Ballet based on Shakespeare’s sonnets premieres

Elizabeth Kramer, Courier-Journal- August 5, 2016

For several months, Louisville Ballet dancer Roger Creel has carried around now dog-eared pieces of paper – each imprinted with one of 22 William Shakespeare’s sonnets. Nearly every single small sheet is frayed at the edges.

For the past several months, Creel has been referring often to them to create “William’s Folly,” a new ballet based on these sonnets that premieres this month as part of this summer’s Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.

The 22 sheets, like flash cards, were once part of la arger deck of 154 that held all of Shakespeare sonnets, which primarily describes the Bard’s emotions of being caught up in a love triangle. That trio includes Shakespeare, a young man and a dark lady. (That lady, of course, is the one whose “eyes are nothing like the sun.”) But Creel had to narrow them down in to create a story for his ballet.

“A goal of this project is to create a narrative arch and then craft around these sonnets movement and music to illuminate them,” Creel said. Read the Full Article

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