I Woke Up Today

I came in to work today and started rehearsal. Giselle is coming along quite nicely. The dancers looked strong, were dancing well, and spirits were high. As I was working, my Executive Director came in to tell me that the promotion below that had just been sent out...

And as part of the description, it stated. "Velasco's evocative production shifts the locale from 19th Century Europe to the pueblos of Spanish Colonial California." And based on the picture above and the sentence stated, that the ballet company had received a handful of comments from extremely upset Facebook members who were accusing us of trying to push our "woke, liberal agenda." 

I shall leave a space for thought and reflection.

Done.

Where to begin? In the first place, SDB's production of Giselle dates back to 2019. It is not a response to anything in recent years. It was a direct response to me seeing some interesting parallels between the story and the Mexican folklore I had grown up with.

A second reasoning behind the placement of the piece in So Cal as opposed to Medieval Rhineland is because I wanted my audience to have as strong a connection to the storytelling of the piece as possible. Whether you are brown, white, black, or any color in the lovely spectrum of humanity, if you live in San Diego, you know Old Town and you know the whole faux Spanish colonial architecture of America's Finest City. It is part of your DNA. This version of Giselle was designed as a piece for my local San Diego audience.

What is so interesting (and saddening to me) to me is just the depth of anger that was directed at the piece in the comments. As if somehow, viewing the "Germanic" piece through a Mexican lens was somehow sullying not just classical ballet, but some sort of Aryan mythology. I have to wonder whether these folks realize that even though the ballet was originally set in Germany, the story was written by 2 Frenchmen. The score was written by a Frenchman. The choreography was created by a Frenchman. And it was originally danced by an Italian ballerina. There is NOTHING authentically German about it. Giselle isn't even a German name. :)

In the spirit of the long standing tradition of films/theatre pieces/operas/dances that have been reinterpreted and placed in different cultures, over the next few days, I will be posting images from some of those works starting with.

Dance Theatre of Harlem's CREOLE GISELLE. Premiered in 1984, CREOLE GISELLE moved the action of the piece to the antebellum South. The piece gave Black classical dancers a chance to shine in the mostly traditional staging and gave me "permission" to look at the piece through my own lens. 40 YEARS AGO. Before woke was even a word. :)