CHRISTMAS approaches and, for thousands of expectant Scottish theatre-goers, that means a visit to one of the country’s most beautiful theatres to enjoy the festive offering of our national dance company Scottish Ballet.
This year – starting at the splendid Festival Theatre in Edinburgh later this month, and touring to Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, before a brief English sojourn in Newcastle upon Tyne – artistic director Christopher Hampson is reviving his highly successful 2019 production of The Snow Queen.
The ballet is based on the Danish bard Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale and boasts a glorious musical score by Rimsky-Korsakov. The piece tells the story of the intrepid girl Gerda and her quest to save her friend Kai from the clutches of the seductive and evil Snow Queen.
When I catch up with Hampson in the midst of rehearsals, he tells me that he is delighted to be restaging his choreography of this great Christmas story. Those who loved the 2019 production will, he says, be able to enjoy a show that is very much the same work – but with a number of enhancements.
“As a creator, I always look back on my work and ask, ‘what might I have done differently if I didn’t have all of those pressures of an opening night?’”
There have been three years – including the wretched period of the Covid pandemic – since the piece was staged. Time enough, Hampson says, to pick up on little things that might be improved.
“When I looked back over The Snow Queen, I thought I could see some areas where I could tell the story a bit more efficiently,” he explains. “You get to know a character by working on something.
“You find that a character who was maybe secondary or tertiary suddenly becomes much more interesting.”
The choreographer’s reflections on what might be considered to be relatively minor characters have led to what promise to be smart little changes to the show.
Take the character of Mazelda the fortune-teller (who originally popped up in Act Two of Hampson’s ballet) for example.
“People really remember her,” the director observes. “I thought it would be great if she was part of that circus troupe at the beginning.”
This little tweak not only makes sense in terms of the character of Mazelda, it also enhances the narrative. Now, he says, “Gerda really knows who she might need to go to solve her quest”.
In addition to bringing the character of Mazelda forward in the story, Hampson has also done some work on the bold and colourful Ringmaster. Ballet-goers can expect to find that this figure has been brought “more strongly through into the story”.
The reconsidering of some of the seemingly minor characters is, the director observes, just “one part of the reflexive process”. The practice of enhancing an already successful ballet is not just down to the director or the company, says Hampson. “When a production is new, it’s always a show in search of an audience...
“Often I’ll spend time listening to audience reactions. I do take feedback from audience members, people who write in to us and tell us things they enjoyed, and things they think could have been better.”
The latter category doesn’t take up much of the Scottish Ballet postbag (be it electronic or physical). Nevertheless, the choreographer is, he says, “always open to listen”.
One area of notable change between the 2019 Snow Queen and the new one is in the cast. Just as a ballet must, for Hampson, be a living, evolving organism, so is a ballet company.
There are, the director tells me, “quite a few new people” in the cast, as compared with the 2019 production. Three years ago, he explains, he had the principal dancers performing the roles of both the Snow Queen and Gerda.
This year the female principals will be limited to just the character of the Snow Queen herself. That way, Hampson comments, “the rest of the dancers in the company get the opportunity to go into a more senior role like Gerda”.
Consequently, the choreographer says, “we’ll see lots of new Gerdas and quite a few new Kais” alongside the company’s established principal dancers.
Those principals themselves will include the recently promoted artist Bruno Micchiardi, who will dance the role of Kai.
One of the great joys of staging a festive ballet is that so many children are in the audience. Many will be having their first experience of ballet, perhaps even their first visit to a theatre.
“It’s that whole experience of going into a theatre,” Hampson says. “The buzz of it. Seeing lots of people who are all excited about the same thing.
“I remember when I was young, the excitement always started just going into the auditorium and hearing an orchestra tuning up.
“There was the sense of excitement about what might be behind that curtain.”
Talking of excitement, Scottish Ballet’s futuristic retelling of Leo Delibes’s 1870 ballet Coppelia received richly deserved plaudits at the year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The piece, which was directed by Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple (aka Jess and Morgs) combines contemporary dance with ingenious video work to reimagine the ballet’s life-size doll as a hi-tech robot.
Such new works “push us a company”, Hampson avers. He was “thrilled”, he says, by the audience’s response to Coppelia.
“We have patrons who, I would say, probably sit at the traditional end of the repertoire,” he says. “I actually had one patron who, at a pre-show function, said to me: ‘I’m not likely to enjoy this, but I’m coming because it’s Scottish Ballet’...
“At the end, they were absolutely bowled over. They came over and told me that, and they were absolutely genuine. I thought that was really wonderful.”
Whether it’s their ultra-modern take on the Delibes ballet or a carefully enhanced restaging of The Snow Queen, few would doubt that Scottish Ballet is currently a company in wonderfully rude health.
The Snow Queen plays the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, November 19 to December 10, then touring until February 4, 2023: scottishballet.co.uk
