay??? At this point we are well into the second act, and obviously have no way to consult the synopsis. If the ballet being understandable rests on every attendant either being intimately familiar with the original novel or memorizing a sheet of paper then the ballet simply will not be understandable to the vast majority of people!
Now raged out, Jekyll kills his friend. This was... not in the synopsis. The synopsis really just is not good enough.
Next at the sexy tavern, Hyde shows up and does his thing again, being threatening and dancing with a lot of grasping and a lot of disregard for other people in the space. This is where the video clip is from, you can see one turn a really interesting thing where Nellie is very often off-balance quite literally. He will be spinning her at arms length and she’s tilting. It's cool: no complaints. Again, Mr Carew has twinks all over him which Hyde seems to dislike. At the end, Carew leaves, Hyde pays for Rowena to come visit him, and follows Carew out the door. He then beats Mr. Carew to death — given Carew is one of the very few people in a spottable costume ie teal vest, and he's had two scenes of being delightedly queer while having other people disapprove, it feels very much like Hyde is killing him for that. This, again, is not mentioned in the synopsis.
We then follow Rowena to Hyde/Jekyll's house where she very reluctantly goes in. She then spots the bloodied cane on his bed and realizes what's about to happen. This again is done well, as other Hyde scenes are, where she dances away from him and runs away in turns and he plays cat and mouse. The maid, who has been seen on and off before, is beating on the door trying to come in and save Rowena, but to no effect. It just baffles me so much of the rest of the ballet has issues with communication while parts like this, which have basically on-stage sexual assault and murder, are so delicately conveyed. We see him loop the scarf around Rowena's neck and then the door turns to conceal them and the music swells and he returns with her body.
Next, Nellie shows up presumably to ask what the ever loving fuck is happening in this ballet, and is also ensnared by Hyde. The same sort of scene plays out as before, but this time Hyde is having more difficulty as Jekyll presumably cares about his fiancee more than he cares about a sex worker. Nellie escapes at the end and the author comes back. He's been here throughout but he's just not an effective part of the ballet so I haven't really remembered much about him other than in the second act seeing him and going "oh right that's the author, at least I know who he is now".
Then we enter the part of the ballet that is the Most. Jekyll enters: stark fucking naked. Well, to be fair, the dancer is wearing flesh coloured like, booty shorts, but my god. Why the fuck was he naked. Hyde then also dramatically strips onstage, including wiggling out of his pants sitting on the floor with his back to the audience. As a friend said, "I don't think that was in the book". It was clearly to illustrate just how intimate this battle of minds is but also... ???????????
Jekyll and Hyde have a dramatic dance off to the repetitive music again with the author tagging along, looking much sloppier than the other mains. Some of the dancing was really cool but so much of it was just... vibes? Okay I'm gonna go wiggle over here. Eventually Jekyll is subsumed and leaves Hyde and the author alone. They spend some more time in the bed, doing bed loop de loops and sitting with their knees entwined for brief moments, face to face. And then the author dies! And it's over!
So much of this is complaints or things that I think they could do differently, but I think that's mostly because during the good parts I just got swept up in the "woohoo, ballet!" of it all. It could use a lot of paring down, a better score, and some cleaning up of the choreography/direction for the author, if not a removal of the author entirely, but it was still a really interesting ballet to see and I'm glad I saw it!
It starts off with a framing device that will return throughout, that of the author Robert Louis Stevenson in bed and ill and basically about thirty seconds from death. At this time, a screen displaying the giant Jekyll and Hyde head logo and text was still down over the stage, making the visuals in the corner of the stage with the bed all muzzy and unclear. Thematically cool but my seat in the nosebleeds meant the logo was covering up part of the bed which made it even more difficult to see what was going on. This led to quite some confusion later.
I think it's an interesting concept and framing device to have the author in with the work, with first Jekyll and later Hyde haunting him and seeming to spring forth from his mind, but it ended up tremendously confusing throughout the first act and a bit of a time sink later. I think the ballet would have been a lot better served just sticking with his introduction in the first act and maybe his death at the very end instead of threading the author throughout, or kicking the author out altogether. The ballet was almost two and a half hours long and at many points it felt the length where I was going... okay but what does this mean? What on earth are they dancing about? Still?
One of the most effective moments though was the way the bed was shrouded in shadow with only a spotlight illuminating it — when Jekyll climbed out from beneath it, or slid under it from the front and then darted away in the darkness to begin working on his lab it very much did feel like the author was haunted by him, or that the character burst forth from his imagination and became "real", or that we were now transforming to storyland. Again however the length played against it, as throughout the entire ballet they would have a very cool and effectual bed slide... and then they'd get right back up and keep dancing. And then do another bed slide and I'd go "okay cool NOW the dance is over... COME ON??? AGAIN????" I think that was one of the biggest flaws is that the ballet felt like it didn't trust itself to stick its own landing and belaboured its point over and over again.
