Just before Nick Carraway meets Jay Gatsby in his big mansion on West Egg, the party his neighbor is throwing for a large number of people is in full Roaring Twenties swing.
And inevitably, that means dancing, from “old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles” to “a great number of single girls dancing individualistically,” all of it part of the atmosphere of moneyed excess and youthful abandon that plays such an important of the backdrop of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic Jazz Age novel, The Great Gatsby.
“Making this, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how we do yearn for things,” says Colleen Smith, artistic director of Ballet Palm Beach. “We yearn for stuff we can’t have, that isn’t even good for us.”
Smith has incorporated that into Gatsby, a new full-length ballet based on the Fitzgerald novel, which will premiere Friday and Saturday at its home venue at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Smith loves “to make new work,” and Gatsby joins recent creations of hers such as Wonderland, based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels; Simple Symphony, set to Benjamin Britten’s work of the same name; and Fish Tales, a series of seaside vignettes choreographed to ballet music by Mozart.
The 16-person ballet, which is in two acts and lasts about 80 minutes, is an all-adult show, unlike most of this company’s work, which features children. Six main players dance out the novel’s tragedy, and the corps de ballet consists of eight flappers who also move scenery.
The music for Gatsby is a combination of period music, including songs Fitzgerald mentions such as “Ain’t We Got Fun?” and “The Sheik of Araby,” plus performances by Fats Waller and Django Reinhardt, along with the Clarinet Concerto of Aaron Copland and City Scenes, a jazz suite for four clarinets by the British teacher and composer Terence J. Thompson.
The clarinet, indeed, takes on an important musical significance.
“The clarinet is the unifying theme throughout the whole ballet,” she said. “When Nick is the key player in a scene, there’s just that clarinet quartet. When Gatsby is moving, and he’s the primary character in a scene, it’s a fully orchestrated work.”
Among that performers taking part in the show are French-born dancer Jessica Dandine as Daisy opposite native Floridian Tyveze Littlejohn as Gatsby; Reinhard von Rabenau, who like Fitzgerald is from Minnesota, dances the role of Nick / Fitzgerald, and Leah Heller will be seen in the role of Jordan Baker.
Smith created this ballet in collaborative fashion, working with dancers with whom she shares a vast knowledge of movement vocabulary.
“I can say to them: ‘This movement needs to go down against the floor, I need you to turn and touch his face, and he’s going to lead down toward you and kiss you. Now we’re going to put that in ballet movement,’” Smith said. “And that’s how we make the work.”
Smith also conceived the entire look of the production, which she thinks is an important part of bringing out the novel’s special character, and began putting it together by thinking from scratch about the best way to craft a communicative vehicle.
“How am I going to elicit the right feeling from the audience and do justice to the beautiful words he chooses?” she said. “How am I going to do something so that when people come to it, their expectation will be sort of met, but be true to the book, and true to how we communicate in this company?”
Excerpts from the ballet were first seen in public at the end of last month, when Ballet Palm Beach dancers joined the Palm Beach Symphony for an outdoor concert at the Meyer Amphitheatre that also featured Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. In May, the company will present more Prokofiev, when it offers two performances of the Russian master’s ballet Cinderella.
As Gatsby makes its debut, Smith says many of the novel’s themes work well as metaphors for the artistic life, and in meeting with the dancers about doing the show, she spent much time talking to them their own lives and where they were in their artistic careers.
“And here I am dealing with this book that’s all about wanting, and about investing your entire life in it. Which is what Gatsby did: He invested his entire life in a pipe dream,” she said.
If you go
Gatsby is set for 7:30 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Saturday at the Eissey Campus Theatre, Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets: $17-$37. Call 207-5900 or visit www.balletpalmbeach.org.