Cleopatra - revised links

Two linked features Published in May in The National in the UAE about the Northern Ballet's production of a new ballet Cleopatra.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-stage/cleopatra-reigns-at-the-ballet


Cleopatra Ballet
Published by The National in the UAE May 2011

What do we really know of Cleopatra, the tragic final pharaoh of Egypt who seduced the two most powerful men of her era, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and struggled to protect her Empire from Roman domination?

Over the centuries countless creative works have fed the myth of the femme fatale and obscured the historical facts.

“Pretty much everyone thinks they know about Cleopatra, but they don’t really know who she was at all, “ says David Nixon, artistic director of Britain’s Northern Ballet and creator of “Cleopatra”, a new full length piece of dance theatre. “And that provides a choreographer with a great deal of scope.” His aim was to get closer to the real Cleopatra.

“We don’t even really know what she looked like or if she was actually a great beauty.” An Egyptian coin is the only confirmed image of Cleopatra though a bust in a Berlin museum shows a woman who may be Cleopatra with her hair in the popular roman style of the era.

And yet the some of the most beautiful actresses of stage and screen have been cast to play this beguiling woman – icons such as Elizabeth Taylor and Claudette Colbert.

In the Northern Ballet production, a newer beauty plays the Queen, the American ballerina Martha Leebolt. Nixon built the ballet around the 28-year-old. The dancer, who moved to Britain ten years ago from her native California, has just been awarded the title of Britain’s Outstanding Female Ballet Performer. She sees Cleopatra as her career highpoint.



“What an amazing story. She is such an iconic woman. You couldn’t really ask for a better part to be created on you - to have Cleopatra be your ballet. She was such a strong and powerful woman, especially for her time when men ruled everything. To be able to play such a commanding woman on stage is hard, but is really rewarding.”

The music is by the French composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, whose successes include two international hit musicals “Miss Saigon” and “Les Miserables”. He first worked with Nixon ten years ago when the Canadian choreographer took over as artistic director of the company.

The company is based in the Yorkshire industrial city of Leeds. “Cleopatra” is their first new ballet for two years and is touring Britain this spring and autumn. Nixon, one of Britain’s most prolific choreographers, was awarded an OBE last year for his work with the company and its dance academy.

Nixon and Schonberg’s first collaboration was “Wuthering Heights,” originally intended for another dance company. “I was quite new to the job and the chief executive said he had been sent this CD of a score for “Wuthering Heights” by Schonberg.

“ At first I was a little bit…I said, well who’s that? And he said he is just the composer of “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon”. I thought, ‘Oh my god! “Les Miserables” was my absolute favourite musical always. So I listened to it and it was really beautiful music.”

It was a big success and afterwards the two men agreed to collaborate again. Nixon had already been nurturing the idea of a ballet about Cleopatra for some years. But the first scenario commissioned, from a German dramaturge, didn’t work. The idea was put aside.

A decade later Nixon revived it and worked quietly with Schonberg before bringing in the company’s long-term co-director, Patricia Doyle to help re-think the story structure.

Schonberg became enthusiastic. He says: “When you talk about someone like say, Mother Theresa you don’t imagine her on stage, but with Cleopatra - it is easy to imagine seeing her danced on stage. I wrote ten minutes of music. He listened and loved it and I kept going and wrote and wrote music and so he surrendered and said, ‘I am going to do it.’ ”

So with a musical score and the lead dancer decided, Nixon had to grapple with translating the complexities of the history and the myth into a compelling piece of ballet theatre.

Cleopatra VII was a member of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. Her wider fame came after she began a romance with Julius Caesar with whom she had a child, and then, after his murder, with Mark Antony. This was her undoing. After losing in his rebellion against Rome, Antony killed himself. Cleopatra then ended her own life, famously by clasping a snake to her bosom.

The West has largely focused on this romantic tragedy largely ignoring her struggle to preserve a dynasty and an empire. But Medieval Arab scholars often referred to her as “the virtuous scholar” according to London based academic Dr Okasha el-Daly and marvelled at her intellectual prowess - a mastery of alchemy, philosophy, mathematics, languages and even town planning.

In re-imagining Cleopatra, Nixon and Patricia Doyle did extensive research. So did Martha Leebolt. “There is a lot of information, but how much is really concrete? There are a lot of myths. So in preparation I read a lot and saw as many films about her as I could. Even looking at pictures can get your mind going. You make your own character by taking information from so many different places.


“I became really intrigued with her. You wonder how she did what she did - to rule Egypt and have love affairs with the two greatest men of her time? She must have been very intelligent. She must have had more than just her sexuality to achieve what she did. “

Nixon says: “I don’t think beauty alone could sustain her fame for 2,000 years. To hold these two powerful men in her hands, there must have been much more. They must have felt she was equal in many ways or perhaps even superior.

“For me Cleopatra is an epic woman, like Alexander the Great. She had qualities above the normal and that includes intelligence. She spoke between seven to 11 languages and was trained as an orator and she would have used her training in how she spoke to these people. She was certainly more educated than Mark Antony, possibly than Julius Caesar. And at the same time, she was a woman, a mother, and a lover. Although she is often portrayed as a whore, there is no evidence she was unfaithful to either of them and in fact there is a strong suggestion she was a virgin when she slept with Caesar.”

Getting to the truth about Cleopatra has challenged scholars for centuries. The Roman poet Horace first created the notion of her as the great seductress and the popular perception of her has been dominated by Shakespeare and Shaw’s great plays about her love life.

The first account of her life was written by the Greek Plutarch two hundred years after her death. There are only a handful of accounts by people who actually met her and their objectivity is doubtful.




