As contemporary Angelenos, watching the immersive “Little Women Ballet” might be the closest thing to stepping into a time machine.
The series of dance works based on Louisa May Alcott's beloved 19th-century novel is presented within the stately Victorian homes of Northeast Los Angeles' Heritage Square Museum. Dancers and actors wear period-inspired costumes, from pioneering cap-sleeved dresses to Steampunk-style fashion. Before each performance, the scene is set by a narrator who speaks with a prim, puritanical accent reminiscent of a bygone era. And the production demands full audience participation: As guests, we're invited to do everything from visiting the homes of the novel's March sisters to playing roles to advance the plot.
We begin by dividing into small groups and following a character (in the case of my group, the girls' wealthy Aunt March) who takes us to the different houses where the ballet will be performed. The show is intimate: The dancers are not even two feet away from audience members, who are given limited seating and standing room in the small rooms. They are so close that you can hear the muffled sounds of their ballet shoes on the carpet and you can make eye contact, which is both intimate and slightly disconcerting.
Directed and choreographed by Emma Andrés, the experience began in May with a spring version before presenting its fall production last month. In late November, the series will conclude with a winter immersion before presenting a full version of the story at the Wilshire Ebell Theater in December.
The trilogy came about organically. “We wanted to take this project in stages to see how it would grow and be received by the public,” Andrés said. “When I originally created the spring dip, I didn't know I would also create fall and winter.”
Andrés created the work with the intention of making room in ballet for more women-centered stories. “The story of 'Little Women' is complicated, but I felt it would be great for narrative ballet,” she said. “I saw myself in the four sisters and felt that they were a group of young women who could be inspirational for young audiences to watch and take influence from. Although they come from a time approximately 100 years before our own, they still have very identifiable traits with us in 2024.”
Ellen Relac and Alberto Hernandez, as Meg March and John Brooke, perform in a room at the LA Heritage Museum.
Built during the Victorian era, the Heritage Square Museum is, in many ways, the perfect backdrop for this production.
“We don't have the privilege of being in Concord, Massachusetts, where Louisa May Alcott grew up, but I feel like Heritage Square really shows where we developed. our performance, which was California,” Andrés said.
Dancing in old houses required careful planning. Fortunately, it turned out that the pointe shoes moved easily over the carpet-covered floors. “[The carpet] It acts like rosin, so it provides this friction that is actually very pleasant and never slippery,” Andrés explained.
However, there were other design challenges, particularly the low chandeliers. To avoid a catastrophe, the team measured all the rooms and recorded the dimensions with masking tape in the Pasadena Civic Ballet's home studio. The dancers also walked through the space and observed each piece of furniture and potential obstacles during a dress rehearsal.
Denise Moses as Aunt March performs a scene before a group of guests.
Andrés grew up dancing with the Pasadena Civic Ballet, which he attended from the ages of 4 to 18. “It's a unique studio, because they create all their own ballets,” he said, including interpretations of Disney titles such as “Peter Pan, “The Little Mermaid,” “Snow White” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
The company has been led by Diane De Franco Browne, Tania Grafos and Zoe Vidalakis since 2000. Browne served as production consultant on this project. “I saw these three really creative women come together and create a very inspiring and creative environment growing up,” Andrés said. “I think a lot of my passion for the arts came from watching them growing up.”
Guests gather outside one of the Victorian buildings that make up the Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles.
The Pasadena native graduated from UC Irvine in 2020 with a bachelor of fine arts in choreography and a minor in literary journalism. After the pandemic, Andrés returned to Pasadena and became manager of the Pasadena Civic Ballet, helping it build several outdoor dance studios to keep dance live. “Although I was very happy to return, it was very difficult to have all of our students on Zoom. But fortunately we got back to living pretty quickly,” Andrés said.
It was during this time that he first conceived the idea of a ballet with the theme of “Little Women.” Locked at home, she watched Greta Gerwig's 2019 version of the classic work and soon after screened the three previous film adaptations (from 1933, 1949 and 1994) and read the book.
“I am glad to have [first] “I read it when I was older because I feel like I identified with it much more than when I was a child,” Andrés said. “I feel like translating it into a ballet is a way that younger audiences can really relate to it and the emotions of the characters and their personalities.”
She began by crafting a six-minute summary of the book for the Pasadena Civic Ballet in 2021, with students from the school. “I tried to focus on key points in their lives,” he said. “I went straight to Jo meeting Laurie and then straight from there to the relationship between John and Meg. Because when Meg starts to fall in love, it's the first time Jo really sees that her family could fall apart when people start growing up.”
From left, Chris Flores, Evan Hernandez, Ross Clark, Jacob Robleto and Alberto Hernandez perform in the immersive “Little Women Ballet.”
She visually established each character's personality by creating recognizable dance motifs for each of the sisters, which endure in the current production. “Each of the sisters has a pose that symbolizes their interests and personality,” Andrés said. “Jo holds up her hands as if she's reading a book, Amy as if she's painting a canvas with a brush, Beth is at a piano and then Meg's are next to her face to symbolize a performance mask.”
Dance sequences were created to illustrate scenes from the girls' lives, including Amy and Laurie's courtship in Paris, Beth's final days with Jo, and Jo's romance with Professor Fredrick Bhaer.
'Little Women Ballet' returns with two performances this winter
The Winter Immersion will take place Nov. 22-24 at the Heritage Square Museum. Tickets are $60. The full ballet will be performed December 7 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Tickets start at $28. For more information, visit littlewomenballet.com
Andrés made the deliberate decision to have all the sisters dance en pointe, except Jo, an unconventional character in her tomboyish nature. Jo dances with her feet flexed.
“Some of our dancers are not pointe dancers, but they are excellent ballet dancers,” he said. “If I feel like someone is going to play the character really well, that's more important to me than them doing pointe. But my hope for the film is that Jo doesn't use them, to emphasize the idea that she is not only breaking social norms as a woman of the time, but that she is also breaking the norms of ballet.”
The program itself is doing the same thing.
Madison Marsh plays Amy March. Dance sequences were created to illustrate scenes from the sisters' lives.
