Behind the scenes at Scottish Ballet’s Alice

Theatre and film pounced on the possibilities offered by a Wonderland crammed with oddball characters and nonsensical twists in the tale but ballets based on Alice’s adventures rarely surface. Until now. This spring, two full-length dance works have come on stage in the UK. Christopher Wheeldon’s version for the Royal Ballet premiered to mixed reviews in London in February. Ashley Page’s Alice for Scottish Ballet has its first performance at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on Tuesday but first The Herald Magazine peered through the looking glass at the company’s Tramway headquarters for a tantalising glimpse of this new production.

Page and his designer Antony McDonald have already chalked up a series of highly successful, innovative collaborations with their reworked Christmas classics Nutcracker, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. But Alice is different. The story isn’t a straightforward page-to-stage tale. Chapter and verse unfurl by way of whimsical, clever wordplay that simply can’t be wrapped up in a succint visual image or a dance move. One other book, however, provides them with a way into Dodgson’s real and imaginary worlds: a book of his photographs.

Page explains: “It occured to us -- Antony and myself -- that if Dodgson hadn’t become famous as a writer of the Alice books, he would have become famous as a photographer. There are these images of Alice Liddell as a child, and she’s looking directly into the camera … and he’s captured something remarkable in that gaze, something that sent us back to the Alice books, to his apparent obsession with her and her interaction with him, feeling that Dodgson’s camera was the way into his imagination and her adventures in Wonderland.” 

Now, picture this. The curtain rises … Whoosh! In the click of a shutter Alice falls through the lens and into Dodgson’s camera, which helpfully disintegrates, becoming the high-sided framework for an onstage Wonderland depicted in a shifting backdrop of projections (some of them animated) and peopled with technicolour eccentrics in exuberantly witty costumes. Monochromely reminiscent of the original John Tenniel drawings it is not. “We wanted to avoid sepia-tinged nostalgia,” murmurs McDonald. A glance along the costume rails in the wardrobe department shows this to be no idle boast.

A sizzling little frock-coat in acid yellow with clashing polka dots is waiting to be fitted, along with matching tights and rainbow-layered tutu. It’s for one of the flowers. The exotic Tiger Lily will be danced by a ballerina -- her companion blooms will, however, be three men, all in contrary colour combinations, and all getting used to the feel of frou-frou frills at the thigh by wearing stiff practice tutus in rehearsal.

No fewer than 70 costumes have been crafted for this production, most of them -- like the 40 or so hats and headdresses -- with a teasing humour, or a sly little reference to a real person, sewn into the overall look. It’s one of the ways that McDonald, in collusion with Page, has acknowledged Dodgson’s penchant for alluding to his contemporaries either through word-play or in illustrations -- the Lion and Unicorn who figure in the follow-up book Through The Looking Glass bear a striking resemblance to Tenniel’s Punch cartoons of Gladstone and Disraeli, while the drawing of the Mad Hatter apparently looks like one Theophilus Carter, a furniture dealer known in Oxford for his unorthodox inventions.

The Hatter who’s on stage in the Alice ballet owes his eye-catching appearance to the late Sebastian Horsley, the self-styled Soho dandy who died last year. “Horsley was a tremendous peacock, wonderfully eccentric, full of flair,” says McDonald with undisguised relish. “There are so few genuine eccentrics around these days. Leigh Bowery [the Australian performance artist] was another, and he’s the inspiration for our Humpty Dumpty. We wanted audiences, whether they know the Alice books or not, to be aware of Dodgson’s innovative, surreal quality. The designs are one of the ways we can do that, one of the ways we can really celebrate the man’s eccentricities.

“Dodgson really mocked convention, really targeted stuffiness in the Alice books,” McDonald continues. “His life as a mathematician at Oxford was probably full of drab rules and dull people -- the dream-time of childhood, the bizarre realm of Wonderland, must have seemed a glorious escape from the mundane.” In fact, that imagined escape becomes a reality in the ballet, for -- liberated from the stolid black garb of an Oxford don -- a vividly red-suited Dodgson/Carroll follows Alice into her newfound Wonderland of curiouser and curiouser crazies.

