deep cut: hansel and gretel

Nearly a year ago, choreographer Christa St. John of the UVU Department of Dance approached us about producing a dance projection for Hansel and Gretel. We first worked with her as a graduate student at the OU School of Dance. Unlike Divertimento–our original projection partnership featuring a soloist and abstract visuals–Hansel and Gretel is a much longer ballet that tells a widely known story.

For Hansel and Gretel, St. John and her husband, composer Brian St. John, condensed the original two-act ballet into a one-act, forty-minute ballet. St. John and her codirector Jamie Johnson proposed a projection to enhance the viewing experience.

Here’s a statement from the codirectors about why they wanted to commission a projection:

“The use of projection with ballet is a merger of two worlds – technology with artistry. The movement potential within the projected form enhances the living movement on the stage for an immersive experience.”

The original proposal involved three scenes total: Hansel and Gretel’s home, the woods, and the Witch’s candy house, which we stayed true to in the final animation, but the scope and goals of the scenes evolved over the months of production.

St. John provided us with invaluable preproduction resources including a rough storyboard with design inspiration timed to the music, an outline of both the dance and the projection, and costume and set design sketches. Together, we ironed out the timing and text for the animation while we worked ahead on the design of each scene.

To accommodate the text, we formatted the projection as a storybook, with a title cover and page turns as scene transitions. The page frame around the scenes gave us room to scale the images up and down, allowing a text block when the audience needed to read something. When there wasn’t text onscreen, we scaled up the imagery up to be more dominant in the environment.

A few considerations for the stage setup were contrast, text readability, and avoiding shadows cast by the dancers. Fortunately, the animation was not too dependent on the choreography. There were only a couple of interactions between the dancers and the projection that needed to be precise. The few choreography elements we needed to establish in advance were about set placements and certain movements, like where the Witch’s oven would be placed onstage for the poof of smoke animation and which direction Hansel and Gretel walked through the woods (stage right or stage left, upstage or downstage).

The power of storytelling is strengthened by all the elements that came together in this ballet: dance, music, costume and set design, and projection. Hansel and Gretel is a gruesome fairy tale, and the bleak plot is juxtaposed with the beauty of ballet and the soft, watercolor visuals, creating tension. A standout scene happens about midway–Hansel and Gretel spend the night in the woods, and fireflies appear onstage and onscreen. Lightness in the darkness.

Thank you to the St. Johns, Johnson, and UVU for working with us on this project!