Danceable Drama Is Not Your Father’s Christmas Carol

By WAYNE CREED

December 8, 2014

In Cape Charles, Christmas is our best of times, and this season, Arts Enter and the Palace Theatre are excited to bring you their unique interpretation of the Dickens classic, “A Christmas Carol: An Original Danceable Drama.” Rather than just blowing dust off the pages, and trotting old Ebenezer out in a nightgown once again, we wanted to re-examine the story, not just relative to a mosaic of other literary work, but as a play between the elements of speech, music, and dance.

This sounds like a daunting task, but working with the brilliant Amy Watkins makes it so much easier. Her original choreography pushes our dancers’ movement and form in space, shape, time and energy. For Amy, it is the art of movement, using the language of ballet, contemporary dance, jazz, hip hop, folk dance, GaGa, and even pedestrian movement, all fused together in a spiritual, emotional, and even non-literal textual context to create a vivid and intense narrative that invokes dance’s grandest ghosts of the past and present, Martha Graham and Twyla Tharp.

We are also blessed to have a supremely talented costume designer (who can lift a great deal of stress off of the directors), Vera Miller, who uses fabric to create the characters and fill the stage with texture and color. For period pieces, such as “A Christmas Carol,” she is marvelous in her ability to plot color, changing social status or period through the visual design of garments and accessories. This may sound simple, but it requires a unique knowledge of not just fabric and pattern development, but also an in-depth education in the history of textiles and fashion.

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Interestingly, the cast is from ages 4 to 60, which requires any approach to be as fluid as possible. How do you tell an 11-year-old girl she has to be the one to play the ghost of Jacob Marley? Luckily for us, this 11-year-old is, after several years on the stage, a very seasoned actress. After a quizzical look, she went right to work; her approach to the role actually made me re-imagine so much about who I thought Jacob Marley was.

This highlights one of the particular joys of the Palace Theatre: working with such intelligent, talented, hardworking young dancers and actors. During the first week of rehearsals, I asked one of our girls, only 12, if she could do a British accent. “Do you want Mary Poppins or Emma Thompson?” she asked. “Let me hear both,” I said. They were both great, but I went with the Emma Thompson.

The progressive holiday tasting tour, the lit-up sidewalks, historical homes, the gorgeous shops decorated to perfection, the Grand Illumination in Central Park, the Santa Train, Smitty’s crab pot Christmas tree at the harbor, all make the holidays in Cape Charles a special time. The beauty of this town’s approach is that it is never happy to rest on its laurels, trying to make each Christmas a unique one. It is in this spirit that Arts Enter and the Palace wish to bring you this Dickens classic. To quote the spirit of Christmas Present, “You have never seen the like of me before!” Like Scrooge, our reply would be “Never!”

A Christmas Carol: An Original Danceable Drama
Saturday, December 13, at 7 p.m.
Sunday, December 14 at 3 p.m.
Palace Theater 305 Mason Avenue, Cape Charles, 757-331-2787