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Friday, October 21st, 2005, Winnipeg Free Press
By Alison Mayes
LIKE a vampire who keeps climbing out of his coffin to claim new victims, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's Dracula keeps rising from the crypt.
When the show opened Wednesday for a pre-Halloween run, it marked the fourth time it has risen locally in seven years. Anyone who knows the realities of arts management recognizes that it's mostly for financial reasons that this lavish full-length story ballet -- with a bankable title -- has to bare its fangs yet again.
It does seem like overkill. But Mark Godden's fast-moving, seductive interpretation of Bram Stoker's 1897 horror classic, set to Mahler symphonies, has become a signature piece for the company.
The choreographer came to town recently to rework it slightly. The theme of being torn between proper Victorian society and the forbidden, decadent underworld seems to have been brought into sharper focus. And the troupe, inaugurating a springy new performance floor, was in fine, high-energy form.
The tricks -- from a flying bat to decapitation and impaling -- are still clever. The treat on opening night was the artistry of Tara Birtwhistle and CindyMarie Small, the commanding ballerinas who originated the key roles of Lucy and Mina.
In the strong opening scene, Birtwhistle's blood-drained Lucy is already slipping into the domain of the undead. Her performance, symbolically centred around her bed, is pitched at the edge of madness as her hungry inner vampire (her neck bite a metaphor for sexual awakening) battles her compliant good-girl self.
She's an unruly force, her high-kicking legs like bolts of lightning. She makes the starched, tut-tutting assembly of four maids, three boyish suitors and a Dutch scientist look like a band of naive ninnies.
Once Lucy succumbs, the inner struggle passes to Small's Mina, a more sturdy and sensible brunette in contrast with the high-strung, blond Lucy. Mina starts out sweet and pious, surrounded by nuns who deliver some of the show's best ensemble work. But we begin to see her Victorian straitjacket as she wonders why her fiancé lusts after Dracula's three vampire brides, but is repulsed when she shows sexual interest.
Supernatural
Small's final pas de deux with her bad-boy foreign bloodsucker (Jaime Vargas as Dracula) includes a repeated motif of almost supernatural backward bending. The duet superbly interweaves the undertow of desire with the attempt to stay rational and break free of the erotic spell. It's a universal push-pull -- part of the eternal resonance of the vampire myth.
Godden has said that his Dracula is intentionally underplayed as a shadowy force of darkness, rather than a showy villain. That always poses a challenge for the principal dancer who gets little stage time, and not much virtuoso choreography, to make an impact.
The Mexican Vargas manages to exude fierce intensity, despite his slim build. His long, wolf-like wig transforms him from light-footed prince to sexy brooding beast. Of the RWB Draculas I've seen, he's the only one who conveys in his embraces of Mina an inkling that the predator longs to be mortal and decent, as much as Mina longs to be wanton and wicked.
One of the frustrations of Godden's choreography is that it is overwhelmingly pointy-and-prim balletic, when Dracula seems to call for raw, earthy movement as a dark counterpoint. Although the second-act pagan bacchanal shows off the company's technique, there's nothing very bacchanalian about it.
Still, in the final minutes when Vargas ripped open his white shirt, slit his exposed chest with a thumbnail and plunged Small's mouth toward the bloody gash, there was a primal theatrical jolt.
Legend has it that Dracula will only enter a room into which he is invited. Perhaps we aren't ready to close our bedrooms to the caped count and his harem just yet.
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