NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA
Alice–choreographed by Glen Tetley to David Del Tredici’s Pulitzer Prize-winning score, Child Alice Part I: In Memory of a Summer Day–was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But Tetley’s Alice goes far beyond reintroducing the audience to the fantastic, whimsical creatures that inhabit the books, or merely describing their individual, bizarre personalities.
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Tetley has probed deeper, and taken a sensitive look into the hearts of Carroll–actually the Reverend Charles Dodgson, a shy, stuttering mathematics don at Oxford–and Alice, the ten-year-old girl for whom he invented the stories. That Dodgson was preternaturally fond of young girls, whom he enjoyed photographing–some unclothed–has been well documented, but it’s unlikely that his pedophilia took a more active form. But there is no question that he was inordinately fond of Alice Liddell, the daughter of an academic colleague. Fortunately for posterity, he seems to have sublimated his affection for Alice by creating the miraculous wonderland that immortalized her.
Karen Kain, NBC’s prima ballerina, has never been so passionately committed to a role. Her dancing is luminous and her personality radiant, both in her present life with her husband and torn by regret over the long-lost past with Carroll. At the very close, as the aged Alice, she picks up a glove that the White Rabbit has dropped, and fantasy and reality meet in a poignant conclusion.
