Dramatic dance of love and tragedy

The choreographer who brought Dracula to town is back with another Gothic tale, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. BERNADETTE RAE talks to Michael Pink.

English choreographer Michael Pink is carving a fine career from the dark side of human nature, hamming up its rawest passions, its most deviant lusts and its most awful desperation.

First there was Dracula, which left the Royal New Zealand Ballet's coffers, accountants and audiences quite satiated in 2000. Now he is back, with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, delivering a second dramatic dose of Gothic gloom and tragedy in a succinct but loyal account of Victor Hugo's classic story.

After debuting the production in Wellington at the New Zealand Festival, the Royal New Zealand Ballet brings Hunchback to Auckland this week.

Much of Pink's time in recent years has been spent delivering these two productions around the world. And he has more in store. He created Romeo and Juliet for the Atlanta Ballet in 2000. He has completed a long synopsis for a prospective Picture of Dorian Gray. Now he can't let go of the idea of a ballet of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Pink is a cheerful, jokey, enthusiastic fellow - it is just that he has a morbid attraction for monstrous tales. No wonder, then, he was drawn to The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "The story is extraordinary," he says. "It's a piece of fine literature with all the elements perfect for a 20th-century ballet. It has clearly defined characters that lend extraordinarily well to non-verbal theatre. They have depth, they have an obvious underlying emotional state. But mostly, it is just a great story."

Pink's success is largely due to his talent for telling a believable story. There is no room in his productions for dance just for dance's sake. Every movement, gesture and production item must ring true and add to the story.

Toby Behan, who dances the role of the hunchback Quasimodo, has found working with Pink a huge relief.

"As a dancer you are often asked to do lots of movements that don't make much sense. You can feel like a piece of plastic," he says. "But with Michael everything has to be saying something that matters. It all has to add up. That gives a sense of realism to the whole. When everybody is dancing that way it has a terrific effect. And as a dancer, you have so much more motivation in the role."

Pink sums up Hunchback's theme as "fate" - the word Hugo found engraved on one of the cathedral's threatened pillars, and which inspired him to write the story. "It is the story of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Condensing the complicated original for a dance theatre piece was not difficult once he had the structure in place.

"It is like a pyramid," he says. "The first act is vast. It implants a lot of information about 15th-century Paris, as well as setting up the characters.

"I want people to almost smell the streets where the lower classes lived in contrast to those of more elevated birth who occupied the floors above. This was, after all, a dark time and man's inhumanity to man was very obvious."

There is a distinct change of pace in the second act, which takes place in the elevated living quarters of Fleur de Lys, with the dull rags of the common people replaced by the glowing gowns of the privileged. The drama also becomes more specific to the main story.

In the third act the crowd scenes make way for just a trio of characters: Quasimodo (Behan), the vile priest Frollo (Graham Fletcher) and the object of all men's desire, the beautiful young gypsy woman, Esmeralda (Larissa Wright).

Be warned: Pink does not Disney-fy the conclusion. Esmeralda dies.

In the book, Hugo wrote that years later the entwined bones were found of a slight young woman and a savagely deformed man. The implication was that Quasimodo took the body of Esmeralda in his arms, carried it to its final resting-place and sat down and held her until he too died.

* The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Civic Theatre, this Wednesday to Sunday.