Ballet Jörgen brings a beloved Canadian classic to life with Anne of Green Gables – The Ballet
Choreographer Bengt Jörgen breathes new life into Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel with an original ballet starring Hannah Mae Cruddas as Anne
Anne of Green Gables – The Ballet.
Massey Theatre presents Ballet Jörgen’s Anne of Green Gables – The Ballet on February 10 at 4 pm
BALLET JÖRGEN’S MISSION as a company is to produce original works that centre Canadian stories—so it’s only natural that their latest full-length piece is Anne of Green Gables – The Ballet.
The production follows the story told in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved 1908 novel of the same name. Eleven-year-old orphan Anne Shirley is adopted by middle-aged Prince Edward Island siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, but there’s been a mistake—the pair had intended to adopt a boy that could help them with farm work on their property, Green Gables. Anne, who is imaginative, stubborn, and fiercely intelligent, soon learns to find her way in the fictional town of Avonlea.
Bengt Jörgen, founder and artistic director of Ballet Jörgen, choreographed the full-length ballet based on Anne of Green Gables – The Musical, with a ballet score arrangement of Norman Campbell’s original music by Alexander Levkovich. The two-hour composition is played by a 78-piece symphony orchestra. It expands upon the score for the musical, which is only one hour, providing a rich backdrop for some recognizable tunes.
“We’re a little different than other ballet companies,” Jörgen tells Stir over a Zoom call between rehearsals. “We are a classical ballet company, but we don’t look at ballet as an aesthetic. We look at it as a language, and therefore it frees us to approach any story. And you could see Anne of Green Gables as our way of working, where you know, ballet is perfectly fine and works really well as a contemporary language—it’s really just how you use it. And when you move it out of this sort of aesthetic that people think of as ballet, all of a sudden, the expressiveness of the language is extraordinary when it comes to the physicality.”
Co-founded by the Stockholm, Sweden-born dancer in 1987, Ballet Jörgen has since produced over 220 original works that pay homage to Canadian lore. In 2012, for instance, Jörgen reimagined Swan Lake within the setting of 17th-century Fortress of Louisbourg, Nova Scotia; and the company’s 2008 production The Nutcracker: A Canadian Tradition places the classic winter tale in 1912 northern Ontario.
Anne of Green Gables – The Ballet had its world premiere in 2019 at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium in Halifax, which is also the hometown of Hannah Mae Cruddas, who dances the lead role of Anne Shirley. She embodies the titular redhead with instinctive vivacity, says Jörgen, which allows Anne’s spunky attitude to translate incredibly well onstage.
“Anne, of course, she just has verbal diarrhea, right?” the choreographer notes with a laugh. “The words just come out of her mouth. And you know, I’ve heard this a lot: ‘Well, how can you possibly transcribe that and dance that?’ Well, that’s the easiest part of it all. Because she’s so energetic and so busy, to dance that is not a problem. The challenge is really the Marilla, who is much more stoic—and very warm ultimately, but it’s hidden deep inside her. That’s much harder to deal with in dance than Anne.”
Audiences are in luck—Jörgen himself will be dancing the role of Matthew for the ballet’s upcoming performance at the Massey Theatre, which is part of a larger Canadian tour. Other B.C. stops include Vernon, Chilliwack, Duncan, Campbell River, Cranbrook, Trail, and Nelson before the show carries on through Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
Jörgen has played Matthew in just two other performances of the show over the course of its five-year touring history through Canada and the U.S. Matthew and Marilla, he notes, are necessary counterpoints to Anne’s exuberant energy. It’s an important balance that helps Cruddas pace herself over the course of the two-hour production.
“Usually I sit in the front of the room, and you get a little detached sometimes. You see the big picture,” says the artistic director. “But when you’re inside the picture, you’re just one piece of a massive amount, and it’s a completely different perspective. There comes a point where as a performer, you can just immerse yourself in that character, and you become part of a big machinery that’s moving. And it’s really freeing in a certain way to just be that character and just be supportive.”
Today, over 50 million copies of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables have been published worldwide. The novel ranks among the best-selling books of all time, and has been translated into over 30 languages.
“There’s a reason that the story connects with people in a very immediate way,” says Jörgen. “We really just wanted to do justice to the story, and to the communities that we serve—and tell it through dance.”
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