Stanton Welch's Marie: Houston Ballet's new take on royalty

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2009 by Nancy Wozny

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With outstretched arms and a forlorn expression, Houston Ballet's Melody Herrera as Marie Antoinette cantilevers in a suspended arabesque. Wrenched from her Austrian home and sent off to France to marry a complete stranger, Marie was pawn, puppet, and scapegoat during her tumultuous reign. It's a story so rich with mystery, hype, and intrigue, Stanton Welch couldn't resist it for the subject of his first completely-from-scratch, evening-length ballet to premiere this month.

Welch found the experience of creating a ballet from a blank slate more liberating than daunting. "It's limitless," he says. "Every single choice is up to me." Welch drew from myth, legend, rumor, and historical evidence to craft his homage to the iconic Marie. He was inspired by a PBS documentary about Marie, around the time of Sofia Coppola's movie. "Almost everything we know about her comes from the tabloid press," says Welch. He has done his homework on the more than 50 historically accurate roles, yet says the ballet's overall feel remains abstract.

Marie is set to Shostakovich's lush music. "There's all this grandeur and pomp," he says. "Yet there's also a dark undercurrent in the music; it foretells the weight of all that is to come." Sets and costumes by Kandis Cook offer period flavor while maintaining a more abstract feel. A gigantic gilded Baroque flame serves as a transitional device while ominous crystal chandeliers hover over a behemoth bed. A closer look shows the frame made of entangled bodies. The chandeliers give off a clinical under-a-microscope look, and the bed is both a stage and a prison. Cook captures period feel without sacrificing danceablity. The entire ballet takes place within a gray box, resembling a stage within a stage, much the way Marie lived out her life. "It works more like a play," says Welch. "Key pieces come in and out, setting the scene without bringing all of Versailles onstage."

To define the ballet's movement style, Welch turned to Baroque dance and early ballet's port de bras shapes. The ensemble varies between the judgmental royals and the manic mob. "The ensemble functions like its own entity," he says, "almost like a body." Key pas de deux propel the complex relationship between Marie and Louis XVI. "Usually, partnering depicts a great love story; theirs was more of a friendship," says Welch. "They shared an awkward and arranged marriage as teens, parenthood, becoming Queen and King, and finally prison and death."

Act II takes place at Versailles, the court's ultimate playground. Welch takes the royal extravagances to near surreal proportions. The food, the affairs, the shoes, the endless parties, are all a part of the ballet.

Melody Herrera is both overwhelmed and excited to be dancing the role of Marie. "It's been a dream of mine to have a role created on me, " says Herrera, who was promoted to principal last spring and was a "25 to Watch" in 2007 (See DM cover, Jan. '07). "It's such a reciprocal process," she says. "Stanton gives us ideas and the freedom to experiment, then takes from us what works."

Welch finds a pertinent lesson in examining this particular time in European history. Themes of living beyond one's means, an ever-growing gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and societal collapse give the ballet relevancy. "Her story speaks to what can happen," he says, "when those at the top are disconnected with the lives of real people."