Fashion
A ‘Crime and Punishment’ Ballet? It’s Not as ‘Ludicrous’ as It Seems.
“Why can’t ballet be a roller coaster?” Helen Pickett said of her and James Bonas’s full-length work, premiering this week at American Ballet Theater.
To make a narrative ballet based on “Crime and Punishment” might seem, in the words of the director James Bonas, “sort of ludicrous.”
Yet that is what Bonas and the choreographer Helen Pickett have done. Their two-hour “Crime and Punishment” for American Ballet Theater has its world premiere at Lincoln Center on Wednesday.
Acknowledging that the idea sounds inadvisable, Bonas and Pickett explained in interviews what they saw instead as promising: Dostoyevsky’s hefty 19th-century novel has a clear dramatic line, and a small core of complex characters — above all the protagonist, Raskolnikov, a family-loving, generous, self-sacrificing fighter against injustice, who is also a murderer.
“That sort of internal conflict and dramatic friction you can really articulate in dance,” Bonas said in a phone interview, “because you’re not in a literal space.”
And the book is a will-he-get-caught page-turner, Pickett added after a rehearsal last week. “Why can’t ballet be a roller coaster,” she said, “something you watch on the edge of your seat as we do with film?”
