Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
The Atlanta Ballet may be dancing "Romeo and Juliet" at its season opened tonight at the Fox Theatre, but ballet leaders are planning to embrace another tragedy-entwined couple: Scarlett and Rhett.
The ballet confirmed this week that it is moving forward with plans to create a full-length dance work based on Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind." The dance company secured the exclusive rights from the Mitchell estate last year.
The ballet expects to raise approximately $1.2 million to put Tara on its toes in a world-premiere production, possibly in time for the 2002-03 season.
Developments are embryonic but accelerating. Artistic director John McFall is "talking to people all over the world" about the challenge of distilling the 1,037-page novel, selecting certain themes and threads and translating them to the ballet stage.
He's in no rush.
"Choosing collaborators has to be done very thoughtfully," McFall says.
"Composer, choreographer, costumes, lighting -- depending on what direction you take, they're all critical. It's a very ambitious project."
A tricky one, too. How does the ballet avoid competing with -- or being compared to -- the immensely successful book and the 1939 movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh? How do you sell skeptics who automatically wonder about seeing Rhett Butler in tights or Mammy en pointe?
"We tell the story in a different way," McFall answers. "What intrigued me is that in ballet we usually don't talk. I think that's why 'Gone With the Wind' can be successful. In our culture you have the movie's images burned into the psyche forever. But because you don't have to speak, we're not
competing with the movie."
The audience may not even recognize the finished work, at first.
"Let's say you're a choreographer, and you're going to do a battle," McFall explains. "You don't have to have swords. You don't have to do it literally. In fact, it can be done very surreal and be very effective."
McFall likens the book's spirit to the images of William Blake.
"There's this fateful destiny, this undercurrent, and these people being thrown into it, families being torn apart. There's a universal sense of conflict, of flux and change, and people resisting change. I think a ballet can say that very eloquently."
The ballet will avoid any intentional reminders of the movie. For example, it won't use any of the famous music from Max Steiner's soundtrack.
Preconceptions aside, McFall, who doubles as the ballet's chief executive officer, knows the staging poses formidable obstacles.
"How do you burn down Atlanta? The designer is going to be challenged, no doubt about that."
The ballet's recent success with story ballets such as "Dracula" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" no doubt influenced the decision to move forward on "Gone With the Wind.'' In tracing the public's appetite for narrative adaptations, McFall mentions recent ballet productions of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," which gets another interpretation in February at the North Carolina Dance Theatre in Charlotte.
If Stanley Kowalski can dance ballet, why not Ashley Wilkes?
Mary Rose Taylor, executive director of the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum, endorses the adaptation, which she discussed with McFall months ago.
"It's an enormous challenge," she says. "But it's what the ballet does so well. Through movement they're able to interpret emotions, through choreography they're able to develop a plot and characters in a way the world has never experienced."
Taylor was pleased when McFall told her they planned to base the ballet on the book and not the movie.
"For the first time, we'll have visual images of 'Gone With the Wind' that will stand apart from those David Selznick created in celluloid," she says."I can't wait to see it play out culturally around the world. It's going tointroduce the book to new generations of young people who might not otherwise know the work, or relate to it."
The adaptation's potential upside seems worth the artistic and financial risk.
K.C. Patrick, associate editor of Dance Magazine, based in Oakland, Calif.,called the fund-raising goal of $1.2 million "probably a small estimate" ofwhat "Gone With the Wind" will cost. "But the large narrative ballets are very popular for marketing purposes, because a known name draws an audience
automatically out of curiosity, if not devotion to ballet," she says.
"Gone With the Wind" could be a touring blockbuster for the company. Its premiere in Atlanta would probably draw international attention.
"It's an amazingly appropriate venue for a company to stage 'Gone With the Wind,' " Patrick says. "But just devising the narrative is going to be an amazingly difficult project. When John McFall says 'distill,' he means a whole lot more than that."
Company insiders agree that the Atlanta Ballet has never before attempted anything of this size, at least in terms of raising money to produce a world-premiere work.
How can the ballet consider such a big-ticket item when it battled for a year over contributing a few thousand dollars to its striking musicians'pension fund?
"It's a totally different situation," McFall says. The pension fund contribution would come out of the ballet's operations budget, which is full of heavily scrutinized line items.
"You want to avoid producing a brand-new world premiere out of your operations budget; you wouldn't have money for anything else. You raise the commitment outside of that."
Because corporations tend to give more freely to sponsor prestigious works,the ballet sounds confident about raising the money.
"We're the only ballet company that should be doing this, and we're ready for it," says Beth Holder, ballet board chairwoman. "The board is really excited about it."
The trustees of the Mitchell estate granted the Atlanta Ballet the rights to produce the ballet out of civic pride.
"We would not have entered into the same agreement with the Chicago or New York City Ballet," says attorney Hal Clarke, a former law partner of the late Stephens Mitchell, the author's brother, who along with Paul Anderson oversees "matters relating to the exploitation of the copyright."
Historically, the odds have been stacked against stage adaptions of "Gone With the Wind," in any art form. With one exception: a successful musical version that has run in Japan.
"I saw it a few years ago," Clarke says. "It was well done and played to enormous crowds for days on end in Tokyo."
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