After Jekyll becomes the main focus we get a sort of pre-roll preview — oh look he's mixing beakers and drinking it and the music swells! Which... was also a little confusing because later he makes and drinks his concoction for the "first" time.
This ballet came with a printout — a full sheet of printer paper front and back, with a paragraph for each scene explaining what was happening. You can see it here! Even having read that, without being familiar with the story of Jekyll and Hyde at many, many points I felt hopelessly lost. Given the fact they had such a detailed synopsis you'd think they're expecting people to not know the story very well, which then means that most people will be baffled by this ballet? The whole thing felt like the ballet was biting off far more than it could chew and just often sitting there with its mouth full of meaty text going "oh fuck I'm a ballet I don't have dialogue how am I supposed to express this" and then the dancers would wiggle around for a too-lengthy time trying to convey the vibes.
We then move to the first real scene, set at a Victorian insane asylum. The lengthy notes on the website talk eloquently and "woke"ly about the roll of madness and disability in the story and how it has been reinterpreted so many times over the years. Some of it may be on me, as a grad student familiar with disability studies in that I see the word "madness" in that sort of context and think about mad studies, a sub-discipline of crip studies, itself under the umbrella of radical disability studies. To then enter into the asylum and see the patients as a many-bodied singular mass of "crazy" was a let down. I think with even a tiny bit more space in the choreography for individualism past "and then these random people do step A and these do step B and then we reverse" it would have been a lot better and kinder. Oh well.
The first scene starts off with a nurse all in stark white dancing alone on the stage. The patients, with metal beds, filter in and rearrange the beds and dance on and around them acting "crazy" while the nurse occasionally comes through and quells them with an attitude sweeping kick in their direction, or paces around heel-toe flat footed walking with her arms crossed. At every point I was thinking, "now is when the nurse will go on pointe to demonstrate how she is literally above them, or to add emphasis to her- nope okay she's going back to standing in the corner. Maybe this-" but not once does she. Madam, you are wearing those things strapped to your feet for a reason! After seeing Giselle somewhat recently with how deliberate being on pointe is in so much of it, it was a complete shock to see it not used at all, even in a dancer wearing themed-colour pointe shoes. Especially since all of the asylum patients were barefoot (or wearing flat nude shoes: nosebleeds) it would have been such a good little !!! of emphasis to have the nurse ever go up on pointe. But it was not to be.
At this point Jekyll and a friend of his enter and at this point I begin realizing that this ballet is chewing unsuccessfully on a textbook. The synopsis says "arguing" and that somewhat comes across but mostly its them darting past each other doing spins with big arms. Where is the mime. Ballet has mime. Start with the argument, the pointing, and then escalate to dance. As I said to the friend with me, one of the reasons I like ballet so much is that it is able to express so much. When you can't say something with just your arms, you get to use your legs too, get your whole body into the communication. But when you're starting from a place of "and who are these guys and why are they wiggling around" you're not expressing anything!
Jekyll then selects someone for an experiment, they are locked in a straight jacket and put in a chair, and he pours something down their throat. When let out of the straight jacket after, they collapse. Jekyll looks bummed and off he goes. This is the point at which my greatest confusion began -- in the earliest scene, the author was wearing a loose white shirt just past the crotch and grey leggings. I never got a good look at this. All the asylum patients in this scene were wearing loose white nightgowns that hit the knee. For the entire first act there was this guy in a big white shirt wandering around looking very thoughtful and I was like... is that the ghost of the patient that Jekyll killed haunting him? Is that Hyde? What's going on??? I only upon reviewing the summary at the intermission realized it was the author and was immediately let down because that in my opinion is the most boring choice.
As well, throughout the ballet the dancer playing the author was... I think it was to indicate he was exhausted and dying and ill but it just came across to me as sloppy. Especially compared to the dancers for Jekyll and Hyde who he danced alongside, it looked like they'd accidentally cast a guy a few levels below the skill level and it was too late in rehearsals to fix.
Jekyll then retreats alone to his lab and is bummed out and dances a little about how frustrated he is, then goes and makes and drinks his potion for the first time. This is the point at which I remembered that there was no music composed specifically for this ballet, and it uses music from many different composers. This was a huge failing of the ballet I felt, as at many points the music was repetitive or one note — granted I have hearing issues that can flatten music, but several portions sounded like minutes long chopsticks — the same note repeated with some background, or worse, a lengthy section later in the ballet that just sounded like some sort of hurricane alarm? Not to compare it to my favourite ballet again, but Giselle uses motifs without seeming to just wholesale repeat the music. This ballet... it just needed more work. More time, more money, more specificity to itself and someone willing to say "no that's enough I think we should move onto the next dance now".
