Brewing Up a Ballet
Festival Ballet Makes Magic with The Widow's Broom
Providence Journal issue on Sunday, October 10, 2004
by Bryan Rourke, Journal Staff Writer

Providence, RI - The chair, the table -- everything's too small for Mihailo Djuric. He's Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians.

Okay, he's a grown-up in the children's section of Providence Public Library.

Shhh!

He's reading. It's 2001.

The third-year artistic director of Festival Ballet Providence has a book in his hands and an idea in his mind. He calls it "Dance Me a Story."

It's self-explanatory.

Djuric holds The Widow's Broom. It's written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg, who Djuric doesn't know lives in Providence.

Interesting tale, Djuric thinks. A witch abandons a broom. A woman takes it in. Each helps the other. It's touching and spooky, and a little bit magical.

Perhaps, Djuric thinks, it's perfect for a pre-Halloween production.

Then Djuric thinks again. His dance company is small. So is its budget.

Get real. Creating an original full-length ballet requires a colossal collaboration of artists: writer, choreographer, composer, set designer and costume designer. Even national companies rarely undertake such things.

"They do things that are already proven," Djuric says. "They do things they know will work."

So Djuric sets the idea aside. It's too ambitious. But, he tells himself, he'll get to it someday.

Now, that day approaches. The world premiere of The Widow's Broom ballet is Oct. 22-24 at Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

"This is a little bit risky," Djuric says. "It's beautiful. It's fascinating. It's frightening."

Djuric isn't talking about the plot. He's talking about the artistic and financial gamble. And he's talking about the process of collaboration.

"It might kill us," Djuric says. "But that's the risk we're taking."

Like the making of sausages, artistic collaboration is not something people often see -- or want to.

That's your warning. Only those who can withstand the sight of gory artistic compromise, the essence of collaboration, should read on.

What follows is the multi-parent birth of a ballet.

Give and take

At the moment, Viktor Plotnikov looks as if he's in labor. He's the choreographer, the same one who created Festival Ballet's modernist version of Carmen last year.

He's standing in Festival Ballet's studio, rehearsing his dancers. They're moving to the music.

Suddenly, it stops. There's silence, except for Plotnikov's groan.

"Oh, my God," he says. "I need to do this and this and this."

He has all these ideas: This dancer would turn this way, that dancer would leap that way, and so on and so on. Now all his ideas are dashed, or at least delayed.

"I was so desperate," Plotnikov says. "I called Aleksandra right away. 'Please, I need another 40 seconds of music.' "

Aleksandra Vrebalov is an accomplished Serbian composer. She lives in New York. But now she temporarily resides in Tennessee on an opera fellowship. She answers her phone.

Vrebalov isn't surprised. It's not as though Plotnikov is calling her out of the blue, making a random musical request from a stranger. You want what? Wait a minute. Who are you? Vrebalov has spoken with Plotnikov many times before.

"Once," she says, "he asked me for seven more seconds of music."

From a field of 10 composers, Plotnikov picked Vrebalov several months ago to create all the music for this two-act ballet. Since then, the two meet periodically in New York and in Providence. And when they do, they exchange adjectives: peaceful, playful, suspenseful.

Before the lengthy piece of music is made, its various moods must be established.

"She would have my vision," Plotnikov says. "But at the same time, she would write what she feels."

That's where their collaboration begins.

"We try to help the story by the way we choose sounds and emotions," Vrebalov says. "In a ballet, there are no words."

Orchestral calculations

Different instruments and sound qualities are chosen for different scenes and characters. For budgeting reasons, Vrebalov is limited to an orchestra of 11 instruments and one conductor.

(Yes, after last year's cost-cutting season without an orchestra, Festival Ballet is bringing back live music.)

Vrebalov chooses an array of instruments, a few from each major group: strings, brass, percussion and woodwinds.

"I have a variety of color," she says. "That's important for a theater piece that has a story."

The broom, Vrebalov decides, should be warm but powerful, represented by the notes of a bass clarinet and cello. The young boy should be innocent and vulnerable, suggested by the softness of a flute.

"It's a basic negotiation," Vrebalov says. "Viktor and I start at two different places and meet at a place in between."

They measure the music in minutes, and seconds. And sometimes, as Plotnikov discovers, the calculations are off.

"I told her I need 40 more seconds," Plotnikov says. "I need it to start very faint and rise up."

Collaboration kicks in. One artist asks another to make a modification.

You imagine offense is taken. Someone wants to tamper with my art?

But your imagination has gotten the best of you.

"This requires a different approach," Vrebalov says. "It's not as hermetic as concert music, which is all up to me. I have to accept steps are happening on stage. If a choreographer says he needs more steps, I'll make the most natural expansion of the music."

First comes the music, then comes the movement.

"I cannot create the movement and try to put it to music," Plotnikov says. "The music, for me, is the moving power."

But the almighty power is the story. That's where the collaboration commences -- with a concept.

Fleshing out the story

Here, it's called The Widow's Broom. It's an illustrated children's story by Van Allsburg, the celebrated author of Jumanji and The Polar Express, both of which received Caldecott Medals and became major motion pictures.

Now, for the first time, one of Van Allsburg's books is being turned into a ballet.

"When I write a children's story, I hope something great happens," Van Allsburg says. "But I'm not wondering if it can become something else."

In order for a book to become a ballet, changes must be made.

"This is a dance," Van Allsburg says. "People want to see dancing. You need people on stage."

