How to go
What: The Dayton Ballet presents "Casanova" and "Eve of Frankenstein"
When: Thursday-Sunday, Oct. 28-31
Where: Victoria Theatre, First and Main streets
Tickets: $20-$72
More Info: (937) 228-3630 or www.ticketcenterstage.com
DAYTON — “Casanova” and “Eve of Frankenstein.”
Sounds like a B-movie double feature, but it’s ballet.
It’s the Dayton Ballet’s season-opening double bill of premieres beginning Thursday, Oct. 28, at the Victoria Theatre.
One of history’s legendary seducers, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-78), would seem to be a natural for an art form in which a man dancing closely with a woman hardly ever grows old, as long as the choreography is good.
That’s up to Jeffrey Graham Hughes, who has choreographed the work about the Italian adventurer and sensualist, who invented and reinvented himself throughout a life he recorded for posterity in his memoirs.
“I was all my life the victim of my senses,” Casanova wrote. “I have delighted in going astray.”
Most people haven’t read the rest of the story. They know Casanova only by a reputation so established that his name is officially a descriptive noun, as in, he’s a real casanova.
Hughes, the former director of the Ohio Ballet, has made and staged several other works for the Dayton Ballet.
Justin Koertgen will play the younger version of the title character in “Casanova: A Story of Romance and Regret,” which is the complete title. Dayton Ballet director Dermot Burke portrays him later, as he looks back on his follies with a touch of regret.
“Eve of Frankenstein,” the latest creation from resident company choreographer Karen Russo, isn’t what it might seem.
It’s no “Bride of Frankenstein,” the horror spinoff in which the scientist creates a woman for his original male creature. The life of Mary Shelley, who wrote the masterpiece of fiction, “Frankenstein,” is woven into the ballet’s central role. That character doesn’t exist in the book.
Erika Cole, who will dance the part, said “Eve is Frankenstein’s daughter.”
Rather than a role with frightful hair and scary presence, “she’s beautiful and loved by everyone,” said Cole, who is beginning her seventh year with the company.
Without giving away a plot that has a twist at the end, she added Eve “is nice even to a character that no one else will be nice to. She treats everyone the same, no matter what they look like.”
Cole has rarely met a combination of steps she couldn’t conquer with flair.
“Technique comes more naturally to me than the artistic side of dancing. I really need to take the time to research a character and then to think about each step and what my motivation is for each moment,” she said.
The choreography for “Eve” “is very demanding and there is a lot of partnering. Karen did a wonderful job setting steps that describe the emotions Eve is feeling,” Cole said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2377 or tmorris@Dayton DailyNews.com.
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