A ballet in three acts, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, features the Royal Ballet in a performance recorded in December.
The original live feed on December 16 to European and American cinemas featured a series of backstage films, including rehearsal footage and interviews with members of the cast and creative team.
Featuring Royal Ballet principals Sarah Lamb and Edward Watson in the leads, the ballet is based on Lewis Carol’s story of the little girl who goes down the rabbit hole, but here Alice is a teenager.
The ballet starts at a garden party one sunny afternoon, when Alice is surprised to see her parents’s friend Lewis Carrol transform into a white rabbit. She follows him down a rabbit hole and, of course, things get curiouser and curiouser.
This ballet was originally commissed by the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada and premiered in February 2011. At the time it was the first full-length ballet created for the Royal Ballet dancers since 1995 and it marked a triumphant return to the stage for Laura Cuthbertson, for whom the role of Alice was created.
Joby Talbot’s full-length original score featured lots of percussion and four female voices, while the staging features several special effects. Costumes are drawn on mask work and puppetry and staging also features projection.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland marks the start of a partnership between Ster- Kinekor and the Royal Ballet to screen their work, the first of five ballets we will see in this season.
The other ballets which will be screened are Swan Lake (May 2), Romeo & Juliet (June 6), La Fille Mal Gardée (June 27) and The Winter’s Tale (August 8).
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland screens at Cinema Nouvea theatres in Joburg (Rosebank Mall), Pretoria (Brooklyn Mall), Durban (Gateway) and Cape Town (V&A Waterfront) tomorrow, April 1 and 2 at 7.3pm and Sunday at 2.30pm.
The running time of 175 minutes includes two intervals.