The set though was absolutely fantastic. There was a black mirrored wall/curtain that would come down at thematic moments, and a mirrored archway where Jekyll would be seen behind, limned in red light, and later Jekyll and/or Hyde would retreat through that mirrored door into the depths of the mind. Really, really effective stuff!
We move onto one of the better scenes of the ballet, where Jekyll is walking the streets feeling all weird and fucked up and demonstrating his character by giving money to a poor beggar child. The corps in the background walking by with umbrellas will freeze and unfreeze while Jekyll isn't looking at them and form big blobs of open umbrellas as he continues to feel tremendously weird.
Eventually he makes it to the party at which point I almost said aloud "oh thank god the corps are here". I'm a huge, huge fan of the corps and think they can add SO much to the ballet. These may have been soloists, to be fair, but oh my god some really cool partnered dancing and I was like oh finally I am seeing A Ballet again. Mrs. Carew, Katie Bonnell on the night I saw, was an absolute standout. She was wonderfully light on her feet and was lifted wonderfully and came down like it was nothing at all. And acting!
The costumes though... The mens costumes were fantastic. Full suits but they still moved in them so well. Some of the female costumes were good as well, like the nurse, but most of the women were just in... ballet dress dot jpeg or at least that's how they seemed from a distance. Mesh neck or thin straps. Where are the long sleeves? The pizzazz? The unique silhouette? It could have added so much. Alas the soloists cannot last forever. Nellie, Jekyll's fiancee, gives him a cane and some cool dancing. She was also a delightful dancer! Then, off to the bar: prostitutes version.
Again a big woohoo to the corps and to seeing many dancers onstage at once! The choreography absolute shone here because what the dancers were conveying was very simple and straightforward: it's horny time! You can convey difficult concepts with ballet but you have to start from somewhere recognizable. Also, there were a lot of male corps dancers in very skimpy outfits, all flirting with Mr Carew and draped over him and each other the whole time. Queer ballet! They did little pas de deux bits while the heterosexual dance couples did! Completely delightful.
We also see someone in a main character dress be forced out, Rowena, the new girl. Jekyll saves her from the menace of another man and then with the influence of Hyde, begins to menace her himself. This again was another delightful scene, with dance done very well with lots of grasping turns and lifts that really put the emphasis on how much Rowena was controlled by him. I was a little disappointing in Rowena's dancer, however, as she often felt... mushy? If a step ended in an arabesque there was no pause, no flourish, she'd just barely hit it and then move on. A charitable read is that this was direction because the character is uncertain and new but again it just read as sloppiness. Especially compared to the effortless grace of Mrs. Carew in the previous scene it really stood out!
Jekyll realizes he's got the evils coming on and books it home, Rowena following him but not entering after him. There is some more dancing inside, where the summary says "the author unleashes Hyde" but when I was watching, not knowing who this guy was I was just like... is this Hyde? There was a very, very effective switching scene where Hyde comes out in a plain white mask which then gets transferred to Jekyll and he steps behind the mirrored door with the mask held in front of his face. End of act one!
I've already said much of what I want to about general patterns in the ballet but: act 2. Hyde goes out to the regular bar and seduces Nellie. This one rules, with the soloists around also doing some dancing, some very effective acting ie Hyde just shoving other people out of the way, including Nellie's father, to get what he wants. I prefer Hyde's choreography in general, to Jekyll's because it's much more powerful and therefore conveys so much more — there is able to be communication through the dance, through the slow and steady steps, that Hyde is full of power and menace and everyone else is an afterthought in his pursuit of what he wants. We also get the very characterful moment of Hyde running into the same beggar child as Jekyll did earlier and he just beats him to death with his cane. Subtle, Hyde is not, but it's great!
There is then an overly long hallucinatory interlude which is interesting but would have been so much better served with better music and some cutting. It's too long, and what it's trying to convey is muddy at best. A lady in a pure red dress — many appear in the hallucinations dressed entirely in red ie red umbrellas — but since it's in red and all the dresses are fairly uniform ballet dress dot jpeg, especially from the nosebleeds, I'm not... sure who this is? She does a bunch of running back and forth on pointe to which I'm like again, finally on pointe to convey something! The show notes say this is Nellie, the fiance slash person Hyde was seducing. That's thematic and good but again, if your costumes are so simple people are mostly told apart by colour, you can't monochrome red them for impact and expect the audience to realize who you're referring to! The most effective part of this is when Hyde is surrounded by children in red, the accusation of the child he killed. There is only one child in this ballet: that is clearly who is being referred to. Success!
