FRANKENSTEIN PROGRAM NOTES

A tragic tale of the risks of tampering with the creation of human life and the power of love

If the name “Frankenstein” makes you think of a green-faced Boris Karloff with bolts threaded into his neck, then Liam Scarlett’s ballet Frankenstein won’t be what you’re expecting. It’ll be better. Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror story Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Scarlett delivers far more than scary-monster thrills. Both book and ballet tell a disturbing, tragic tale about the consequences of abandonment, the risks of tampering with the creation of human life, and, most of all, the power of love, both given and withheld.

Scarlett tells the story of Frankenstein through movement in a poetic way, embodying all the dualities of Shelley’s book — love and hate, curiosity and fear, desire, and guilt — within one man, Victor Frankenstein. That duality is amplified by the overarching design concept. In every scene, we see two worlds: Victor’s, represented by the 18th-century buildings he inhabits, sits within the Creature’s world, a landscape described by Scenic and Costume Designer John Macfarlane as conveying “an overwhelming sense of emptiness.”

Frankenstein was created as a co-production between The Royal Ballet and San Francisco Ballet in 2016 and 2017. When Kevin O’Hare, The Royal Ballet’s artistic director, pitched the idea to Helgi Tomasson, SF Ballet’s then Artistic Director, he described Scarlett’s vision for the production. “I was intrigued right away,” says Tomasson. “I’m always looking for something new, and it’s hard to find something full-length [that’s] different and maybe daring.” What is remarkable, he says, is how Scarlett addresses a theme that’s so suited to “this time we are living through — it’s so much about acceptance of someone who is not like yourself.” When he saw Frankenstein in London, Tomasson says, “I was amazed to see how many people were wiping their tears. It’s touching.”

Scarlett was deeply invested in this story. He was about 11 when he first read Frankenstein. “I’ve revisited it at various points in my life, and it’s always had a different poignancy every time that I’ve read it,” he says in a Royal Opera House (ROH) video. “The fragments of emotions that shine through, I think, differ with the age that you read it. Even now different gems come up; it’s such a multi-layered story, and incredibly written, that it kind of struck something with me.” He wanted to make a ballet inspired by this book, he said, because it’s “a story of betrayal, curiosity, life, death, and above all, love. Shelley was really commenting on the state of human emotions.” And on her own as well — she experienced tremendous loss early in her life, with the deaths of her mother (in giving birth to her), three of her four children, and her young husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Shelley wrote her novel in 1813 and set it in the 1700s, at a time when the functions of the human body were largely mysterious and the discovery of galvanism (the contraction of a muscle when stimulated with an electrical current) sparked scientists’ imaginations. “I think that’s why the book works,” Scarlett noted, “because there was so much unknown in that period, where the idea and the fear of creating something new was almost real.”

Adapting a book of this depth and complexity to a ballet narrative is difficult, and changes must be made in order to tell the story clearly. Scarlett cut several characters, but “the intention and emotions that go through the book, and the empathy that you feel for absolutely every character is something that I’ve tried to stay true to.” He omitted the Arctic Circle setting that begins and ends the book, but the scenic design reflects the desolation of that environment. And though he changed the circumstances surrounding some of the characters’ deaths, he retains all the significance and consequences of those events.

To help tell this story, Scarlett turned to composer Lowell Liebermann, whose music he used for three previous ballets. For Frankenstein, Scarlett said, “I wanted something hauntingly beautiful, and I think he has done that.” SF Ballet Music Director and Principal Conductor Martin West agreed. “It’s great music, very dramatic, full of leitmotifs that come back, so we’re always taken on a journey. Lowell doesn’t write easy music. It’s tricky, it’s fast and exposed, a lot of energy going on.”

Liebermann had read Frankenstein, so he knew what to expect in terms of story. What surprised him was that Scarlett wasn’t updating it, as he has done with other story ballets. “When he told me that this was going to be absolute period Mary Shelley, then I had to readjust,” Liebermann says. “The music can’t be too anachronistic to what you’re seeing and to the nature of the story and the way people reacted in that time. I felt the need to write music that would be true to that period.” What Scarlett wanted, Liebermann says, was “a very romantic- sounding score, certainly a very melodic score.”

