Ballet Translates ‘Amarcord’ From Film to Feet

Choreographer Luciano Cannito didn’t set out to re-create a Fellini film in his ballet “Amarcord,” which Teatro Alla Scala Ballet will be dancing tonight and Wednesday in the opening program of its two-program run at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“It would have been ridiculous to make a ballet remaking a movie,” said Cannito, 39, in a recent phone interview from Naples, where he is director of the corps de ballet of the San Carlo Theatre.

“When you take another form of art, you should make a new thing. Otherwise, you’d make a cheap copy or an imitation.”

What Cannito wanted to do, he said, was give “an impressionist point of view of the movie,” which won an Academy Award in 1974, and use “the power of film to talk to a lot of people.”

“I always start with the point of view that theater and performance are a way of communication,” he said. “So very often in dance, we tend to forget that and do works that are very nice [only] for people who are very much into dance.

“My goal is to talk to a lot of people. Theater was invented 3,000 years ago as a form of communication so people would recognize themselves.”

He made the ballet as a homage to Fellini, who died in 1993.

“ ‘Amarcord’ is a very special movie to Italians,” Cannito said. “The word means ‘I remember’ in the dialect of Rimini, the city Fellini was born in, by the sea.

“It is a picture of what Italy was like between the two wars under the Fascists. Some critics said it was the greatest portrayal of the history of Italy in the ‘30s and beginning of the ‘40s.”

Cannito’s original version, in 1995, was a two-act ballet. In June 2000, La Scala Ballet asked him to create a new work for a special evening on Fellini composer Nino Rota.

“I did not have time to make a new creation,” he said. “So I said, ‘Let’s do a new version of this work.’ They already had another ballet to perform it with. So I put my hands on it and started to cut here and there. It was fun.

“Half the public tells me they prefer the full-length version. Others say this is much nicer.”

Only La Scala Ballet dances this version, about 50 minutes long.

Cannito had not been a Fellini fan until he began working on the project.

“I used to say to my friends, ‘I don’t like Fellini because I don’t understand Fellini.’ The great discovery happened when I started to work on his screenplay to make this ballet. I was very much misled. There was nothing to understand.

“What he wanted to say was already there. He was talking with images. The beauty of the movie is that there was no story he was trying to tell. He just wanted to show images, pictures. That’s why he’s so famous for his faces, his characters.”

Similarly, Cannito wants people to simply look at his ballet and not hunt for deeper meanings.

“Just enjoy what you see,” he said. “Do not make any historical or aesthetic connections. I would like the public to enjoy the ballet. It’s very dynamic. I like dynamism.”

The ballet will be spectacle enough.

“It’s a huge production. There are 55 dancers onstage at tops. It’s not a production with special roles for principals. It’s a production for the company. It’s really made to show up the potential and the structure of a big company. It could never be done by a small company.”

Nonetheless, several key roles do emerge: Titta, the young boy protagonist and Fellini stand-in; Gradisca, “who is very unlucky with men and is all the time trying to find the right man”; and a German officer with whom she “ends up having a love affair.”

For this affair, Cannito has added a love scene not found in the movie. He also departed from Rota for the scene, a five-minute pas de deux, using music by Alfred Schnittke.

“Many critics said this was the high point of the ballet. It’s not there at all in the movie.”

The sets are simple but striking.

“There are 99 life-size puppets in a ring suspended in the air--all the characters of Fellini’s movies--watching us from up there,” Cannito said. “All the ballet will happen under them.

“When you work with a set designer, sometimes it’s so difficult. We found a very nice balance between the presence of the world of Fellini and the possibility of using the stage space to make a real strong dance.”

* Teatro Alla Scala Ballet, “Amarcord,” tonight and Wednesday, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Second program: “Giselle,” Friday-Sunday, 2 and 8 p.m. $20-$80. (714) 556-2787.