Bruce Monk

Royal Winnipeg Ballet

J.M. Barrie’s classic tale about the boy who refuses to grow up will soon be dancing its way into Calgary.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet premièred its original production of Peter Pan back in 2006. It tells the story of Peter, who invites Wendy and her brothers to fly with him to Neverland. There, Wendy mothers Peter’s gang of Lost Boys, while Peter gets into a showdown with his enemy, Captain Hook.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet wanted to create a production that would provide an alternative to the usual Nutcracker fare at Christmas time, as well as a family show they could tour. Calgary is the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s first stop on its journey throughout Western Canada (and Ottawa) between now and early 2009.

Creating a ballet from scratch is no easy task. “It took me two years of preparation to come up with a storyboard and create a script from that. It takes hours and hours and days and months of listening to literally thousands of pieces of music to find that one piece that works, that fits that one scene,” says Jorden Morris, who choreographed and directs Peter Pan.

The result? A sparkling score made up of about 26 selections of music from British composers including Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Benjamin Britten, Eric Coates, Ron Goodwin and Montague Phillips. “I tried to pick British composers that were writing music at the same time Barrie was writing the book. I wanted to conceivably be able to know that J.M. Barrie may very well have been at one of Montague Phillips’s or Edward Elgar’s concerts and heard a piece of music while he was writing,” Morris explains.

The play Peter Pan was first staged in 1904. A few years later, Barrie adapted and expanded it into a novel. “My idea was to take a really fantastic story and translate it into the language of dance and be able to tell the story with the imagination, physical movement and beauty that dance has to offer,” says Morris.

Morris, himself formerly a principal dancer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, uses that phrase “language of dance” several times throughout our conversation. “Peter has that magical quality about him, so his dancing is very technical, very fast, but he has to look very light and confident with the dance moves I’ve given him,” says Morris. “As Hook is the bad guy, his music is dark and sinister, and his movements tend to be a lot heavier, a lot bigger, a lot broader.” And, of course, as with any Peter Pan production worth the cost of admission, its characters take flight.

Morris says the production “pushes the edge of the classical boundary to a more contemporary, modern look.” He estimates the ballet is about “Eighty per cent very classical and 20 per cent contemporary in its movement.”

Morris likens the process of creating a ballet to directing a movie. “You have your script, and then you take each scene and go, ‘OK, what are the characters doing, and how is that driving the plot?’ Then I put the music to that scene, and I create the movement as the dialogue for the scene,” Morris says. “Choreography expresses what the characters are saying, feeling and doing within a scene.”

This is certainly not the first time Peter Pan and the magical qualities of Neverland have been made into a ballet. Morris, however, believes that his version bears its own unique stamp. For one thing, he says, the choreography for ballets based on fairy tales tends not to be very challenging, but he tries to do the opposite. “The more difficult the choreography, it allows you to tell a more in-depth story, and develop the characters in a more sophisticated way.

“I can’t take credit for the story, but I’ve tried to tell it in a way that gives everyone in the audience something to laugh at, something to think about and something to reflect upon,” says Morris.