Scheherazade & Con Amore: Two sides of love at Vets
By Bryan Rourke
Journal Staff Writer
The Providence Journal
Thursday, February 10, 2005

Look at love. Yes, it's romantic, but also comic and tragic -- and taking the stage at Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

This weekend, Festival Ballet Providence presents its annual ode to Valentine's Day. This year, the program is Scheherazade & Con Amore, a twin bill of one-act works. One elicits laughter, the other tears.

"It's a good match ..." says Mihailo Djuric, Festival's artistic director. "They're opposites in a good sense." Together, Djuric says, the productions portray a more complete picture of the complexity of love. And now, he says, is finally the right time to present that.

"I had been planning this for years," Djuric says. "But every season was not the right season." Djuric's plan began with Con Amore. The 1953 ballet, considered a comic masterpiece, was created by the late Lew Christensen of the San Francisco Ballet. It's a farce about infidelity, which turns into amorous serendipity. "It's light and short," Djuric says.

To complement the piece, Djuric sought something heavier and longer. He chose Scheherazade, which he calls "dramatic and powerful." The ballet is based on an ancient Persian tale. A woman marries a king who has a custom of killing all his wives a day after marriage. That way, the king reasons, they won't cheat on him. His latest bride saves herself by telling interesting stories, enthralling the king, keeping him from killing her. Djuric likes the ballet, which is being adapted from the 1910 Ballet Russes version. All he needed was a choreographer. "I just thought, Gianni Di Marco," Djuric says. "It's him."

Festival has previously used Di Marco's choreography. In 2003, for its "Up Close, On Hope" dance series, Festival performed Di Marco's Killing Time, a fun and funny work involving two male dancers who hopped around like rabbits. Djuric recalls other Di Marco choreography, which he calls "strange, almost weird." Djuric likes that. "You cannot do things the same way every time," he says. "It gets boring. It should always be fresh."

Timing and miming
Di Marco, 41, is the oldest member of the Boston Ballet. This is his first time choreographing a story ballet, which happens to have a celebrated history. And he's going to tamper with it. "I'm rearranging how I see the story," Di Marco says. "You have to think like this, to innovate and make audiences more involved." What was interesting and provocative in 1910, Di Marco says, isn't necessarily so now. For instance, he says, nine minutes of music with no dancing doesn't do much for him. That's the work's original prologue, and that's where Di Marco begins to make his mark.

Bring on the dancers, and the enlightenment. Di Marco wants his audiences to understand Scheherazade before it's supposed to begin. He wants to show them who loves whom, and why. "At the end, there is this drama of people killing each other," he says. "In the traditional version, it is not explained." Di Marco offers an early explanation. In his version, while the prologue music plays, out come some characters: a slave woman, Zobeide, along with a few other slaves, one of whom, a man known as Golden Slave is beaten. "She pities him and comforts him," Di Marco says. "In the process, she falls in love with him." In the original ballet, audiences see Zobeide and Golden Slave in love, without offering substantiation for their mutual infatuation.

Another change Di Marco has made is removing all the miming from the production. In the original, the king, Sultan Shahriar and his brother Shah Zeman don't dance. They mime, excessively, like silent movie actors. Call him crazy, but Di Marco thought a dance production should involve dancing. "I wanted everyone to be dancing and projecting mood through movement," he says.

Di Marco, who now lives in Boston, has lived in Venezuela, Italy, Germany and Canada, among other places. He has learned many languages. He has danced in many cultures. Never has he resorted to mime. "Dance is an international language that has no boundaries," he says. "Physicality is something that speaks to all minds. There's never a doubt people understand. Dance can touch people without having to say one word." The style of dance that Di Marco favors is energetic. "It doesn't stop. It's always moving, like chaos. It's one thing after the next."

Stronger roles
Other modifications Di Marco has made to Scheherazade include making the role of the sultan's brother stronger than in the original, and giving prominence to the previously emasculated role of the eunuch. "He's kind of like the butler of the kingdom," he says. "That's how I see him. In my version, he is a jester and a storyteller."
The reason for all the changes, Di Marco says, is that since 1910, "dance has evolved. I'm working in a more contemporary era."

Scheherazade will follow Con Amore. In January, for 10 days, Virginia Johnson, who danced for and worked with Christensen for 40 years at San Francisco Ballet, came to Providence to instruct Festival's dancers on performing Con Amore. "Everywhere else she has staged it, the results were beautiful," Djuric says. "I wanted to get the person who knows the ballet inside out."

Festival Ballet Providence's Scheherazade & Con Amore is tomorrow and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m., in Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Avenue of the Arts, Providence. For tickets, $11 to $51, call (800) 919-6272, (401) 272-4862, (401) 353-1129, or visit www.festivalballet.com.