RWB pivots on pointe

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This article was published 22/02/2022 (1650 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in February, and ballet dancers are gracefully twirling across the stage at the Centennial Concert Hall.

The stage is opulent, a kingdom of pillars and vines cutting a striking figure against a brilliant turquoise sky. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet company members are in their ornate, storybook costumes, performing sections of Marius Petipa’s classic The Sleeping Beauty. The music — Tchaikovsky — suddenly stops. “Wait, wait, wait,” the disembodied voice of associate artistic director Tara Birtwhistle rings out. “That timing was off.”

This is not an ordinary matinee performance. In fact, the only people in the audience are members of a film crew. This is the technical rehearsal for the filming of the digital production of The Sleeping Beauty, which will be available at rwb.org beginning Friday until March 13. Tickets go on sale Friday at noon.

A digital Sleeping Beauty represents another pandemic-era pivot for the RWB, which opened its 2021/22 season in October with live performances of the mixed program Perpetual Motion, followed by the return of Nutcracker, which had its holiday run cut short by the arrival of the Omicron variant in Winnipeg. Out of an abundance of caution, the RWB decided to mount its third show of the season virtually.

“For me, it still feels like we’re about to do a show,” says soloist Elizabeth Lamont during a break. She’s perched on a bench in the empty lobby, still dressed as the Lilac Fairy in her pale purple tutu. “It’s weird being back here at the Centennial Concert Hall and not knowing when your audience is going to come in. I’m like, ‘Where are they, they’re late for the show.’”

Lamont misses performing live. She craves the immediacy, the connection. Still, “I feel like we’ve made the best of this terrible situation. We’re still here, we’re still performing the ballet — and this ballet brings a lot of joy to people.”

Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty is a century-old ballet based on a beloved fairy tale even older than that. It tells the story of Princess Aurora, who is cursed as an infant by the wicked fairy Carabosse — perhaps more recognizable as Maleficent to those raised on the Disney version — sentencing her to prick her finger on a spindle and die on her 16th birthday. But thanks to the quick intervention of the good Lilac Fairy, the curse is softened, and Princess Aurora will fall into an enchanted sleep for 100 years, only to be woken by true love’s kiss.

Second soloist Stephan Azulay is performing — in drag — the role of Carabosse, which is more of a character part than a strictly dance part. To that end, the camera offers some advantages. “They’re able to get some really close-up shots, which, for the audience members, is a new perspective,” he says. “For someone that likes being able to see the whole thing from the real orchestra and you’re not used to being that close, you kind of get both. It’s quite cool. And I’ve been watching the cameras already. The close-ups are just awesome.”

Immortalizing a medium meant to be experienced live is its own artistic undertaking. For this production, the RWB teamed up with Winnipeg video and post-production company Frank Digital, with whom they’ve worked previously, on last year’s Visions of Swan Lake.

Being able to get up close and personal to the ballet gave Chris McIvor, president and executive producer at Frank Digital, a new appreciation for the artform. “When you watch the ballet, you’re always 30 rows back or whatever,” he says. “You don’t actually realize how physically demanding it is until you’re that close and you see this little muscle bulging out, it’s like, ‘holy.’ Or standing on your tippy toes for three minutes. It’s like, ‘Wow, how are you doing this?’”

Meanwhile, the camera operators have their own choreography to master.

“I have to say, it was kind of a ballet co-ordinating all five of the cameras,” Libby Lea, vice-president of production at Frank Digital, says of their set-up, which included a seven-metre jib for wide shots, a dolly for storytelling shots, a couple of close-up cameras, and a just-in-case cam. “And they did a tremendous job.”

Now, you might think that capturing a football player making a game-saving play might be a world away from doing the same for a ballet dancer executing a perfect arabesque, but it’s not, not really.

“A lot of these guys have experience shooting with the Jets or the Bombers. Our jib operator, that’s what he does: curling and hockey and football,” Lea says. “So they kept referring to the dancers as players onstage — ‘OK, this is the one where they have 27 players and there’s all this action’ sort of sport analogy, which was hilarious, but it’s true. It’s a game. And their camerawork was stunningly beautiful. I think, overall, the ballet was just seen through the camera moves as well, which was really fun to watch. I have a lot of behind-the-scenes (footage) of the guys shooting and watching them, not quite doing pirouettes or pliés but, you know, pretty close.”

Reconciling how the ballet appears on stage and how it will appear on screen is a big part of the process. Lea sat beside Birtwhistle to call shots, and Birtwhistle was offering corrections based on what she saw on film. Caroline Gruber, artistic faculty, was on stage offering corrections based on what she saw on stage, while artistic director André Lewis oversaw it all.

“It was intense watching the little corrections and realizing sometimes that we can’t correct every little thing,” Lea says. “(The dancers) hate being on film because it’s immortalized and they’re not used to it. When you’re actually performing live, you can forget about, you know, the missed step. But when it’s on camera, it’s just like, ‘argh.’ We would never notice. They do.”

And unlike a traditional film shoot, there is not a ton of opportunity to do multiple takes owing to both the tight schedule — The Sleeping Beauty was filmed in an eight-hour day — and the nature of ballet itself.

“Tara told us that, basically, they’re trained to do it once, perfectly,” Lea says. “So, she said, you can get two out of them because they have that stamina, but anything more than that, and that’s probably not going to happen just because of the amount of energy.”

Editing the ballet, which runs just shy of two and a half hours, will take about a week, all in. The FRANK team worked closely with the RWB’s lighting designer, Marc Gagnon, to get the lighting just right for film, which looks darker in person. Other details, such as placing microphones on the stage to capture the dancer’s footfalls, will help make the production come alive in people’s living rooms.

For the dancers, a digital production of The Sleeping Beauty is still a chance to offer audiences something beautiful they can’t see anywhere else.

“There’s only so many shows on Netflix,” Azulay says with a laugh.

“We’re not on Netflix,” Lamont chimes in.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @JenZoratti