There is no dancing in the book. And furthermore, there are only a few characters.

"My contribution was to expand the story to allow more dancing," Van Allsburg says.

A village is only mentioned in the book. In the ballet, actual villagers appear. And, of course, they dance.

Instead of there being one witch, as there is in the beginning of the book, in the ballet there's a coven of them.

Also, in the book, there's just a widow. In the ballet, she has a son.

"You make additions and changes," Van Allsburg says. "But you make them in a way that reaffirms the theme and tonality of the original."

Van Allsburg has already adapted The Widow's Broom once. It's under option to become a movie produced by Paramount Pictures.

"In that, the woman has a son, a daughter and a grandmother," he says. "More people are necessary for the requirements of a 90-minute feature film."

The same goes for ballet.

However, The Widow's Broom would appear to lack one essential ingredient to become a ballet: a romance. There's no fair maiden, no dashing man, no apparent love story.

Well, it's not the type of love story you often see.

"It's kind of a love story between the widow and the broom," Djuric says.

Costume challenges

It's a nice idea, but one far more easily executed in a book than a ballet. When's the last time you saw a broom dance?

"It's going to be a challenge," Djuric says. "All of us like challenges."

Meeting that particular challenge is Plotnikov's job.

"The broom is alive," he says. "It also has a soul. We have to be able to see that. It understands what is right and wrong. It has feelings."

So the face of the person dancing the broom must be exposed. And the dancer's movements can't be completely stiff, in keeping with the book's portrayal of the broom.

But in the book, the broom is a drawing, not a costumed dancer.

Wardrobe!

Here comes Ka Yan Kan. She is a 2002 URI graduate, and Festival Ballet's new wardrobe supervisor, the costume designer for this production.

Her challenge is turning a human being into a broom.

"It's obviously somebody dancing," Kan says. "You don't want to cover the person with a thick costume. Just keep it simple. That's the whole design concept, simple and easy to understand."

A straw-colored costume is in order for the broom. At the dancer's knees, Kan says, light-colored Lycra will hang like the bristles of a broom.

The other characters, she says, are easy. A witch is a witch; the peasants will look like peasants.

"They make their living from the earth," Kan says. "They're farmers and don't have the luxury of dyes and expensive materials. The story also takes place in the fall, so they wear fall colors."

They won't wear pointe shoes. That's not a very peasant thing to do. And their movements, Plotnikov says, will not be excessively elegant, since peasants aren't known for extended toes and fingers.

"This is going to be even more modern than Carmen," he says. "It will represent something a little earthy."

Setting the stage

All the production needs now is a set. Eugene Lee, Trinity Rep's resident set designer since 1967 and a three-time Tony Award winner from Providence, is taking care of that.

He got involved in this production the same way Van Allsburg did. At some social function years ago, Djuric asked him if he'd someday be willing to work for Festival Ballet.

"I said I'd be happy to do something for them sometime," Lee says. "When you say that, eventually they ask you."

Lee is in his studio. He's working, which looks a lot like playing. He's arranging tiny chairs and tables inside a doll house-like box, the model of The Widow's Broom set.

"This is great," Lee says. "I'm like a little kid. I never grew up."

The set design, Lee says, is simple, as it should be. This isn't theater; it's dance. Performers need room to move.

A sky and trees will suggest outdoors, a chair and table indoors.

"It's a dance piece," Lee says. "If you design a chair, they'll probably dance on it. If you have a table, they're bound to be dancing on that."

Lee meets with Plotnikov a few times to hear about what he wants his dancers to do on stage, and to hear what he can do to help.

This is not a clash of artistic visions. Decades of designing for the TV show Saturday Night Live have taught Lee that.

"They may say, 'The color of the set isn't funny,' " Lee says. "Fine, what color would you like? Would you like a llama for that next sketch? If it's available, it's yours."

No need for a llama

Lee and Plotnikov agree, without speaking on the subject, that there's no need for a llama here. Furthermore, though witches may fly, there's no need for flight in this show.

"Nothing is better than dance," Lee says. "You don't need wires in a ballet to fly people. Who's kidding who? You're on a wire."

Instead of characters rising up, the ground will fall away, or so it will seem.

Lee shows his "version of a little hill." He holds it in the palm of his hand. It looks like rows of toothpicks glued to paper. But on stage, Lee says, it will be a large painted screen that will collapse to the floor, leaving the characters before a backdrop of the sky.

Another idea is to use lanterns to frame the stage opening, for decoration and deception. At one point in the performance, a person dressed in black manipulates a white broom.

"The lights are really there to close the iris in your eyes a little bit," he says. "It's an old-fashioned magic trick."

The show's curtain will feature a Van Allsburg drawing of a broom holding an ax.

"You don't know if it's a nice broom or a mean broom," Lee says. "It might be cutting wood. It might be cutting up kids."

While Lee is in charge of the set design, he readily accepts good suggestions from others. For instance, Plotnikov says he wants dancers passing through a pumpkin patch, and wants their walk to seem far longer than the stage. So he suggests that instead of the dancers moving, the set would, by putting pumpkins on fabric that's pulled across the stage.

Lee likes the idea, and incorporates it.

"We're collaborators," Lee says. "It's the best way."

Festival Ballet Providence dances The Widow's Broom Oct. 22-24 at Veterans Memorial Auditorium, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Providence. Shows are 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday.

For tickets, $16 to $51, call (800) 919-6272 or (401) 353-1129, or go online at www.tickets.com .