American Ballet Theatre is known for its story ballets. But where do those stories come from? Many of the full-length works in the Company’s repertoire, ranging from The Sleeping Beauty to Manon to Jane Eyre—and including this season’s Onegin and Romeo and Juliet—are based on literary source material. Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor are among the choreographers carrying on this tradition at ABT today. Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate, which returns July 16-20 following last summer’s debut, is based on Laura Esquival’s 1989 novel of the same name. And McGregor’s Woolf Works, which made its New York debut last month, is a triptych inspired by three of Virginia Woolf’s modernist novels: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931).
When creating Woolf Works for The Royal Ballet in 2015, McGregor was clear that this ballet was not going to be a standard retelling of Woolf’s oeuvre, but something much more abstract. It includes elements of Woolf’s biography and distillations of her books’ themes, imagery, and literary devices. “The three-act ballet format provided us with a chance, with Woolf as the instigator, to upend and interrogate ballet’s often conventional structure—much in the same way Woolf challenged not only the conventions of writing, but also the process of reading,” says McGregor. “Woolf’s biography too, like all artists’ lives, is intrinsically woven into her works—art and life inseparable.”
To get there, McGregor collaborated with dramaturg Uzma Hameed on extensive research. They read and re-read Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves and met with several Woolf scholars. They also went on a kind of Woolf pilgrimage, visiting Woolf’s home, Monks House, and her sister Vanessa Bell’s house and studio. They had the chance, says McGregor, to “touch the artifacts of her life and the context in which she lived, experience the garden she wrote in, the river she drowned in—a complete immersion."
Teuscher finds that the challenge of the ballet is portraying the character of Clarissa Dalloway/Virginia Woolf’s inner and exterior lives. “People describe Mrs. Dalloway as stream of consciousness writing, but I see it more as going in and out of worlds, in and out of the present and the past,” she says. “Obviously, I can’t explain to the audience that suddenly this is a memory, or a thought that's happening in my mind."
For Wheeldon, adapting Like Water for Chocolate for the stage meant narrowing down the novel’s 256 pages into two hours of dancing—while still holding onto the legibility of the plot. “Making ballets from existing novels means there is a lot of source material to draw from,” says Wheeldon, adding, “Laura was our best source of dramaturgy.” He still recalls with great fondness his trips to visit Esquival in her home in Mexico. “My husband and I were enchanted by her warmth and her willingness to share her beautiful story with us,” he says.
When Wheeldon brought Like Water for Chocolate to ABT in 2023 (it too was originally created for The Royal Ballet), he sat the Company down for a presentation by Esquival via Zoom.“ She explained how the three sisters represent the three different phases of how people reacted to the Mexican Revolution,” remembers ABT Principal Dancer Herman Cornejo, who dances the role of Pedro. “When you do Giselle or Swan Lake, you don’t get this background from the creator.”
Cornejo sees Like Water for Chocolate as part of “a new era of classics.” He relishes the chance to do away with mime and the classical ballet set up of pas de deux, solo, coda, to focus on stories and themes. “You don’t feel yourself as a dancer anymore,” he says of dancing Pedro.“You’re an actor, portraying a story. It fulfills me.” Similarly, Teuscher thinks of contemporary literary adaptations, includingWoolf Works, as a continuation of ballet’s story telling tradition. “I personally love that people are continuing to make narrative-based work,” she says. “I think it is a really beautiful craft that has become uncommon.”
