Theatre as ballet or ballet as theatre? Is it possible to transform Tennessee Williams’s literary masterpiece into a piece of performance art, a ballet no less, without losing the grit and emotional intensity of A Streetcar Named Desire? The answer is “Yes.”
The Auckland Arts Festival has brought the Scottish Ballet’s contemporary narrative dance to the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre for five mind-blowing performances – and tickets are still available for four of them. You don’t have to be a dance aficionado to appreciate this re-interpretation of Williams’s classic.
Of course, the first question that came to mind when I first heard of this production was; ‘how on earth are they going to tell the story, when Blanche’s history before moving to New Orleans is never shown, just revealed in fragments of dialog and mutterings?’ Director Nancy Meckler and Choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa brushed this issue aside by crafting what is essentially an extended prologue, bringing those fragments to life.
I admit to being in a muddle at the outset, because we are greeted by the young Blanche at Belle Reve, danced so eloquently by Roseanna Leney. The southern belle falls in love and marries the fragile Alan (Javier Andreu), who has a male lover (Thomas Edwards). When she discovers them together, she spurns Alan and he kills himself. Wracked by despair and guilt, Blanche loses the family homestead and turns to booze and promiscuity, which gets her run out of town.
As someone who’s pored over the text to grasp the fullness of Williams’s telling, I was delighted by this ballet’s illustration of Blanche’s past. And in terms of the ballet’s structure, it had to precede the writer’s beginning to separate her memories from her descent into madness.
At this point we are immersed in Williams’s original story. Roseanna Leney transforms from the light-hearted belle, bringing a heaviness, a weariness, a sense of fragile desperation to her performance. Her acting skills are every bit on par with her dance form.
She’s come to New Orleans to stay with her vivacious younger sister Stella (Jessica Fyfe) and her brutish husband, Stanley Kowalski (Evan Loudon). Their passion is driven by lust which Leney and Loudon embody in several intimate pas de deux.
Stanley is equally passionate in his loathing of Blanche; and this is the one area the ballet’s script struggles, confirmed by my companion who asked what was in the papers in Blanche’s suitcase and later, in the letter. If you are not familiar with the play or movie, you may wonder why he hates her THAT much. It may seem she is merely annoying and pretentious; and while his eventual behaviour is unjustifiable regardless of what she has done, knowing the content of these things is relevant.
Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s choreography is brilliant throughout, but I was mesmerised in the second act, as Blanche progressively loses herself in memories and madness. Ochoa brings her demons and ghosts to life, putting the large company of dancers to work around her.
The entire company are so accomplished the performance seemed effortless, from drunken scenes where Blanche is passed around a group of rowdy men, brutal sexual violence and a raucous dance party in the bowling alley. Stanley’s raw physicality and strength seemed almost alien.
Dance must have music and we were treated to a live orchestra filling the theatre with a vibrant score peppered with New Orleans jazz, bluesy piano, strings and waltzes, performed by the Auckland Philharmonia.
This production is also a visual delight, a spare set deploying numerous black boxes continuously rearranged by the dancers into beds, and chairs, and stairs, and of course… that eponymous streetcar.
The Auckland Arts Festival is renowned for bringing us some of the most innovative and unexpected performances and the Scottish Ballet’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire is no exception. It not only reimagines a literary masterwork into an (almost) wordless dance narrative. (I leave it to your imagination to guess the word!) It illuminates Tennessee Williams’s play and in some ways, exposes its depths in ways a traditional production couldn’t.
This is one to ponder, talk about and revel in!
Veronica McLaughlin
A Streetcar Named Desire
Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre
March 20-23
Tickets are available HERE.
Red Raven photographer Leonie Moreland brought her camera to a media preview and captured this gallery of incredible shots of the performance.
