Blanche Neige

What if Clive Barker had a fever dream of Snow White as imagined by Angela Carter? This is the question nobody but me asked, but I imagine Angelin Preljocaj’s Blanche Neige to answer.

Winnipeg is one of my favourite orchestras to play with, and recently I was invited to play guest principal for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of this show. The draw for musicians is that it’s a new ballet constructed entirely out of Mahler symphonies; but once I watched a video of a previous production sent to the orchestra, I was also excited for the reaction to the work, which is– look, I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that this is a very sexy ballet. The costumes were designed by Jean Paul Gaultier. The sexy cats had headgear intended to convey the danceable impression of ball gags. When Snow White eats the apple, it’s less a trick and more of an orgasmic force feeding.

I’m not casting aspersions. It all– in my opinion, from the production I did watch and the reaction of the Winnipeg audience– worked great. There is something about the project of presenting Mahler as anything other than an integral whole symphony that invites, nearly demands, a certain amount of enjoyable grotesquerie; Ken Russell comes to mind. That said, the music was not as chopped up as you might think it would have to be; no crazy cuts and very few significant alterations to make the music fit the dance. There were even two entire movements, the Purgatorio of the Tenth symphony and the third movement of the First, which accompanied probably one of the most memorable stagings in the show: the introduction of the seven dwarves (I think credited here instead as “miners”), an entire vertical ballet taking place on a sheer rock face, one of the pieces of it that is available online:

The only really wacky alteration was this section, from the very end of the 3rd movement of the Third symphony, being repeated eleven times:

…which is how I learned that in the Brothers Grimm version of the story, the happily ever after is that the Prince orders the evil Queen to dance herself to death while wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes, which is what is happening during the above. Disney sure didn’t mention that part!

Anyway, I’m very much hoping that the National Ballet or some other company around these parts picks this up, as I’d like to see it properly!