San Francisco Ballet

conflict with "a lot of pull in, pull away; pull in, pull away. And constant hesitation — a wrapping inwards." To demonstrate, he shrinks his shoulders and collapses his chest. "It really expresses when someone is fragile or vulnerable." The duet for the Creature and Elizabeth is filled with promenades (poses that revolve in place) and reversals. "It's the struggle of no matter where you go, you're entangled," Cervera says. "He's completely in control of her." If you dig into the book's subtext, you might see Victor and the Creature as two aspects of one being. Scarlett addresses that interpretation by giving the same steps to both Victor and his creation, in very different contexts. "A section in the Creature and Elizabeth pas de deux is straight out of the Victor and Elizabeth pas de deux," says Cervera. "The same movement can look so different — with Victor it's loving; with the Creature it's aggressive. The Creature is trying to understand. His intention is not to hurt Elizabeth, necessarily. In the pas de deux, doing the same steps, he's saying, 'Love me — I'm doing the same thing Victor did. What is wrong with you?'" The Creature's desperate need for love is denied, and that's what changes him from benign to murderous. Scarlett says he tells the dancers that the Creature should feel like he's just been born. "He doesn't have a teacher," Scarlett says, "he doesn't have a parent to take him, pick him up, to laugh at his mistakes, to say that everything's going to be all right, or to teach him anything. He relies on mimicking," without understanding what he's doing. The Creature searches for Victor, his creator/parent, and when he finds him, he gets not love but rejection. In his solo, he discovers who — or what — he is when he realizes that all the drawings and data in Victor's notebook pertain to him, that he was assembled from parts of dead men. Then the final inscription: "Experiment failed." With that revelation comes deep pain. "Your scars and your stitches should ache," Scarlett says. A turning point comes when the Creature accidentally kills Victor's younger brother, William, and discovers that he can get Victor's attention by taking away what he loves. In Frankenstein, the big-picture aspects — choreography, dramatic arc, visual elements, and music — combine to tell a compelling story. But the dancers must tend to subtleties too, conveying action or revealing their characters through small, still moments. Doing this can be difficult. "As a dancer you always associate movement with expressing something and stillness with being vacuous," Cervera says. "But Liam says, 'Don't be afraid of stillness; it can tell so much about a character.'" All of these aspects add up to what Tomasson calls Frankenstein's "theatrical drama," one of the ballet's strengths. "At the end of the first act, you can't wait to see what comes next, and the same thing at the end of the second act," he says. "Even though you know [the story], you can't wait to see what he has done with it." Frances Chung and Joseph Walsh rehearsing Scarlett's Frankenstein // © Erik Tomasson 2017 SEASON GUIDE SAN FRANCISCO BALLET 63

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