Among those intriguing oddities is the Cheshire Cat, whose talent for disappearing -- leaving only a grin, mid-air -- is surely a challenge for both designer and dancer. American-born Quenby Hersh has been creating the role.

“I don’t vanish, no,” she says, “but I do kind of switch … When I’m with other people, I’m very cat-like in my movements because I’m a pet. But when I’m by myself I turn into a showgirl. My inner Vegas girl really comes out, all dancing and smiling -- which is fabulous for me, because I love smiling on stage, showing everyone how much I absolutely love what I do.”

Even in the Cat’s tight-fitting costume of boned corset, fishnet stockings and elaborate make-up? “Well, the briefs are very high cut, so I won’t have any problems moving my legs,” laughs Hersh, who clearly brings a glass-half-full attitude to the challenge.

She will, however, have to give herself plenty of time to reproduce the make-up look specially devised by Mac senior artist Caroline Donnelly. “My make-up is quite intricate,” agrees Hersh. “Caroline came in during rehearsals to show us how to do our individual looks. I don’t have cat’s whiskers, no, but I do have very dramatic eye make-up, with false eyelashes on both the top and bottom, which should be very interesting. I’ve never danced with bottom lashes before -- I’m going to have to be very careful with the glue, make sure they’re stuck on correctly, and that they don’t impede my vision.”

When Australian Tama Barry saw the costume sketches for the Hatter, he immediately reached for a top hat and used it every time he rehearsed his moves. “You need to know if it’s going to be a problem,” he says, before describing the actual titfer his character will be wearing. “Basically it’s three top hats in one. It’s about a foot high -- luckily everything’s joined together, but it’s still a bit of a challenge. The biggest challenge, though, is the character itself. Ashley and Antony explained who Sebastian was and why he was the inspiration for the Hatter. I think rehearsing with a hat right from the start helped give me the right kind of feeling for the character. He’s flamboyant, but you want that to be real, not any kind of pantomime camp that makes him ridiculous. I’ve actually danced in an Alice ballet before, back in Oz with Queensland Ballet. I was Tweedledum. It was fun, but nowhere near as complex, full of depth, as what we’re doing here with Ashley.”

You could say that Lewis Landini is coming to terms with the depths -- or rather the widths -- attached to his portrayal of Humpty Dumpty. A photograph of a rotundly bulbous Bowery, with paint dripping down his bald pate, had McDonald and Page chorusing “Humpty”. Landini’s character is an overgrown baby in a padded yellow romper, all tum and Beyonce bum, with a broken egg on his head. That egg-cap needs to be a snug fit. So Landini sits patiently while clingfilm is moulded to his skull and then reinforced with layer upon layer of Sellotape to form a rigid base for the milliner. He then surveys his new body shape in a mirror. It won’t be vanity but practicality that will slim down Humpty’s paunch -- all manner of moves have been choreographed for the character, and toppling over because of too much padding isn’t one of them.

One individual, however, is missing out on the leathers, feathers, neon-brights and polka dots, and that’s Alice. Tradition has prevailed here, and a little blue dress is hanging in the wardrobe department with Sophie Martin’s name on it. She jokes she was “a bit disappointed to only have this one costume to wear. Every time we do the big story ballets, I get to change costumes two, maybe three times. That’s what I loved to do as a kid too. I loved dancing, but I loved the shows, with all the dressing up and getting into the character most. But maybe, because there is so much happening on stage -- the playing cards, insects, flowers, all very elaborate -- it’s good that Alice has something so neat and simple.”

This wonderland adventure will, in all likelihood, be the last work Page creates at Scottish Ballet. For reasons that are still to be made clear beyond the confines of the ballet’s Tramway base, Page’s contract as artistic director will end in mid-2012. It’s not a subject that anyone brings into conversation, but -- rather like the Jabberwock that stalks the action as the Red Queen’s Executioner -- it’s hard to pretend it’s not the end of an era. Perhaps that’s why, just as Dodgson’s photographs hold a precious moment for all time, the photographs of this new ballet are not just a delight, but a truly special memory.

Visit www.scottishballet.co.uk..