Dance

How do you create a world premiere out of a dance that was first performed back in 1939? That’s the conundrum Mark Baldwin, Rambert Dance Company’s artistic director, was faced with when he decided to take on ‘Lady into Fox’.

What he’s ended up doing is surrounding the original Andrée Howard ballet with a scene-setting prologue along with a dramatic epilogue. ‘Lady into Fox’ is now 40 minutes long. When it was last seen by audiences, in Paris in 1950, it was only about 25 minutes long. Feature continues

‘When it was first choreographed,’ Baldwin explains, ‘the novel it’s based on was a big bestseller. In today’s terms, it would be like doing “The Da Vinci Code” – everyone would know what they’re looking at. Nowadays, no one will know in advance what this is all about. So it was my job to try to make everything as clean and clear as possible.’

‘Lady into Fox’ is a bizarre little fable that offers up no logical explanation of its central incident – a proper Edwardian wife who is suddenly transformed into a vixen. ‘In the original,’ Baldwin says, ‘there is no explanation. The author, David Garnett, simply says “make of it what you will.” So I thought I’d make of it what I could.’

Baldwin has been bold in his approach. He’s opted to recreate ‘Lady into Fox’ as a new work of his own ‘inspired’ by Howard’s original. ‘It’s a brand new production incorporating all we have left, which,’ he says, ‘is a silent 12-minute black-and-white film shot by a friend of one of the original dancers. It’s invaluable, of course, but it just isn’t enough to tell us “this is exactly how it was”.