Glorious music, spectacular choreography and a heart-melting love story set in one of America’s most colorful cities.
La Bohème, the first full-length ballet created by BalletMet Artistic Director Remi Wörtmeyer for BalletMet, paints a portrait of young bohemian artists scraping by through love, loss, and heartache against the beguiling backdrop of The Big Easy.
BalletMet premieres Wörtmeyer’s La Bohème May 13-17 in the Riffe Center’s Davidson Theatre, Downtown Columbus. The Columbus Symphony Orchestra will accompany the dancers in an instrumental arrangement of Giacomo Puccini’s music for his opera La Bohème, the theatrical inspiration for Wörtmeyer’s ballet and one of the world’s best-loved operas.
Puccini’s famously romantic and sumptuous score for La Bohème was much of what appealed to Wörtmeyer.
“I’m in love with Puccini’s music,” Wörtmeyer said. “The music is so big and so powerful and so sensitive in moments and so descriptive, and I really just love how narrative-driven the music is. I do love choreographers who really take a narrative and express it through every single choreographic choice. Every step, everything has to drive the narrative content. And I love that that also exists very firmly in Puccini’s music.”
Based on Scènes de la vie de bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life), a collection of vignettes by 19th-century French novelist Henri Murger, the original story of La Bohème revolves around the lives and loves of bohemian artists in Paris’ fabled Latin Quarter of the 1800s. The poignant romance of Mimì and Rodolfo unfolds as they and their friends struggle to survive amid poverty and poor health, ultimately to a tragic end.
Puccini’s score for the opera—a classic of post-Romantic Italian verismo, or “realism”—couches the hardscrabble lives of real people in musical storytelling that stirs the soul.
“The tragic story of Mimì and Rodolfo, I think, is such a beautiful story to tell through ballet because it’s unlike the happily-ever-after stories. It’s not the traditional happy kind of heroic story that we might expect to see in a ballet, but it is a very human story with human people, and I think that’s beautiful to explore in ballet, as well,” Wörtmeyer said.
The touching love story and Puccini’s ravishing music unfold against the backdrop of the French Quarter of 1920s New Orleans in Wörtmeyer’s La Bohème. A trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras inspired Wörtmeyer, a native of Australia, to move the ballet’s setting from Paris to America.
“I wanted it to have a very new take, or a different perspective from the original,” Wörtmeyer said. “And now being an expat who has actually moved from Europe, I thought, why don’t I take that and put an American twist on it?”
That twist places the action of the ballet in the thriving bohemian artist community of 1920s New Orleans. During the ‘20s, jazz, booze (despite Prohibition in the U.S.) all types of good times rolled through Paris and New Orleans, which came to be known as the “Paris of the Mississippi.”
Wörtmeyer’s La Bohème sees the principal characters designing puppets and costumes for their neighborhood’s small Mardi Gras parade and selling Mardi Gras beads to make a much-needed buck, then banding together to restore their neighborhood after a hurricane.
In this distinctly American setting, Wörtmeyer’s contemporary choreography tells the poignant tale of bohemians in life and love with a sensual realism only the human body can muster.
“Dance has the ability to be a very human, a very sincere, honest art form,” Wörtmeyer said. “I think that dance is in that unique position where it can go both to the fairy tale, but it can also express very human, very sensitive feeling and emotion and narrative that we all understand.”
BalletMet premieres Remi Wörtmeyer’s La Bohème with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, May 13-17 in the Riffe Center’s Davidson Theatre, Downtown Columbus.
