From Alberta Ballet’s Dangerous Liaisons
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Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium
Thursday, February 7 - Saturday, February 9
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We love to watch people behave badly. An endless parade of characters attempt to shaft one another on soap operas and reality TV, but they are innocent and harmless as newborn puppies compared to the cruel, conniving villains in Alberta Ballet’s production of Dangerous Liaisons.
Many will be familiar with Stephen Frears’s wonderful 1989 film of the same name that featured chillingly sinister performances by Glenn Close and John Malkovich. The movie and ballet are both based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by 18th century writer Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Jean Grand-Maître, artistic director of Alberta Ballet, describes the book as an “intricate story of psychological warfare.”
Dangerous Liaisons revolves around two protagonists, the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, whose manipulative ways have propelled them to the pinnacle of pre-revolution French society. Allies at first, they become bitter enemies, each obsessed with the social annihilation of the other. During the course of their battle, innocents are seduced, reputations are left in tatters and lives are irreparably damaged.
Initially, Grand-Maître thought that it would be impossible to choreograph a ballet based on such a complicated plot, until a colleague suggested a solution. “He explained that we should have a play and a ballet going on simultaneously. It liberated me from creating a narrative ballet.”
The play unfolds upstage, as actors resplendent in towering powdered wigs, corsets and tights reveal the dark intentions and Byzantine schemes that are the lifeblood of the work. Downstage, dancers portray the same characters, revealing their inner turmoil and subconscious motivations. This innovative method of presentation allows both the dancers and choreographer to approach movement in unusual and rewarding ways. “I told the dancers that you don’t have to be expressing anger or joy to the level that you might have to in a normal narrative [ballet]. You want to contain emotion, so that movement is internal instead of external, and that brings the audience into a very mysterious place,” Grand-Maître says.
As a choreographer, Grand-Maître has established a worldwide reputation for his innovative and visually stunning ballets and for tackling important contemporary issues. In last year’s The Fiddle and The Drum, he and legendary songwriter-visual artist Joni Mitchell addressed the deteriorating state of our environment. In Dangerous Liaisons, he is interested in exploring parallels between the psychology of individuals in pre-revolution French society, and 21st century North America. “Unfortunately, Laclos’s uncompromising portrait of human behaviour is still relevant today,” he says. “[There are] two things going on — first it’s the picture of decadence, what happens when the ego wants to be too powerful and rich and controlling and how it transforms people into destructive machines. But it’s not just of the period, it’s of today. There is a lot of money in this city, and all the games you see in the book about how [the characters] play with people’s reputations, and how they move up the ladder, applies 100 per cent.
“It’s also something else,” he adds. “Laclos was an army general, and he had a very well-trained military mind. The two lead protagonists [in the book] are military minds — they’re tactical, and they prepare their strategies. Laclos is describing the militarization of a mind, or of a society for war, which is exactly what is going on here now.”
During previous productions of Dangerous Liaisons for the Norwegian National Ballet and Alberta Ballet, Grand-Maître says he focused on the potential for the soul to be poisoned by greed and selfishness. For this restaging of the work, he has incorporated the notion of how a wartime mentality allows people, including some of our leaders, to treat human beings as objects to be manipulated, rather than individuals deserving respect. Perhaps the most frightening villains on our TV screens are found not on fictional shows, but on the evening news.
