To make a narrative ballet based on “Crime and Punishment” might seem, in the words of the director James Bonas, “sort of ludicrous.”
Yet that is what Bonas and the choreographer Helen Pickett have done. Their two-hour “Crime and Punishment” for American Ballet Theater has its world premiere at Lincoln Center on Wednesday.
Acknowledging that the idea sounds inadvisable, Bonas and Pickett explained in interviews what they saw instead as promising: Dostoyevsky’s hefty 19th-century novel has a clear dramatic line, and a small core of complex characters — above all the protagonist, Raskolnikov, a family-loving, generous, self-sacrificing fighter against injustice, who is also a murderer.
“That sort of internal conflict and dramatic friction you can really articulate in dance,” Bonas said in a phone interview, “because you’re not in a literal space.”
And the book is a will-he-get-caught page-turner, Pickett added after a rehearsal last week. “Why can’t ballet be a roller coaster,” she said, “something you watch on the edge of your seat as we do with film?”
Bonas and Pickett have been exploring these ideas about narrative dance since they first teamed up in 2019 to adapt the Arthur Miller play “The Crucible” for Scottish Ballet. Last year they did the same with “Madame Bovary” for the National Ballet of Canada, and they are working on a “Macbeth” for Dutch National Ballet’s 2025 season.
Pickett, a classically trained dancer, moved into choreography after more than a decade with William Forsythe’s forward-thinking Ballet Frankfurt and a brief turn as an actor with the boldly experimental theater company the Wooster Group. Bonas, trained as an actor, expanded from directing theater, opera and physical theater into dance with Pickett.
“We sort of met in the middle,” he said.
Susan Jaffe, Ballet Theater’s artistic director, has been supporting Pickett’s choreography for years in previous leadership roles. Commissioning a full-length ballet from Pickett was a risk, Jaffe said, a high-cost first alliance of choreographer and company. “But Helen has enough under her belt that the chances of it being successful are great,” she said. (The company declined to disclose the budget.)
It was Bonas who suggested the Dostoyevsky novel. “It’s my fault,” he said.
Reading the book, Pickett said, she was attracted to the characters and the way they are shaped by poverty. But she also sensed a certain velocity that made the words feel like movement. “And then I can find the cadence within the changes of speed,” she added, rising from her seat to demonstrate how some ballet steps start fast and finish slowly, or the reverse, conveying shifts between hesitation and decision.
Pickett and Bonas began by condensing Dostoevsky’s story into a Google Doc they called a treatment, with scenes and timing. They shared it with the composer Isobel Waller-Bridge (sister of the actor-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who created the score in close collaboration with Pickett. “When we get into the room with the dancers,” Bonas said, “we have a strong narrative framework.”
The movement is a blend of classical steps, a Forsythean heightening of torque and a lot of speechlike gestures. It is common for ballet choreographers to teach steps first and add characterization later. “I don’t understand that,” Pickett said. As Bonas put it, “dancers ought to express character through the movement, not on top of it.”
Raskolnikov, for example, is a man in pieces, not put together in a neat way, so that is how he moves. Pickett looked for dancers with that quality, she said, regardless of gender. The Lincoln Center run will feature Herman Cornejo in the part, but also Cassandra Trenary (in the first cast) and the soloist Breanne Granlund (in the third).
“Raskolnikov isn’t a they or a she,” Bonas said. “The character is just being played by men and women, like Glenda Jackson playing King Lear.” In the conventionally gendered world of ballet, in which men lift women, Raskolnikov isn’t the typical male lead. “He’s not lifting anybody,” Bonas said.
The dancers cast in the role, he added, “have an emotional openness that gives the audience a problem — you feel for the murderer, you want them not to get caught.”
Trenary said she doesn’t feel she is playing a particular gender. She recalled a rehearsal when Tal Yarden, the video designer, praised her for taking on the physical presence of a young man. “I don’t know what you’re seeing,” she responded. “I’m just being myself.”
Creating movement and character at once was a little overwhelming at first, Trenary said, but finding the character in her mind and body grew exciting — at times shocking. “It’s fun what I’ve unearthed in myself,” she said.
Calvin Royal III, who plays Rasknolnikov’s loyal best friend, Razumikhin, agreed that the creative process took some getting used to: “About every step they kept asking us, ‘What are you thinking and feeling in this moment? What are you trying to say?’”
The ballet places more emphasis than the book does on the love story between Razumikhin and Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, giving them a big duet. Dunya, for Pickett, is an appealingly strong female character, as is Sonya, an angel-like prostitute who helps Rasknolnikov. “I like these heavy stories,” Pickett said, “but I also love finding the light: Dunya’s strength, Sonya’s faith, Razumikhin’s loyalty, qualities we hope to find in ourselves.”
Pickett uses the corps de ballet sometimes as the “pulse of the city,” she said, united in its energy, and sometimes as an oppressive presence. But in other crowd scenes, each corps member is an individual, with the option to expand on the steps Pickett has made. For leads and corps members alike, she said, “the more they build their character, the more spontaneous they can be onstage.”
Everything is in service of story — from the walls-on-wheels sets by Soutra Gilmour to the lighting by the illustrious Jennifer Tipton to Yarden’s video, which includes supertitles at the start of each scene, specifying location and plot summary in the manner of stage directions or silent-movie intertitles.
“Collaboration is what makes the whole,” Pickett said, stressing that credit should also be shared with her assistant, Sarah Hillmer, and Ballet Theater’s rehearsal director, Nancy Raffa. “I think women are better at giving credit,” Pickett added. “I’m not taking anything away from myself to say this is a team work.”
“Crime and Punishment” is the first full-length work for Ballet Theater to be choreographed by a woman. And Waller-Bridge’s cinematic ballet music, her first work in this form, is also Ballet Theater’s first full-length commissioned score by a woman. “I feel the weight of potential failure, though I shouldn’t have to,” Pickett said. “But I’m proud to carry the mantle.”
Both Pickett and Bonas stressed that they intend “Crime and Punishment” to be enjoyable by someone who loves theater but knows nothing about dance, or vice versa; and by people who haven’t read the book as well as by people who have.
“There might not be enough dance for some people,” Pickett said. “There might not be enough theater. It might hit the mark.”
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she added. “That’s why I’m doing it.”
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