NC tour A Canadian who lives in North Carolina, choreographer-on-the-rise Helen Simoneau is using her newest evening-length work, Caribou, to take a closer look at heritage, assimilation and identity. She studies these ideas through the iconic caribou—an enormously antlered animal beloved by our friends to the nort.
LONDON — The creature of “Frankenstein,” or “The Modern Prometheus,” as the author Mary Shelley subtitled her 1818 masterpiece, is perhaps literature’s most misunderstood and misrepresented character: more an infantile outcast longing for love than a vengeful monster chased by pitchfork-wielding mobs.
It is that misbegotten aspect that drew the choreographer Liam Scarlett to bring Shelley’s story to life in a full-length work for the Royal Ballet, running May 4-27.
While the thought of a dancing monster may strike some as funny — think Peter Boyle in a white-tie-and-tails routine with Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein” — for Mr. Scarlett it was a chance to reinterpret a story that has long enthralled, and often baffled, readers and audiences.