From book to ballet?

Whenever anything I write is adapted for another medium, I’m always astonished how many people are involved. Unlike writing, film or play or dance are all, I realise, essentially team projects.

This realisation is followed by amazement at the way every detail is subjected to huge attention: a sort of ‘If I’d known you were going to have take all this trouble, I wouldn’t have made it so complicated!’ And then this guilty feeling is, if I’m lucky, followed by delight. A quite new work of art has been created from the basis I’ve provided.

It is a simple fact that a book must be altered if it’s to succeed on screen or on the stage. A book is unique in being able to display the inside life of a person: all other media can only give you the outside.

Everyone acknowledges this, although I confess that when I first saw the animated film based on my book Howl’s Moving Castle, I did feel that the director, Miyazaki, had taken advantage of this process of adaptation to introduce all his own favourite obsessions. He crammed the story full of flying machines and war scenes, all superbly animated, on the very thin basis that the King in my book was planning a war.

Miyazaki and I were both children in World War II and we seem to have gone opposite ways in our reactions to it. I tend to leave the actual war out of my work (we all know how horrible wars are), whereas Miyazaki (who feels just the same) has his cake and eats it, representing both the nastiness of a war and the exciting scenic effects of a big bombing raid. But the faint miffed feeling I had about this was very much smaller than the sheer awe I felt knowing that large numbers of people had spent several years painstakingly drawing and painting every frame in a very long movie.

So when Tom Armstrong and Susie Crow first approached me about making a ballet out of Black Maria, my first feeling was: however would they do it? Black Maria is a far more layered and complex story than Howl’s Moving Castle. It is full of magic. And it is a first person narrative, which makes it all the harder to adapt. But they explained that the music would contribute much – and that staging against a video background would add a further, deeper dimension.

They did this – and it was teamwork indeed. It took months of discussion, rearranging and cutting to pare the story down to its essentials, to adapt it for the small number of dancers they could afford, and then to fit the videos to the rest. And it worked.

I confess I was delighted. The story took a splendid shape from the sad and malignant start engineered by Aunt Maria, through her machinations and sinister tea parties with her coven and their brow beaten spouses, to the point where her schemes go wrong in the hunting scene, and then on to release, love and joy.

Zara Waldeback’s videos certainly pulled their weight. At times they simply set the scene, or showed what the scene was about, but at other times they worked in counterpoint to the stage action – and showed what was really going on. I can think of no better way to portray magic than this. On stage, Aunt Maria was either in her wheelchair or sinisterly standing: on the screen, she was a menacing silhouette, weilding her sticks like wands of power, or a huge face, dominating. This, I believe, is how magic is.

The choreography was at times menacing, brisk, lyrical or comical, in each case backed up by the music. There were times when I wanted to laugh, but didn’t quite like to because the man in the seat next to me was a Reporter Taking Notes, very seriously writing down each occasion when Tom’s music borrowed from Couperin or someone. And even where I knew what was going to happen, there were times when my heart was in my mouth, as in the pivotal hunting scene. The music here was wonderful, and Susie had actually gone to France and studied people hunting there – I was awed at her attention to detail – and then come home and got it right. As the browbeaten husbands suddenly turned Dominant Male, because hunting is men’s business, and all started pulling up big red socks, a small French child in the audience shouted out delightedly, ‘Ah-hah! La chasse!’ Which just shows you how much it pays to attend to detail.

Everyone I spoke to, not only me, said they were overwhelmed by the joyful ending, where music and dance were once again a perfect blend. I had difficulty believing that all this stemmed from something I had written.

In fact, it didn’t. It was the artistry of a whole team of people. I do hope they get a chance to perform it more than just the week they managed. It deserves much more.