Orlando Ballet is closing out its landmark 50th anniversary season with an international collaboration billed as a lavish feast for the senses – and it’s a ballet that has never before been performed in the United States.
This production of “Casanova” is generating so much buzz that its opening night is drawing the work’s composer and the world’s leading Casanova historian – or “Casanovaist” – to the American premiere here at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
I dropped by rehearsal at the Orlando Ballet Center and spoke with all three international partners collaborating for this ballet – the UK-based choreographer Kenneth Tindall, the Canadian guest conductor Julian Pellicano, and Orlando Ballet’s own artistic director, Jorden Morris.
“Casanova” is designed to help bring big, lavish ballet to a modern audience, according to Morris, and a partnership with the Colorado Ballet and the Milwaukee Ballet brought the expensive costumes and extravagant set pieces from the UK production to America. Morris says this is the perfect approach for the colorful, larger-than-life character of Casanova himself.
Also, this collaboration allowed for original UK choreographer Kenneth Tindall to come work with the Orlando Ballet.
Tindall has a reputation for bending the genre of ballet dancing and taking artistic risks that draw accolades and help expand audiences.
“What a great way to really push the envelope with the art form,” Morris says of working with Tindall. “And the production was so successful in the UK, that I wanted to bring it to North America.”
Tindall himself explains his philosophy for choreographing “Casanova” this way: “It’s absolutely in the classical style, but it’s also asking you to break and manipulate the rules of classical ballet to see where it could go if the form was allowed to bend, change, morph, and be more 3-D, and of course the music is a huge part of any movement style, so it’s how you interact and create and connect as well. But above all, I love to feel. And that’s why I tell stories…that hopefully connects with an audience and brings you in.”
As for the music Tindall mentioned, Canadian conductor Julian Pellicano says there’s a kind of ongoing creative dialogue between the dancers and the live musicians. “My approach to that has always been to really get into the choreography and get into the story telling,” Pellicano explains. “When you begin to understand the language of movement that’s happening onstage, and, of course, the dramatic elements, then making decisions in the pit with the orchestra becomes more clear.”
