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.
All dance companies are, inevitably, in perpetual transition, but that’s unusually pronounced just now at Pennsylvania Ballet, which opened a program of 21st-century choreography on Tuesday night at the Joyce Theater. Since Angel Corella became the company’s artistic director in 2014, large numbers of dancers have come and gone. Some of those dancing in New York this week…