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This month, Peninsula Ballet Theatre is staging a heavy hitter — and not just because the title character famously takes big swings at windmills. The headliner of the company’s spring repertory program is a reimagining of the ballet “Don Quixote,” originally created by one of the biggest names in classical ballet, Marius Petipa.
“Don Quixote” anchors the program, which also features the world premieres of three dance works: “Slant of the Earth” by London-based choreographer Marika Brussel; “Tis But a Jest” by choreographer Naomi Sailors, also a Peninsula Ballet Theatre company member; and “In This Light” by Peninsula Ballet Theatre Artistic Director Gregory Amato. Performances take place April 11-12 and at the Woodside Performing Arts Center.
“We’ve been wanting to do contemporary rep that highlighted female choreographers and the strength of women in dance, as dancers, as choreographers, as collaborators, as my muse. Then we wanted to bring the audience in with our classical side by using one of the most well known classical dances of ‘Don Quixote,’ usually a three-act ballet, but we’ve condensed it into one act, and we call it ‘Kitri’s Wedding,'” Amato said.
Petipa’s original version of “Don Quixote,” which debuted in 1869, featured five acts. That was later reduced to three acts by Alexander Gorsky, whose 1902 revival of the ballet has become the basis for most modern productions, according to the Marius Petipa Society.
Peninsula Ballet Theatre’s reimagining, choreographed by Amato and the company’s ballet mistress, Nina Amato, focuses on what Amato calls the “iconic” wedding scene for the principal character Kitri and her beau, Basilio.
“It’s iconic because it’s been performed in every country in the world. Every ballet company that’s ever done ballet has done ‘Don Quixote,'” Amato said, noting that the technically demanding wedding scene is also frequently performed by dancers at competitions.
“There’s so much great music from Ludwig Minkus, an Austrian composer, music that is just meant to dance to. It’s full, it’s vibrant, it’s alive, and it’s a great showpiece for the individual talents of dancers, especially the principal dancers. All the best dancers in the world, they’re all judged and compared by ‘Well, how did they do ‘Don Quixote?'”
That may sound like serious stuff, but on the contrary, Amato emphasized the ballet’s joyful spirit, which finds the artists dancing with fans, tambourines, and unusually, even features the dancers vocalizing. This grand classical ballet can sometimes lend itself to over-the-top stagings — some productions have even brought horses onstage, he said. Despite the production taking place in horse-friendly Woodside, there won’t be equine co-stars, but Peninsula Ballet Theatre’s “Don Quixote” captures the tale’s high spirits.
“There’s a lot of comedy in it, which is great for ballet. Nobody dies, nobody has a broken heart. Nobody’s cheating. It’s really just great fun,” he said.
Another light-hearted piece that takes influence from the courtly past is “Tis But a Jest” by company member Naomi Sailors. The new piece, one of the program’s three world premieres, is centered on an escalating showdown between entertainers at a royal court and treats the audience like a king.
“It’s about a court jester and four court ladies, and the sixth character is actually the audience. The audience is the character of the king. A court jester has his weekly performance for the king, and four of the court ladies have decided that they want in on it. So they’re crashing his performance,” Sailors said of the story behind the piece.
“The idea is that he has coached (each of) them through a different skill. So one is drama, one is poetry, one is music, and one is comedy. They try to one up each other a little bit, or find ways to mess up the other person’s performance.”
Sailors was inspired to create the piece by Léo Delibes’ bright and bounding composition “Le roi s’amuse” (the king amuses himself), to which the piece is set.
“It started with the music. With my choreographic process, I pretty much always start with music, and it’ll usually be a piece of music that I’ve just listened to for a while, or I come across, and then the story forms itself the more I listen to the piece of music. Where this started was I really loved ‘Le roi s’amuse’. It’s just been a favorite of mine for a while, and I started listening to it again last year and decided, ‘this needs movement.’ From there, the story just came into being,” Sailors said.
Visually, the piece draws on medieval imagery, with the dancers sometimes moving in symmetrical or circular formations and making long, angular deliberately affected poses, suggesting the pomp of a royal court.
“I was really inspired by those weird medieval paintings of cats wearing clothes, dancing with bagpipes. I looked at a lot of those images, and tried to derive some of the movement from what I saw in that, so a lot of circles, just a lot of the angular shapes of the body,” Sailors said, “and a few things that are drawn from ballet, what we call character dance, which is like folk dancing, just to give it a little bit more of that old European element.”
Sailors will dance in every piece on the spring repertory program except her own. That includes a new work by Amato that has particular personal inspiration for him.
“In This Light” is set to music by Italian pianist and composer Ezio Bosso, who Amato describes as a favorite of his. Bosso, who had a neurodegenerative disease, lost feeling in his fingers and could no longer play, but still composed and conducted until his death at age 48 in 2020, which coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amato had begun to work on a piece based on Bosso’s music when the pandemic disrupted it.
“I was really inspired that he continued to work through adversities in life. During that lockdown period of COVID, which is why I call it ‘In This Light,’ there was only a few dancers I worked with because of masking and (distancing), and one of them was Chloe Watson, who was one of my lead principal dancers, and this is her farewell performance,” Amato said.
“It’s really a big thing in the dance world when a ballerina retires, and Chloe’s been dancing professionally for 20 years, and I’ve known her for eight years. She not only is an incredible dancer, she’s also helped me bring (Peninsula Ballet Theatre’s) school through COVID. She helped me build the company. And because I’ve choreographed a lot of things on Chloe, I wanted to do this as her last show.”
Using Bosso’s piece “Rain, in your black eyes,” the piece is set on nine dancers and highlights Watson.
“(Chloe) really shines in it. It’s about personal transformation,transcending all these things that happen to us and then renewal, and Chloe is moving into the next part of her life. So she’s moving into a new light,” Amato said.
Performances take place April 11, 7 p.m, and April 12, 2 p.m., at Woodside Performing Arts Center, 199 Churchill Ave., Woodside. $40-$60. peninsulalivelyarts.org/don-quixote.
