Photography by Saint Louis Ballet
Alice in Wonderland
Large, elaborate sets for stage productions can create scenes that immediately transport viewers to a different place or time. But they can also be cumbersome and expensive, not to mention limiting in how quickly they can be rearranged.
So when choreographer Brian Enos and artist Luis Grane went down the rabbit hole to design their take on Alice In Wonderland for the Grand Rapids Ballet in 2017, they wanted to create a fantastical landscape that captured the endearing madness of Wonderland’s dream world. To do so, they thought less about props and backdrops and more about colorful and imaginative visual art that could be projected onto the stage.
“It started from a place of, ‘OK, how do we create a production where we do some really incredible things and not have to deal with the laws of physics?’” Enos says. “So we went to animation and projection in order to leverage technology in a way that allows us to make things happen that we couldn’t do with practical sets.”
The result is an immersive production that Enos, who also serves as artistic director for The Big Muddy Dance Company, is finally getting to bring to St. Louis. The production will open Saint Louis Ballet’s 2021-22 season this weekend with three shows at the Touhill Performing Arts Center (1 Touhill Circle).
“I’m really excited to share this with St. Louis audiences,” Enos says. “We premiered it in Grand Rapids, and they brought it back twice. Then we did it in San Antonio with a company down there. But this is home now. This is where I live, and create, and work. So having the opportunity to share this with St. Louis dance audiences is really special to me.”
On a stage dressed in white, characters will swirl and twirl to choreography rooted in classical and contemporary dance. Enos fused the two, assigning unique movements to individual characters. As the fun, nonsensical journey through Alice’s imagination unfolds, the more normal characters, for instance, will perform in a classical style, while the zanier characters' moves will be more modern.
“We created this hybrid movement vocabulary for a lot of the Wonderland characters,” Enos says. “There’s a lot of influence from classical jazz dance, contemporary dance, and even some soft shoe tap. I used this as an opportunity to pull from all of my past experiences, and all of the stuff I’ve done throughout my career to weave this tapestry of movement that calls on a whole lot of different styles and vocabularies to come together to create the world.”
Grane, too, drew on his background as a former Pixar/Dreamworks artist to build the background projections that fill the stage with life.
“He’s done a lot of really big Hollywood animation projects, so working with him was such an exciting prospect,” Enos says. “It was such a fun collaboration. His imagination helped drive the story in a unique way that I think is different from classical ballet—and even contemporary ballet. It was a lot of fun to work on.”