Frankenstein is Liebermann’s first full-length ballet and only the second piece he’s written for dance. What was difficult about composing this ballet, he says, was that he had only an outline to work from, “the emotional thrust of each scene. Liam doesn’t make a lot of decisions until he’s actually working with the dancers. So the challenge was composing music when I had no idea what the movements were going to be, or the detailed action.” He compared the experience to composing an opera, in which lyrics provide a detailed story. “With ballet, it’s more like writing a two-and-a-half-hour symphony.” His strategy was to focus on “finding the right music to capture what is going on emotionally at any given moment, and having a musical follow-through that would tie the whole thing together. It’s a full-blown symphonic score.”

While Liebermann wished for a detailed libretto, designer John Macfarlane would have preferred to have the music at hand to guide him in his work. “Music helps with the design process because it gives you all your pivot points, a kind of thread for how to go through the piece. Music is what makes me see in my head — images, set changes, and what would be exciting to go with the relevant moments of music.” However, because his creative process coincided with Liebermann’s, he had to create the sets and costumes without music to guide him. Fortunately, the story has “a lot of meat on the bones,” Macfarlane said. “I kicked off by doing the anatomy theater. For the designer, it’s the core of the piece — it’s a fantastically theatrical space, a very magical and frightening space. It has all the connotations of dissection in an era when people were digging up bodies out of graveyards so they could learn anatomy.” Next came the skull-emblazoned front cloths, “and then I moved out in different directions from there,” he noted.

For the Frankenstein family’s home, Scarlett “wanted a house where there’s been terrific sadness,” Macfarlane said. “So no matter how lovely it seemed, you came out of the house and there was a coldness and the feeling that, in this very bleak and empty landscape, something was out there.” For the first interior scene, he chose a washed-out palette. “That whole scene should feel like a bleached photograph of this one moment in a family’s life when it was all lovely.” The reds we see later in the ballet are faded pinks here, and Macfarlane ended up bleaching the blue dress he had designed for Elizabeth, which looked too solid and heavy once he saw it onstage, to “a very pale, kind of frosted blue, and quite cloudy.”

Macfarlane called the 18th century “a very kind period for dancers,” explaining that the women’s corseted bodices are “pared away round the neck and shoulders,” thus allowing for freedom of movement. The skirts are voluminous, but he used lightweight fabrics suitable to dancing, creating the period shape by adding net at the hips and in back. “And you’ve got the most fantastic coats for men,” he noted. Macfarlane bore in mind the effect Scarlett’s demanding choreography can have on the costumes. “Liam is capable of shredding a costume in one rehearsal,” he shared. In designing costumes, what’s most important to Macfarlane is to give each dancer an onstage identity. “I hate costumes that don’t mean anything,” he says. “You go to a lot of classical ballet and you think, ‘I don’t know who these people are meant to be, and from where.’ It’s one of the great pleasures of doing ballet costumes — that you get people to look believably like real people, but they can dance.”

Macfarlane is a very hands-on artist, constructing models himself and doing much of the painting. For a backdrop, he lets the scenic artists rough in the design. “Then I get going on it, normally with one other painter, and basically turn it into one of my paintings.” For the front cloths, he painted the skulls, which were photographed, then animated and

embellished via projections. For the Creature’s body stocking, he spent an hour on each dancer’s costume, drawing all of the scars and sutures, tendons and sinews.

Choreographically, Frankenstein is laced with characterization and filled with movement that is distinctly Scarlett’s — what Ricardo Cervera, a ballet master at The Royal Ballet, calls “Liamisms.” For example, in one lift a dancer wraps herself around her partner in a suspended leap; elsewhere, when gesturing with a leg, a dancer turns in, knee and foot toward the midline, before turning out. “In order to make something bigger, or more open, you close it first,” says Cervera, who taught much of Frankenstein to the SF Ballet dancers. And there’s Scarlett’s use of the upper back, especially with the women: “always very, very open,” Cervera says, “very luscious and expansive.”

