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Val Caniparoli’s Lady of the Camellias comes to Boston Ballet
BY IRIS FANGER
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The Grand Studio in the Boston Ballet building on Clarendon Street was roiling in a cheerful sort of disarray last Friday as visiting choreographer Val Caniparoli stood coaching the second cast of Lady of the Camellias, his ballet based on the 1848 novel by Alexander Dumas fils that opens next Thursday at the Wang Theatre. Near a corner of the mirrored space, rehearsal pianist and performance soloist Freda Locker played one of the pieces by Frédéric Chopin that had been stitched together for the score. Boston Ballet music director Jonathan McPhee leaned over the piano as he practiced conducting the rhythms Caniparoli had set. When I asked which Chopin pieces made up the score, McPhee answered, "Nearly everything he wrote for the piano." Members of the first cast sat watching while (if they were ladies) sewing pink ribbons on their pointe shoes or stretching in that offhand manner of athletes in momentary stasis. One dancer rested on the ornate bed from Marguerite’s boudoir that would be rolled on stage for a later scene. Although Lady of the Camellias is bringing Caniparoli to Boston Ballet for the first time, he’s hardly an unknown. A member of the San Francisco Ballet for an astonishing 31 years, where he performed alongside current BB artistic director Mikko Nissinen, Caniparoli has choreographed many works for his home company and for troupes around the world. Since 1981, he’s received 10 choreography grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. First conceived by the late choreographer Norbert Vesak and designer Robert Glay de La Rose but created by Caniparoli, Lady premiered at Ballet Florida in 1994 as a co-production with Ballet West, then was presented by companies in Cincinnati, Alberta, and Tulsa. Based on his own affair with Marie Duplessis, Dumas’s novel tells the story of the tragic love between gentleman Armand and consumptive courtesan Marguerite, who renounces him at the request of his father, whereupon he leaves her to die alone. Dumas soon turned the novel into a hit play; that was followed by Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 opera La traviata. The 1937 Greta Garbo film Camille was, however, Caniparoli’s chief influence. "Perhaps the biggest change from the novel," he says, "is the scene halfway through the third act when she’s remembering back to happier times. It’s a device to show her dementia, or what I imagine dementia to be like, all in your head. This year I rechoreographed the second act, and we added new roles and new costumes for act three. I think the story is a little bit relevant to modern times, with the return of tuberculosis and AIDS. I try to keep it out of the quaintness, but it is a period piece. I’m really trying to tell a story." The two-weekend run of Lady of the Camillas bookends the repertory program "Drink to Me," which will comprise Mark Morris’s "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," George Balanchine’s Duo Concertant, and world premieres by Caniparoli and the Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo. Caniparoli takes a 180-degree turn from Lady here with an abstract piece set to music by Béla Bartók. "I don’t choreograph ahead when I make a new work. I like to see what the dancers make of what I give them. I’m never at a loss for steps." Boston Ballet presents Lady of the Camellias at the Wang Theatre, 270 Tremont Street in the Theater District, March 18 through 21 and April 1 through 4. Tickets are $39 to $96; call 800-447-7400, or visit www.Telecharge.com, or drop in to the Wang box office.
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