Dracula - Blood, sweat and pirouettes

By BERNADETTE RAE

With a swift gesture Count Dracula rips open his blouse, pierces his own chest with a knife blade and suckles the semiconscious Mina on the crimson flow.

It's ghoulish, ghastly and pure melodrama, maybe. But the moment still packs a darkly sensual punch. And the dancers of the Royal New Zealand Ballet are giving their latest work in their ever-widening repertoire more than a drop of their own lifeblood.

"I love it," says 22-year-old dancer Jane Casson, one of three female leads. The role of Mina Harker is her first principal role and it comes in "the most challenging ballet I have ever done."

Choreographed by English artist Michael Pink, who created the work for the late Christopher Gable's Northern Ballet Theatre in 1996, Dracula combines dance and drama in equal measures. Pink's demands have stretched the dan-cers to their dramatic limits.

The New Zealand version of the ballet is no carbon copy of any previous production. Every dancer must find the actor within and come up with the emotional resources to flesh out the roles.

"They have also had to learn to hold the character for every second throughout the whole performance," Pink says. He likens his dance version of the old immortality tale to a silent movie. "If somebody drops out of role for even a second it destroys the whole."

Casson says that dancers are accustomed to projecting to their audiences, but in Dracula have had to "learn to invite the audience in. I kept getting told off for turning my arabesque to the audience.

"You get so used to doing line stuff — and there are beautiful lines in Dracula, too. But Michael kept shouting at me to 'stop being a ballerina.' "

Now she has learned to believe in herself as both dancer and actor and to trust the choices made over the long rehearsal period, forget that she is performing on stage and just live the part.

Casson's character is the well-educated and self-contained wife of Jonathan Harker, who finally falls for the mysterious Count Dracula in the third act.

"They do have a fleeting connection in the second act," Casson says, "just before Dracula takes the life of Mina's best friend, Lucy. After that Mina is totally preoccupied by Lucy being ill and then becoming one of the nosferatu — the undead.

"But when she finally comes face to face with Dracula she is entranced. It is as if she enters a whole new world."

Casson says that when she and Graham Fletcher are dancing together she can almost believe that he really is Dracula. "And I think he thinks he is, too. His eyes burn so intensely. He seems so passionate."

Pink, who made the ballet to celebrate the centenary of Bram Stoker's original horror story, has stuck close to the original. Stoker's story has spawned 180 film versions, from the moderately masterful to the appallingly banal.

Stoker's original begins with Jonathan Harker's visit to Transylvania, home of the mysterious Count Dracula, who — having run out of suitable victims in his own environs — wants to buy property in the British port of Whitby.

Harker narrowly escapes seduction by three of Dracula's female vampires and returns home to be nursed back to health by the devoted Mina.

It is Mina who proves to be the fatal chink in the bloodthirsty one's armour. When Dracula sees her across the floor at a tea dance in Whitby, he is struck by her likeness to his former wife and decides she will be his next blood-bride, not merely another victim. That sliver of affection finally causes him to hesitate long enough for the good guys — Jonathan Harker, Dr Van Helsing and a suitor or two of the lost Lucy — to drive a stake through his heart.

It is Dracula's power to hypnotise his victims and his ability to transform himself from human form to that of a bat — hanging upside-down from a stage balustrade, or writhing along the floor in snakelike fashion — that fascinates Fletcher, one of three dancers who have the title role.

Fletcher is a veteran of the role, having danced it for Pink in Britain last year. He and fellow Australian Larissa Wright spent three years with the Northern Ballet Theatre before returning to the Royal New Zealand Ballet this year. Wright alternately dances the roles of Mina and Lucy in this production.

Fletcher believes that the appeal of Dracula is in its strong sensuality, even sexuality. People can't help being attracted to Count Dracula, he says, even though they know he is ruthless and evil.

* Dracula plays in Auckland at the Civic Theatre June 21- 25.