Beauty & The Beast has reached iconic status in our culture, thanks to the Disneyfication of the tale which was actually first was told in France in 1740. But what if you reimagined the heroine Belle as being not quite so purely good, or the Beast as being not quite as ‘beastly.’ And what if, further, you reimagined the tale as a ballet instead of a play? What you get is Belle, one of the finest ballets Stephen Mills has ever created. The Artistic Director of Ballet Austin has indeed given us a ballet for the ages.
While several upcoming ballets will feature the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Mills opted for an acoustic creation from Graham Reynolds that no symphony could perform. As Reynolds explained in a talk after the performance, the music preceded all else.
“For Stephen, he likes the music to be done before any choreography – he wants to know what musical world it’s going to taking place in. I might start developing a little bit of palette before figuring out exactly where things go. Then I finish everything (maybe not all the mixing) but every note is pretty much in place.” Mills asked Reynolds to create music evocative of a spooky Alfred Hitchcock film.
In his talk to the audience, Reynolds elaborated on the musical elements he incorporated in this dramatic score, which is such an integral part of this ballet that one cannot imagine one without the other. “In classical music percussion was often used only half-way through and only had to go bang-bang at the end. Cool instruments but one hardly does anything with it. In the mid-20th century John Cage and others were doing all sorts of fun things with percussion ensemble. Also in the 20th century the drums became a huge, foundational part of the music: samba and reggae are defined by the rhythms. The drum machines that are used today in hip-hop can tell you where it is from.
“All that informs me a lot: I try to absorb that and put it through a composer lens. But the percussion tradition that I know of is very different from all of those – much more iterative and pictorial – namely Chinese percussion. I try to bring that in as a concept. I’m not trying to recreate Chinese percussion, but just its narrative potential.” In this he succeeded admirably, as the music here tells the narrative in a synergistic relationship with the (mute) ballet.
The score has classical elements with strings and piano, while on the other side it’s all electronic. This Janus-faced score is perfectly depicted in the ballet, with both Belle and the Beast exhibiting two entirely different aspects of their characters.
“There is theatre, and then they invented film,” said Reynolds, “and film at first was the documentation of theatre, but then they became two different art forms. But music did not split into recorded and live music: they stayed under the same umbrella. But to me there are two different art forms: music either is live or can be created live, and the music that can only be recorded through this newer medium of technology. So, we have Beauty and the Beast: two very different characters. The idea was to come up with two different palettes. Very broadly, for Belle, we have an acoustic palette that could have been played 300 years ago; then for the Beast we have this much rougher, heavily distorted compressed guitar, drums and synthesizers that could have been done in this last hundred years.”
Ultimately, in the ballet, we have a quartet dancing in combination. Belle and her (evil) doppleganger, and the Prince and his evil doppleganger, the Beast. A double Janus! Katherine Deuitch is Belle, with Isabella Phillips Lynch as Belle Double; Morgan Stillman is the Beast, with Leighton Taylor as the white-clothed Prince. Costuming was inventive, with several dancers hooded, and the set of the Beasts’ castle, which exuded menace, perfectly set the visual tone required. I especially liked the sequence of tendus by Belle as she slid from one doorway to another in the castle, wondering what might lie beyond. A superb, spine-tingling production.
Belle originally premiered here in Austin in 2015; this is its third production.
As an aside, the did hear one Patron of the Ballet lament that all the ballet dancers he was familiar with have retired. I especially miss James Fuller, a dancer for 14 years, whose last appearance was in 2023. He noted that “it’s not easy to dance ballet after 30.” But time marches on and we have a very fine ballet troupe to be proud of here in Austin.
The final performance of Belle is today, Sept. 29, 2024. Visit the website for tickets and background videos:
Photo of Belle with the Beast, scattering roses, by Anne Marie Bloodgood / Courtesy of Ballet Austin