The newest biography of Cleopatra is by the American writer Stacy Schiff who says she deserves to be remembered not as a sexual adventuress but: “as the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in western affairs."

But Schiff adds: “She descended from a long line of murderers and kept up that tradition.” Cleopatra was one of five siblings. Her father killed the eldest and Cleopatra was behind the death of the others.

She says that by the standards of her time she was fairly well behaved. If the Romans had not defeated her, her own son might eventually have plotted her killing in the sort of dynastic struggle common in some places today.

Nixon’s ballet doesn’t avoid this darker history. There is a graphic portrayal of her killing of the brother with whom she joint ruler. Nixon says he wanted to tell the story of her whole life, not simply offer another version of the love story.

Martha Leebolt says: “Cleopatra was willing to do anything to be Queen and take care of her country. There are parts about her you do admire because she is so strong, but parts you certainly don’t want to have in your own character.”

How do you compress such complexity into dance, which must tell its tale through movement, gesture and music without words? Nixon says: “You can’t get everything across in a ballet over a couple of hours. The point of the piece was to give an overview of her. From that we arrive at the legend. We get the differences in her loves, that she is a woman who knows grief and sorrow and success. We get elements of her intelligence through the decisions she makes. We have given her the premonition before the Ides of March. She sensed the mood of the people and she was very protective of her child and she had to flee when things went wrong. I never profess that in dance we can tell everything, but it is the physical image of a woman in movement that captures something extraordinary – and in dance you can capture that element of Cleopatra better than in any other genre.”

The production draws heavily upon Egyptian iconography. Martha Leebolt adds: “A lot of the Egyptian characters use vocabulary in their movements that is slinky and fluid with hand gestures drawn from hieroglyphics. But not too much otherwise it would clichéd. The Egyptians are very fluid and the movement never ends. The Roman men are much sharper and more angular.”

Cliché is also avoided in the music. Schonberg eschewed familiar dashes of orientalism in his score or the use of trumpets and brass for the Romans.

One of the ballet’s most remarkable devices is to turn the snake the Queen used in her suicide into her personal God Wadjet, who tracks her from the beginning to the end of the play – a remarkable performance of serpentine sinuosity by the young Scottish actor Kenneth Tindall.

The company went into rehearsal with Cleopatra at the beginning of this year after a visit to China. The first night was in Leeds in late February. Now the company is on the road with the show – an entourage of around 100 people.

For Martha Leebolt 2011 will have been the year of Cleopatra – and she has no real sense of what role comes next. The life of a dancer is tough and injuries common.

But the emotional commitment is equally intense. “This is an exhausting role. You are on stage almost all the time and for all of the weeks of rehearsal and performance you eat, breathe and sleep Cleopatra – 100 per cent Cleopatra. On stage I am in Egypt and at night I dream about it. You have to live it.”

ENDS


http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-stage/cleopatra-in-the-arts-through-the-ages

Cleopatra in the popular imagination
Published in The National in the UAE May 2011

John Kelleher


Cleopatra the femme fatale has peered at the world through Kohl rimmed eyes for centuries – and the world has gazed back in wonder at the first great global celebrity.

The Greek writer Plutarch first wrote about her in a book called “Parallel Lives” sometime around 100 AD. He said she met Antony: “at the very time when women have the most brilliant beauty and are at the acme of intellectual power.” Roman historian Cassius Dio went further. She was, he said: “a woman of surpassing beauty.”

But neither actually saw her and were writing long after her death. They spawned an enduring myth which has been sustained ever since by books, ballets, operas, films and paintings. She remains one of the most famous women in history.

Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw both wrote plays about her famous romances and these have inspired a continuing flow of other dramatic portrayals.

Most great actresses seem to have played Cleopatra at some stage in their careers and she has featured in films since the dawn of the movies.

Oddly her first cinematic outing was as a mummy in a French silent film made in 1899 by Jeanne D’Alcy. The first full-length film about her was the 1908 American feature “Antony and Cleopatra” starring the Canadian actress Florence Lawrence, star of more than 270 films.

The first movie Cleopatra whose fame endures today featured Theda Bara, the silent screen’s greatest vamp. But only 17 seconds survive of her 1917 film “Cleopatra.”

As soon as the talkies arrived the most glamorous actresses of the day were cast in the role - Claudette Colbert in a 1934 film, Vivien Leigh opposite Claude Rains in 1945’s “Caesar and Cleopatra”, Rhonda Fleming in the 1953 saga “Serpent Of The Nile” and, most memorably, Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra” opposite her future husband Richard Burton. Their own romance blossomed though this 1963 film legendarily nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

It was followed swiftly by the 1964 spoof, “Carry On Cleo” starring Amanda Barrie. A similarly playful take on the queen was offered in two French animated films “Asterix and Cleopatra” and “Asterix and Obelix meet Cleopatra.”

But the queen’s magic still seduces filmmakers. Two contemporary goddesses of the big screen are lined up to play her. Angelina Jolie is expected to star in a 3D blockbuster of her story based on a new biography by American writer Stacy Schiff.

And the Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is tipped to star in another 3D version of the story – this time a rock musical - opposite Ray Winstone.

Cinema may bring Cleo to mass audiences, but theatre, opera and ballet have also shown a continuing preoccupation with her tale. Handel, Berlioz, Massenet, Scarlatti, Samuel Barber are among more than 20 composers who’ve based operas around her.

Ballet companies have been presenting the Queen ever since Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe staged Michel Fokine’s choreographed “Cleopatre” in St Petersburg and then Paris in 1908.

Most recently the Houston Ballet Company toured their 2000 production of “Cleopatra”, choreographed by Ben Stevenson to music by Rimsky-Korsakov. It was the Queen’s last dance appearance on a British stage until Northern Ballet’s production.