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Page Turns: Literary Translations on the American Ballet Theater's Summer Stage
Though I’ve heard ballet dancers say there are moments onstage when they feel more like actors than athletes, I’ve always assumed the choices available to dancers as actors were few, and that embod…
When they notice that the choreographer of Like Water for Chocolate opted for a contemporary form of renversé, they see that the character Tita’s world is changing: at the brink of the twentieth century, new technology and new social norms arrive on her farm throughout the story, modernizing her family’s life along with the language she dances. It’s uncommon in ballet to choreograph the type of abject aggression between two women where, in Like Water for Chocolate, Mama Elena drags her daughter’s body down onto the stage and mimes beating her, the sound of her fists thundering through six tiers of a stunned audience. In the English translation of this scene from the novel, Tita remembers a piece of wisdom from another man she had considered marrying during Pedro’s exile from her: “If a strong emotion suddenly lights all the candles we carry inside ourselves, it creates a brightness that shines far beyond our normal vision and then a splendid tunnel appears that shows us the way that we forgot when we were born and calls us to recover our lost divine origin.” The sentence grates a scrap of sandpaper against Laura Esquivel’s language.
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