The National Arts Centre hosts Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet Jan. 22-24 as the famed dance company performs an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s award-winning 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.
The story, which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, was adapted through theatre and film, but this is the first time it’s being represented through dance.
“It’s great to see the combination of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, which is such a great premiere dance company, working with an iconic Canadian novelist,” says Eleri Evans, the marketing and communications officer of NAC’s dance department.
Evans says it’s noteworthy that the 30th anniversary of the story is being celebrated in Atwood’s hometown. The Booker Prize-winning, 75-year-old writer was born in 1939 at the Ottawa Civic Hospital.
Lila York, the choreographer, was taken by the timelessness of the story. “Even though it was written in the mid-’80s, it is so timely right now,” she says.
The novel is about a futuristic United States, called the “Republic of Gilead,” where women’s rights no longer exist. The totalitarian government took power in a coup d’état and rule in a Big Brother-like fashion.
York explains the moment that the lead character loses her whole life overnight caught her attention.
“It had such a ring of truth, specifically that moment, that instantaneous ripping away of the rights of women. The shock of it stayed with me for a very long time and so I’ve always really wanted to work on this material.”
When it came to adapting the book to dance, York found, it was possible to translate all the action in the story into movement.
But she also admits there were some difficulties.
“I felt conflicting pressures within me to be true to the novel and also at the same time, my intention was not to terrify audiences – so I felt that I was treading a line as it is a very, very scary novel.”
She said she know there would be children in the audience.
“I wanted it to be abstracted enough that they could bring their children to it without it feeling too upsetting for them.”
Other challenging elements, according to York, were the inner thoughts of Offred, one of the protagonists in the novel.
York got some help from Atwood.
Jane Puchniak, public relations coordinator for Royal Winnipeg Ballet, says that York was in contact with the author during the creative process through email, but the ballet adaptation was entirely the creation of the choreographer.
The Handmaid’s Tale is not Atwood’s first novel to be artistically adapted, but it is the first to be danced. In 2004, the famous story was also made into an opera by the Canadian Opera Company. In 2007, the NAC collaborated with Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company to present the play, The Penelopiad
Norma Sue Fisher-Stitt, a professor at York University’s dance department, says it’s common for ballets to be inspired by literature. She gives the example of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and the Grimm Brothers’ Cinderella.
She explains that dance is a great way to tell emotional stories because “you certainly can get an immediate feel for the emotions that underline the relationships and see that in a very physical form.”
Cathy Levy, the NAC’s executive director of dance, writes in the official house program for the show that York’s adaptation is “fascinating” and “bold.”