In some story ballets, the main characters have movement motifs — steps that are specific to them. In Frankenstein, the motifs come in the form of movement quality that tells us who they are. “Henry is upbeat,” Cervera says. “Victor is a little bit heavier,” his movements slowed by longing and guilt. In his Act 2 pas de deux with Elizabeth, the young woman taken in by the Frankenstein family when she was orphaned as a child, Victor struggles with conflicting feelings. “His love for her is as strong as his guilt for what he’s done, so every time he looks at her or feels that love, the guilt comes as well,” Cervera says. “And she doesn’t understand what’s going on. She goes from being quite childish and girly to almost trying to take that mother role, hold him, support him, because he’s so fragile.” In the Creature’s movement, he says, there’s an element of the grotesque. “Some of his stitches haven’t healed yet; he hasn’t been put together quite right. Therefore it can’t be just beautiful movement the whole way through. [His solo] breaks into moments that remind you that he’s not really human.”

The idea of struggle permeates the ballet. Characters chafe against themselves, one another, and social constraints. “There’s the social etiquette that you have to adhere to, and there are all the inner battles, all the relationships,” Cervera says. The movement reflects this conflict with “a lot of pull in, pull away; pull in, pull away. And constant hesitation — a wrapping inwards.” To demonstrate, he shrinks his shoulders and collapses his chest. “It really expresses when someone is fragile or vulnerable.” The duet for the Creature and Elizabeth is filled with promenades (poses that revolve in place) and reversals. “It’s the struggle of no matter where you go, you’re entangled,” Cervera says. “He’s completely in control of her.”

If you dig into the book’s subtext, you might see Victor and the Creature as two aspects of one being. Scarlett addressed that interpretation by giving the same steps to both Victor and his creation, in very different contexts. “A section in the Creature and Elizabeth pas de deux is straight out of the Victor and Elizabeth pas de deux,” says Cervera. “The same movement can look so different — with Victor it’s loving; with the Creature it’s aggressive. The Creature is trying to understand. His intention is not to hurt

Elizabeth, necessarily. In the pas de deux, doing the same steps, he’s saying, ‘Love me — I’m doing the same thing Victor did. What is wrong with you?’”

The Creature’s desperate need for love is denied, and that’s what changes him from benign to murderous. Scarlett noted that he told the dancers that the Creature should feel like he’s just been born. “He doesn’t have a teacher, he doesn’t have a parent to take him, pick him up, to laugh at his mistakes, to say that everything’s going to be all right, or to teach him anything. He relies on mimicking,” without understanding what he’s doing. The Creature searches for Victor, his creator/parent, and when he finds him, he gets not love but rejection. In his solo, he discovers who — or what — he is when he realizes that all the drawings and data in Victor’s notebook pertain to him, that he was assembled from parts of dead men. Then the final inscription: “Experiment failed.” With that revelation comes deep pain. “Your scars and your stitches should ache,” Scarlett shared. A turning point comes when the Creature accidentally kills Victor’s younger brother, William, and discovers that he can get Victor’s attention by taking away what he loves.

In Frankenstein, the big-picture aspects — choreography, dramatic arc, visual elements, and music — combine to tell a compelling story. But the dancers must tend to subtleties too, conveying action or revealing their characters through small, still moments. Doing this can be difficult. “As a dancer you always associate movement with expressing something and stillness with being vacuous,” Cervera says. “But Liam shared, ‘Don’t be afraid of stillness; it can tell so much about a character.’”

All of these aspects add up to what Tomasson calls Frankenstein’s “theatrical drama,” one of the ballet’s strengths. “At the end of the first act, you can’t wait to see what comes next, and the same thing at the end of the second act,” he says. “Even though you know [the story], you can’t wait to see what he has done with it.”