In his legendary Divine Comedy, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri imagined Hell as a descending tower of the damned, with each specific type of sinner tormented by increasingly horrifying punishments.
Anna Betz (Art History BA '16 MA '20) is re-imagining Dante’s Hell — and his Purgatory and Paradise, too — as a modern ballet.
Like so many before her, Betz has always been fascinated by Dante’s epic poem. But an undergraduate trip to Florence and a literature and translation course with Associate Professor of Italian Jelena Todorović ignited something deeper in her.
“She had this big overarching theme, talking about how people are continually making things based on Dante's Divine Comedy,” says Betz, who lives in Minneapolis and teaches dance at Ballet Co.Laboratory. “She had an approach that really opened up our minds and encouraged us to look for ways to see Dante in our current world.”
Dancing had been a huge part of Betz’s life since childhood — she danced in a professional ballet company as a teenager. But when an injury robbed her of the ability to continue dancing, she opted to head to UW–Madison instead.
“As a dancer reading this text, I just really saw it come to life and I thought, ‘How on earth has no one made a ballet with this yet?’” she says. “It just kind of took off from there.”
It took Betz the better part of a decade to fully shape her ideas and concepts. She knew that a literal interpretation of Dante’s poem would likely be impossible, given the sheer number of places the protagonist visits and characters he meets. Her vision focuses more on the conceptual nature of the work.
“I want people to experience what Dante experienced,” Betz explains. “The way the poem is written, the words that are chosen, inspire a certain feeling, and it's bone-chilling sometimes, and sometimes it's sublimely beautiful.”
Not surprisingly, Inferno gets the lion’s share of Betz’s ballet. Points of emphasis include the Circle of Lust — that’s the second Circle of Hell, for those who may have forgotten — and the tumultuous hurricane that envelops the lovers Paolo and Francesca. The design of the dancers’ costumes in Hell will represent its dark and dirty nature.
“The biggest theme that we're exploring throughout this is love,” Betz says. “How love can be perverted, how love can be pure, and where that fits in his three different realms.”
Some of Betz’s initial ideas, like a stage that rotates and flips upside down, had to be shelved for reasons of practicality.
“Initially I was like, we're going full blown Cirque du Soleil on this,” she laughs.
Betz quickly realized that the music and the choreography should do the heavy emotional lifting. Instead of constructing sets showing Dante’s descent into Hell, Betz’s troupe of 20 dancers will act as architecture, evoking the different circles and the damned souls that inhabit them. (Interestingly, Todorović, who first helped inspire Betz, is serving as the production’s dramaturg.)
“I think it fits, because the souls and the desolation of the physical space in Hell are kind of one in the same,” she says. “It's almost like the bodies, the souls and the landscape are all kind of just one in this dark place.”
Creating original music alongside original choreography is becoming increasingly rare in the ballet world, but Betz has chosen to defy convention. She’s paired with composer Ian McGlynn to create original music for the production. Like the work itself, the score will bend ballet tradition, melding indie rock and EDM (electronic dance music) with choirs, a vintage toy piano and percussive cello.
“We're talking about souls who are dammed and people's choices in life having gone wrong,” she explains. “We're looking at music and themes that make people feel good and then twisting them to have a psychological impact and make them not feel so good.”
With the creative angles largely settled, Betz has spent the last several months tackling the hardest part of any artistic venture — funding the project. Between IndieGoGo crowdfunding and art grants, Betz has raised enough money to stage a 15-minute excerpt of the longer work in October, which could help spark support to create the entire production.
“I'm just excited to see how people will receive it,” says Betz. “This is the project that's going to get people thinking about what ballet could be. Ballet isn't always necessarily going to be about a royal family prince and princess falling in love. And it doesn't always have to be beautiful. I really want people to know that ballet can explore some pretty deep psychological things.”