And a picture of Nellie, to illustrate the costume choice:
I can't remember if this happens here or a bit later and the synopsis is unhelpful, but the most effective scene in the entire ballet is when the corps return in their asylum nightgowns, now drenched in red at the bottom. They surround Hyde and dance with him and mimic him, and he mimics them -- he is not so different from them. The formations are odd as well, with a ragged circle and corps members lingering outside the circle so it almost looks like a triangle for a moment. This is how you do disorganization and imperfection in dance — it is so clearly purposeful and looks very interesting!
The hallucination ends and we return to Jekyll who is now sat in his chair reeling. Four of his friends enter and again I'm absolutely begging this ballet to remember that mime exists because they kind of just come on in and start doing little leaps with swinging fifth arms like whoa! something is up! Yes, I say to them, but what is up, who are you, and why are you here? Some of this again is that I am in the nosebleeds and the only distinguishing feature I can see is one teal vest but if you're making a ballet you really do need to communicate what's going on to everyone, not just people who are fortunate enough to afford good tickets.
They eventually give up and leave, other than one who remains to do a final sort of... you good bro? Again I am begging and weeping for mime because the synopsis says that the friend asks to see the transformation/the potion but in practice what happens is Jekyll just kinds of gets up and chugs it and I was like... okay??? At this point we are well into the second act, and obviously have no way to consult the synopsis. If the ballet being understandable rests on every attendant either being intimately familiar with the original novel or memorizing a sheet of paper then the ballet simply will not be understandable to the vast majority of people!
Now raged out, Jekyll kills his friend. This was... not in the synopsis. The synopsis really just is not good enough.
Next at the sexy tavern, Hyde shows up and does his thing again, being threatening and dancing with a lot of grasping and a lot of disregard for other people in the space. This is where the video clip is from, you can see one turn a really interesting thing where Nellie is very often off-balance quite literally. He will be spinning her at arms length and she’s tilting. It's cool: no complaints. Again, Mr Carew has twinks all over him which Hyde seems to dislike. At the end, Carew leaves, Hyde pays for Rowena to come visit him, and follows Carew out the door. He then beats Mr. Carew to death — given Carew is one of the very few people in a spottable costume ie teal vest, and he's had two scenes of being delightedly queer while having other people disapprove, it feels very much like Hyde is killing him for that. This, again, is not mentioned in the synopsis.
We then follow Rowena to Hyde/Jekyll's house where she very reluctantly goes in. She then spots the bloodied cane on his bed and realizes what's about to happen. This again is done well, as other Hyde scenes are, where she dances away from him and runs away in turns and he plays cat and mouse. The maid, who has been seen on and off before, is beating on the door trying to come in and save Rowena, but to no effect. It just baffles me so much of the rest of the ballet has issues with communication while parts like this, which have basically on-stage sexual assault and murder, are so delicately conveyed. We see him loop the scarf around Rowena's neck and then the door turns to conceal them and the music swells and he returns with her body.
Next, Nellie shows up presumably to ask what the ever loving fuck is happening in this ballet, and is also ensnared by Hyde. The same sort of scene plays out as before, but this time Hyde is having more difficulty as Jekyll presumably cares about his fiancee more than he cares about a sex worker. Nellie escapes at the end and the author comes back. He's been here throughout but he's just not an effective part of the ballet so I haven't really remembered much about him other than in the second act seeing him and going "oh right that's the author, at least I know who he is now".
Then we enter the part of the ballet that is the Most. Jekyll enters: stark fucking naked. Well, to be fair, the dancer is wearing flesh coloured like, booty shorts, but my god. Why the fuck was he naked. Hyde then also dramatically strips onstage, including wiggling out of his pants sitting on the floor with his back to the audience. As a friend said, "I don't think that was in the book". It was clearly to illustrate just how intimate this battle of minds is but also... ???????????
Jekyll and Hyde have a dramatic dance off to the repetitive music again with the author tagging along, looking much sloppier than the other mains. Some of the dancing was really cool but so much of it was just... vibes? Okay I'm gonna go wiggle over here. Eventually Jekyll is subsumed and leaves Hyde and the author alone. They spend some more time in the bed, doing bed loop de loops and sitting with their knees entwined for brief moments, face to face. And then the author dies! And it's over!
So much of this is complaints or things that I think they could do differently, but I think that's mostly because during the good parts I just got swept up in the "woohoo, ballet!" of it all. It could use a lot of paring down, a better score, and some cleaning up of the choreography/direction for the author, if not a removal of the author entirely, but it was still a really interesting ballet to see and I'm glad I saw it!
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Date: 9 Apr 2025 19:02 (UTC)I'm intrigued by the decision to have Jekyll and Hyde played by two different dancers in the first place! Obviously it permits certain dramatic and choreographic possibilities, but I can imagine an Odette/Odile thing as well…
2.5 hours is a very long time for anyone to be wriggling about, as you so wonderfully put it. These exceptionally long new story ballets always seem like such a workout for the company, for good or ill.