Interview with Carolina Ballet
by Bethany Tillerson (photo credit: Carolina Ballet)

 

This week on Preview! our guests are members of the Carolina Ballet, here to talk about their roles in the new ballet Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel.

MOSS: Our guests this week are members of the Carolina Ballet: Jan Burkhard, Yevgeny Shlapko, and Marcelo Martinez. I would like for each of you to introduce yourselves, please.

BURKHARD: I am one of the principal dancers of the Carolina Ballet and will be playing the role of Elizabeth in Frankenstein.

SHLAPKO: I am the originator of the role of Victor Frankenstein and I’ve been helping stage the production.

MARTINEZ: I was the original Creature in Frankenstein.

MOSS: I love when music joins forces with another art form, and in this case it’s dance. Tell me a little bit about how the choreography relates to the music in this way.

BURKHARD: The choreography is the vessel for you to be able to see the music on the stage. Oftentimes when new ballets are being created, the music dictates what style of steps or what type of steps accentuate the score. We believe that we’re the physical representation of the music.

MARTINEZ: This time around, we are going to be performing with live music. When it’s recorded, the tempo’s always fixed. Live music makes it a little more special.

MOSS: Do you feel like the performers of the music and the dancers’ energies feed off of each other?

BURKHARD: It’s a very special experience any time you have live music, and you have two live art forms coming together. Sometimes a dancer might be a little more on balance or off balance and you have to adjust. Sometimes the conductor might be a tad faster, or maybe you have a musician who is indulging a little bit more, but that keeps you super present as opposed to sometimes being on autopilot with recorded music.

SHLAPKO: I know a lot of the audience members just look at the musicians in the orchestra pit and sometimes they’ll glance up at the stage and see that there is a connection between the music and the dancers. It’s really nice symbolism, too. The music will make you feel a certain emotion and set an atmosphere or mood, and then the dancer replicates that mood with their steps and their movements.

MOSS: Do you have a favorite selection of music that is featured in Frankenstein?

BURKHARD: My favorite is Victor and the Monster’s section. The duet between the two of them is so beautiful, that music just emotes so much that you can’t help but tear up.

SHLAPKO: That section is probably everybody’s favorite. There are so many sentimental moments that are reflected in the music and that part between Victor and the Monster is a battle between the creator and his creation. The Monster just wants him to accept him and love him and Victor is just like, I can’t bear the sight of you. It’s very emotional.

MARTINEZ: For me in that moment is the turning point of the Creature turning into the Monster. There’s a scene where the monster tries to touch Victor’s face, and Victor pushes him away. It just goes through your heart.

BURKHARD: This storyline is relatable to life in that everybody just wants to be loved. The creature is longing for all the same things but just doesn’t look like any of us. It about that search and that frustration. And oftentimes sometimes people’s anger or like the negative emotions stem from not being loved. There’s so many things you can relate it to.

MOSS: The composer of the music is Mark Scearce. How would you describe the music he’s composed for this production?

SHLAPKO: It’s a wide spectrum, I’d say. He has a little bit of everything in there, and it’s kind of indicative of the production itself. It’s got the love story between Elizabeth and Victor. It’s got a little bit of that bravado in the Monster, and even may have   elements of surprise pyrotechnics. It is a full production with the music and the costumes, the dancing, everything.

MARTINEZ: And Mark has always tried to compose the music to take you back to that period of time with elements of that style or instruments that resemble that time period.

MOSS: Can you describe some of the costumes?

BURKHARD: I think everybody has the popular idea of what the Creature looks like. But in our production he’s just more fleshy looking.

MARTINEZ: There’s some limitation on what we can really do. The whole idea is that he was put together, but if we have a lot of stitches, then that will restrict movement.

MOSS: What other productions do you have coming up?

BURKHARD: I always encourage people to come to our website. Through the end of the year, we have Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in November and we close out the year with The Nutcracker. In our spring season we’ll have The Little Mermaid and Rhapsody in Blue. There’s so much to look forward to because also in a lot of those programs, there’s other additional pieces of work. There’s going to be a few little opening ballets before the headliner, so to speak. It’s an experience for everybody involved: the audience, the dancers, the people working backstage, the conductor, the musicians. I mean, there’s so many components that make the whole evening unique and special.