Opening the 66th season of the Kansas City Ballet with a bang – or rather, a scream of terror – was Val Caniparoli’s Jekyll & Hyde, a two-act tour de force receiving its North American premiere tonight. Enthralling, intense, terrifying and disturbing yet compellingly watchable, is how I’d describe the work, and both the leads, Gavin Abercrombie as the respectable Jekyll in crisis, and Cameron Thomas as the evil Hyde, formed quite the pairing, onto which was layered Nabokov’s account of Robert Louis Stevenson’s death, played here by Angelin Carrant. That’s already three substantial layers of dance narrative, not to speak of the straight and twisted scenes and transformations that would follow.
Choreographically, there was much to celebrate in the choices Caniparoli made to tell this horror story in movement. Even a touch so slight as the maid (Naomi Tanioka) skimming backwards en pointe at dazzling speed was creepily suggestive. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a ballet scene quite so chilling as the danse avec les lits (in a few iterations throughout), a glimpse of the interior mayhem of that ‘apex’ of Victorian health science: the mental asylum. This was ballet blanc turned on its head, self-mutilating and hideous and sad. The patients, in shapeless white gowns, pushed their institutional beds on stage, their faces (and identities) hidden under wild hair and proceeded to the frenzied dance of those without self-awareness (or with too much), rattling the bars of their beds. Beds? Prisons? Graves? The constant prop was an open invitation to see a conventional thing as another, altogether bigger and more problematic thing.
Indeed, with impeccable staging by David Israel Reynoso, Maiqui Manosa, and Ogulcan Borova, transitional places such as doors, mirrors, and chairs (as well as beds) reinforce, at every stage, the surreal. Is one a different person from one place to a next? Here one is. What happens when one leaves a bed? One’s comfortable chair? Goes over a threshold? The characters reel with the discovery. In a mirror, the self transforms, or indeed, deforms. Jim French’s adroit lighting complemented by playing with shadows, textures, reflections.
Hyde may be vile; but by gum, Thomas was marvelous to watch; the charisma and confidence of his movements, after Jekyll’s prevarications, was always going to overpower Nellie (elegant Emily Mistretta) and Rowena (delicately vulnerable and movingly played by Amanda DeVenuta).
The male pas de deux (and indeed de trois) were, unsurprisingly, at the choreographic core of this work about identity and transformations, and we got a full share of these to mull on. Partnership as they mirrored each other’s movements? Antagonism as they strained against each other? Both/and? Then there was the extraordinary stripping down into nude body suits for the final battle. Like King Lear’s mad scene I felt: man but a forked animal. Bodies like Michelangelo’s sculptures: contorted muscles, struggle, agony of the self. Jekyll is not getting out of this alive. Who is? Neither Stevenson nor Hyde either, nor the latter’s long list of victims.
The score was calibrated to perfection. Ramona Pansegrau who herself had worked with Caniporoli on the arrangement of the score, conducted an orchestra that was very much on point, in touch with every frisson, suggested every presentiment of horror, and every ramping up of approaching terror. His choice of five Polish composers included Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Gorecki and Wajciech Kilar, but also throwbacks to Wieniawski and Chopin. For where would any Victorian narrative be without the interjections of the violin caprice and the boudoir piano? Rounded edges before and after so much horror. Chopin can pretty much reconcile one to everything.
