Blood Wedding
Premiere: Finnish National Ballet, Finnish Opera House, Helsinki. Oct 2010
Music: Dave Maric
Set: Jon Bausor
Costumes: Erika Turunen
Light: Tulay Schakir
Scenario: Edward Kemp with Cathy Marston
Cast: 27-30 dancers
“Created by British choreographer Cathy Marston for the Finnish National Ballet, Blood Wedding is a clear-cut, no-nonsense adaptation of the original play by Federico Garcia Lorca… The inexorable course of the tragedy is underlined in booming percussion as the lovers perform a courting dance, almost as if in heat. This is the ‘chemistry’ that is so often talked about. At the same time, the people upstage are engaged in a formal, custom-bound wedding polonaise. The space is used to excellent effect, as are simultaneous contrasting events.”
Helsingin Sanomat, October 2010
“…so intense that nothing like it has been seen on the stage of the National Opera for quite a while.”
Helsingin Sanomat, November 2010
“Cathy Marston and her team in Blood Wedding rely on the principle of ‘less is more’. Both the staging and the performance are restrained, hinting at and subtly alluding to things rather than showing them overtly, thus underlining the hidden tensions and symbolism of the drama. As the action and the protagonists’ feelings are shown in parallel with montage-like cuts and lightning-quick shifts of focus, both action and motivation receive shape and substance… The dance language builds on symbolism, restraint of powerful feelings and, of course, characterisation. The tensions and frictions in personal relationships are wonderfully translated into physical terms.”
Hufvudstadsbladet, October 2010
“Blood Wedding by English choreographer Cathy Marston, director of the Berne Ballet, is full of drama and a feeling of inexorable fate from its first moments…The duets in particular feature many apparently complex extreme positions expressing both passion and pain… but it can also be sensed in the tenseness and sharpness of the movement language.”
Uutispäivä Demari, November 2010
“Both of the mini-ballets given their world premieres in this double bill by the Finnish National Ballet, Blood Wedding and Scheherazade, are about grand emotions, though with very different moods and means. Blood Wedding is a contemporary ballet relying on sombre symbolism…The libretto by Marston and Edward Kemp compellingly highlights the women in the story and their emotions. The real love triangle, we find, is the one between the Mother, the Bride and Leonardo’s Wife.
The choreography brings forth turmoil of the mind, with restraint but therefore all the more powerfully.”
Turun Sanomat, October 2010
* Performance Rights are currently held by the Finnish National Ballet. Please contact Cathy Marston for more details.
To view a showreel and/or video of the complete work please contact Cathy Marston to request a private link.
