Little Tramp a Big Deal for Ballet

The choreographers behind State Street Ballet’s season-opening world premiere, Chaplin, had no idea that Charlie Chaplin had a major Montecito and Santa Barbara connection, the silent-film icon having had a hand in the building of the Montecito Inn in 1928, and marrying Oona O’Neill here in 1943. All they knew was that not only did Chaplin seem like a natural focal point for a dance piece, but that, curiously, few others dance organizations had ever attempted to do it.

In many ways, though, State Street new evening-length work is as ambitious an endeavor as envisioning a luxury hotel in Montecito was for Chaplin. That’s because there are actually three different choreographers – Kevin Jenkins, William Soleau, and Edgar Zendejas – who collaborated to explore the many aspects of Chaplin’s creative genius and complex personality, something more or less unheard of in the world of ballet. What’s more, they do so through an imaginative, Alice-in-Wonderland-like prism that allows State Street’s newest principal dancer, 23-year-old ballerina Ahna Lipchik, to make her company debut embodying to Little Tramp and other aspects of Chaplin as a young girl subsumed by Chaplin’s personality while James Folsom, a State Street Ballet company member since 2017, portrays the actual icon. Plus, there are special effects, projects, props, original music, and classic piano rags, and (not-so-colorful) costumes (as Chaplin’s world was largely black-and-white) to add flavor.

Soleau, who recently became co-artistic director of State Street, talked about the production earlier this week. 

Q. Why is Charlie Chaplin right for a ballet treatment? 

A. Because he literally moved like a dancer. He was so graceful, it was really incredible. From movement point alone, it makes a lot of sense. But it’s also that his life is so interesting, it’s great material for a work. Today, we know him mostly as the tramp, but there are 10 other sides to him: composer, director, a very political person, a rich man at age 24, the guy who started Universal Pictures. He was a real svengali. We cover many aspects of his life from his early childhood to the Keystone Cops, his later movies, his politics, then later in life.

How did the three of you come to collaborate?

We wanted to open the season with a brand-new, full-length ballet, and while we were thinking of ideas, Kevin brought up Charlie Chaplin. But he had never done a full evening before. So (SSB founder) Rodney (Gustafson) asked me to work with him. Then I thought, why not bring in Edgar, who had also never done a full-length ballet before. I could create the storyline and the arc, and make sure everything flowed. 

It seems like that would be challenging, to maintain continuity.

While we divided periods of his life into sections, instead of one of taking an individual section by himself, we decided to each do a part of each one. So, they flow into each other, and sometimes they even overlap. It’s very intertwined. We didn’t want people to be able point out which one of us has done what. Everything mashes up. The whole ballet is done that way. There are no blackouts between sections. It all just flows… The experience of creating it has been Incredible not only for the dancers, who get all these different styles, but also for each of us, because we get a chance to see how we each work. We got along really well and spent a lot of time talking through ideas and sharing thoughts, bouncing things off each other. That was fun. It was like throwing a lot of different ingredients into a soup and having it turn out great.

What was the impetus behind doing the story from the young girl’s point of view?

It was Kevin’s idea to have a woman play Chaplin, after he did a short improv idea with Ahna in San Diego. At first, I didn’t want to do it full-on, because it seemed too far outside of the box. But Ahna has Chaplin down – she’s not just a ballet dancer but also she’s a break dancer and popper, and she’s really studied his movements. I think it would be very hard to teach a ballet dancer how to isolate her body the way she does, and be able to replicate Chaplin, who was such a perfectionist that he sometimes did hundreds of takes for scenes that were a few seconds long. But she’s the personification of Charlie Chaplin. There is really no one else who could do this part. 

(State Street Ballet performs Chaplin at 7:30 pm Saturday, October 6, at The Granada Theatre. Visit www.granadasb.org or call (805) 899-2222.)