Genevieve Penn Nabity and Harrison James rehearse for a scene in The National Ballet of Canada's production of Don Quixote.Canada’s ballet companies are either tilting at windmills or, like Sancho Panza, they’ve discovered that the perfect companion on a quest to advance their art form, challenge their dancers and sell tickets is Don Quixote.
The ballet’s one contemporary wrinkle, says Rachel Schmidt, a Spanish literature expert at the University of Calgary: the gypsy caravan, pulled by Petipa and Minkus from a Cervantes short story and dropped into Act 2 of the ballet.is set in an unspecified South Asian locale, reflecting the creators’ fetishization of cultures they knew little about. Ditto for, a vaguely Middle Eastern ballet that Petipa popularized in Russia. Since 2020, the ballet world has basically hit pause on both.
National Ballet artistic director Hope Muir has long been friendly with Acosta and convinced him to share the Birmingham Royal’s fresh sets and costumes. What distinguishes Acosta’s versions are the expanded featured roles – as many as a dozen each for men and women, including a lead Roma couple and a trio for the Act 2 dream sequence, after Don Quixote is knocked unconscious by a windmill blade.is a ballet that stretches the dancers,” Acosta said, speaking recently from his home in England.