On Sunday, the Kalamazoo Balletwill perform three scenes from Dracula, an original ballet executive director Terry Bullard wrote nearly 20 years ago. You can see excerpts of the ballet Sunday at 3 p.m. at the Bullard School of Dance.
When I went to the Bullard School last weekend, dancers were rehearsing the gypsy camp scene. A nurse has gone there looking for help. Strange things have been going on at the insane asylum where Dracula has been hired as a new doctor. Rebecca Solomon plays the part of the nurse.
“The young girl who dies, Lucy, is a ward of mine living in my house. And, during this part of the play, my daughter Mina is becoming increasingly ill but we really don’t understand why," says Soloman. "And so that’s why I’ve gone to the gypsy camp to try to…essentially to help introduce the inspector because the gypsies won’t talk to them otherwise. But then the gypsies tell me about having a priest to get holy water and they give me garlic.”
Bullard’s Dracula is almost more of a play. There’s a lot of text to explain some of the details in the original book by Bram Stoker. Since it was written in the 1800s, some of the terms are a little outdated like “insane asylum” and “gypsies.” In the late 90s, Bullard actually went to the town of Whitby in England to get inspiration.
“I was in the cemetery looking around and I’m talking to the man that runs the cemetery there. And I was telling him why I’m there because I’m researching trying to get the feeling to make the ballet Dracula. Because that’s where Stoker wrote it—not the ballet, but the book," Bullard explains. "And he said ‘You know, it’s so funny.’ He said ‘Every summer people come and ask: Where’s Dracula’s grave?’”
Elle Epskamp-Hunt is a regular dancer with the Kalamazoo Ballet. She says she likes Dracula because it fuses ballet with other styles of dance. There are folkloric moves in the gypsy camp scene and more sharp, modern moves in the insane asylum dance.
“It’s definitely supposed to be really creepy and there’s a lot of strange movements that I’m not really used to,” says Epskamp-Hunt. “There’s shapes where you have to cover your eyes and kind of these like angular strikes.”
Though it is meant to be a little scary, Rebecca Solomon says the ballet is more like a psychological thriller than a horror film.
“A lot of the tension that builds is because there are one or two people who know what a vampire is, who know what Dracula is doing, and nobody will listen to them," says Soloman. "So to me that builds a level of suspense that just dashing about, biting someone on the neck doesn’t really build that kind of suspense.”
Bullard says all of her apprentices learn excerpts from Dracula to have it in their repertoires. This allows her to bring together old students and friends for a homecoming every time they perform the ballet. Bullard even encourages her dancers not to touch the costumes (the original costumes from 1995) so that they can last another 20 years.
