[Introspective] A Ballet Score? Not Such a Stretch for the Pet Shop Boys - New York Ti mes

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A Ballet Score? Not Such a Stretch for the Pet Shop Boys
By GAVIN EDWARDS MARCH 7, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/arts/dance/the-pet-shop-boys-most-incredible-thing-charlotte-ballet.html

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When he was 8, two decades before he became the singing half of the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant wanted to be a ballet dancer. The Royal Ballet had visited Newcastle, England, where the Tennant family lived, so he saw “Giselle” and (he thinks) “Coppélia.” He was so impressed, he checked out “Teach Yourself Ballet” from the library and attempted to learn at home with his younger brother.

“We used the radiator as a barre,” Mr. Tennant, now 63, said on the phone from London. The impulse, though, didn’t last. “I moved on and decided I wanted to be an actor,” he said. “And then I thought I might have the potential for being a pop star.”

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Chelsea Dumas and Josh Hall, of Charlotte Ballet, rehearse a scene from “The Most Incredible Thing.” Credit Mike Belleme for The New York Times
That last career choice turned out well. In 1986 the Pet Shop Boys, his partnership with Chris Lowe, hit No. 1 in the United States with their debut single, “West End Girls,” and the group went on to release 13 studio albums of literate, melancholy dance music. Mr. Tennant never mastered the grand plié, but he didn’t give up on the ballet altogether: “The Most Incredible Thing,” with a Pet Shop Boys score and choreography by Javier de Frutos, has its American premiere on Friday with Charlotte Ballet here.

The Pet Shop Boys have always been interested in theater and the classical arts, name-checking Debussy on the 1988 single “Left to My Own Devices” and in 2004, scoring Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film “Battleship Potemkin.” When they decided to write a ballet, Mr. Lowe was reading Hans Christian Andersen stories and was struck by one about a king who offers half his kingdom and his daughter in marriage to the creator of “the most incredible thing.”

Mr. Tennant said composing a ballet score wasn’t a huge transition: “We’ve always written dance music. That means club or pop dancing, but nonetheless, it’s dancing.” They aren’t the first pop musicians to explore the possibilities of concert dance, but “The Most Incredible Thing” was unusual in its ambition. “It’s not like three-act narrative ballets come along every day of the week,” Mr. Tennant dryly noted.

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Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, performing in 2016. The Boys have always been interested in theater and the classical arts. Credit Jason Koerner/Getty Images
Mr. Tennant and Mr. Lowe did “Battleship Potemkin” in eight-bar sections, as if constructing a pop record. Now, working with a scenario written by the playwright Matthew Dunster, they pushed themselves to write longer melodic lines, each Pet Shop Boy revising and extending the work of the other.

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“The Most Incredible Thing” had its debut at Sadler’s Wells Theater in London in 2011. (Its limited run sold out and received an Evening Standard Theater Award.) But the lavish multimedia production proved too expensive to tour and hasn’t been performed since 2012. Justin Peck, also inspired by the Andersen story, made a one-act dance for New York City Ballet, with a score by Bryce Dessner of the National.

When Hope Muir, the new artistic director of Charlotte Ballet (formerly of Scottish Ballet), was looking for interesting family fare, she negotiated the revival, with most of the same creative principals but scaled down slightly. Some changes have been made. Instead of the 60-piece symphonic orchestration, the Pet Shop Boys’ electronic score will be used. And projections of shadows that Mr. de Frutos had conceived as a tribute to Pilobolus Dance Theater now actually have been done by Pilobolus (and will be shown on film).

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Mr. de Frutos working with dancers of Charlotte Ballet. Credit Mike Belleme for The New York Times
On a recent Tuesday in Charlotte, a man with a bald head and a mischievous expression slipped off his sneakers to lead two dozen dancers through a rehearsal. This was Mr. de Frutos, 54, who was revising his choreography for the American production. He was working on a scene involving Josh Hall as the clockmaker and Chelsea Dumas as the princess who wins his heart, guiding them through a dance in which they are reunited and the princess proposes marriage.

Caught up in the emotion, Ms. Dumas waited too long to pivot her body and missed a cue. She apologized to Mr. de Frutos, who reassured her: “It’s absolutely fine. It’s about getting the right feeling.” He grinned. “Now feel it faster.”

“Acting is action,” Mr. de Frutos likes to tell the dancers. He has taught them that when their movements tell the story, they don’t have to do anything with their faces.

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Anson Zwingelberg, center, rehearsing “The Most Incredible Thing.” Credit Mike Belleme for The New York Times
”You write what you want it to be, and then you listen to the actors and they lead you in a different way,” he said on a break from rehearsal. In his studio at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, where he is an artist in residence, he sat on a couch he had painted with a Maya Angelou quotation. When he’s not busy choreographing, he makes visual art. “London is a place where the national sport is pigeonholing,” he said of his dual career. “I don’t like pigeons and I don’t like holes.”

Mr. de Frutos, born in Venezuela, has worked with one foot in the mainstream (British revivals of “Carousel” and “Cabaret,” the pilot for “Game of Thrones”) and one foot in the avant-garde (“London Road,” a documentary musical about the murder of five prostitutes, which he largely choreographed to the dialogue). Although he made his reputation dancing in the nude, his most notorious piece was “Eternal Damnation to Sancho and Sanchez” (2009), which depicted pregnant nuns and the electrocution of a deformed pope, leading to audience walkouts and the cancellation of a planned BBC broadcast.

“Those were the works that I needed to make at the time,” he said. Still, he bristled when the worried producers of the British production of “The Most Incredible Thing” reminded him once too often that it was going to be a family ballet. They “made me feel like they were putting this in the hands of somebody that didn’t understand what a family was,” he said.

Despite that background, he says he is less cynical than the Pet Shop Boys expected; they learned to respect his romanticism. Mr. Tennant said that the first time he attended a performance of “The Most Incredible Thing,” he burst into tears, overcome by the emotion of the ballet and the knowledge of how much work had gone into it.

Remembering the moment, Mr. Tennant confessed he was starting to tear up again and said that the Pet Shop Boys found the ballet all the more remarkable because they weren’t onstage for it. “I’m looking forward to sitting in the theater in Charlotte and seeing what it sounds like,” he said.

The Most Incredible Thing
March 9-18 at the Knight Theater, Charlotte, N.C.; 704-372-1000, charlotteballet.org.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2018, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Yes, a Ballet Score From a Pop Duo. 

Images:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/03/08/arts/08PETSHOPBOYS2/merlin_134778096_9f67cfec-c209-472a-ad7a-3eb2d377d3c0-master675.jpg
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https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/03/08/arts/08PETSHOPBOYS5/merlin_135103359_cf4f7ab7-4453-4473-86ce-da2b7c630288-master675.jpg
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/03/08/arts/08PETSHOPBOYS5/merlin_135103359_cf4f7ab7-4453-4473-86ce-da2b7c630288-master675.jpg
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/03/08/arts/08PETSHOPBOYS1/merlin_134778060_73e61b60-134d-4b90-8386-f0ab6d72bd88-superJumbo.jpg

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