Genevieve Penn Nabity and Harrison James rehearse for a scene in The National Ballet of Canada's production of Don Quixote.The National Ballet of Canada.
Canada’s ballet companies are either tilting at windmills or, like Sancho Panza, they’ve discovered that the perfect companion on a quest to advance their art form, challenge their dancers and sell tickets is Don Quixote.
Three of Canada’s four largest troupes are mounting new adaptations of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, beginning with Toronto’s National Ballet, where Don Quixote runs June 1-9 at the Four Seasons Centre. Two more productions will debut in May, 2025, at Alberta Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.
Sarah Gutsche-Miller, a dance historian and musicologist at the University of Toronto, said in an e-mail that Don Quixote, choreographed by Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig Minkus, is “a fun piece of dance acrobatics for ballet connoisseurs and general audiences.” Extrapolated from a short passage in the novel, the plot focuses on a young woman, Kitri, whose father wants her to marry a foppish wealthy landowner rather than the local barber she adores. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza show up to ensure true love and chivalry will prevail. Add bullfighting capes, lots of leggy extensions and the fandango, and the ballet has “all of the pyrotechnical virtuosity that made Russian ballet popular in the first place,” Gutsche-Miller said.
The ballet’s one contemporary wrinkle, says Rachel Schmidt, a Spanish literature expert at the University of Calgary: the gypsy caravan, pulled by Petipa and Minkus from a Cervantes short story and dropped into Act 2 of the ballet. Don Q isn’t the only 19th-century story ballet with questionable cultural depictions: La Bayadère is set in an unspecified South Asian locale, reflecting the creators’ fetishization of cultures they knew little about. Ditto for Le Corsaire, a vaguely Middle Eastern ballet that Petipa popularized in Russia. Since 2020, the ballet world has basically hit pause on both La Bayadère and Le Corsaire, but not Don Q. Exoticizing Spanish culture is apparently “less problematic for most people than the orientalist caricatures that have finally come under fire over the past few years,” Gutsche-Miller said.
Alberta Ballet artistic director Francesco Ventriglia said decisions about such depictions should be made by individual companies. Les Grands Ballets Canadiens promoted the “beautiful gypsy women” of Don Quixote in its season announcement. National Ballet has opted to describe the characters as “Roma” rather than “gypsy,” a company spokesperson said, but added that the scene is “not culturally specific.”
National Ballet of Canada dancers Selene Guerrero-Trujillo and Josh Hall rehearse Don Quixote. The National Ballet's production runs June 1-9 at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, and the Alberta Ballet and Les Grands Ballets Canadiens will debut their own productions of the ballet in May, 2025.The National Ballet of Canada.
With those broader balletic evolutions in mind, here’s a look at how the three companies are approaching Don Quixote.
National Ballet of Canada, June 1-9, 2024, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
Carlos Acosta’s name has been synonymous with Don Quixote ever since he first leapt onstage as Basilio in his native Cuba. Over a career lasting three decades, he danced the role for more than a dozen companies around the world. Before taking his final bows with London’s Royal Ballet, the company allowed him to create a new Don Q. Now 50 and serving as the artistic director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Acosta slightly tweaked his choreography and debuted yet another production in 2022.
National Ballet artistic director Hope Muir has long been friendly with Acosta and convinced him to share the Birmingham Royal’s fresh sets and costumes. What distinguishes Acosta’s versions are the expanded featured roles – as many as a dozen each for men and women, including a lead Roma couple and a trio for the Act 2 dream sequence, after Don Quixote is knocked unconscious by a windmill blade.
“From a classical perspective, Don Q is a ballet that stretches the dancers,” Acosta said, speaking recently from his home in England. “There is a lot of dancing there, for everyone.”
Other story ballets use the corps “like an ornament,” he said. Not Don Q. Over the course of three hours, the same dancer might play a matador’s sweetheart, a Roma dancer, a dryad fairy and a wedding festival guest. That’s a lot of varied dancing. And because each adaptation can draw from Cervantes’ entire oeuvre, “there’s so much there, the opportunities are endless.”
What all the variations in Don Q storytelling have in common is a happy ending, “which we don’t have a lot of in repertory,” Acosta noted. “We need that.”
Alberta Ballet, May 1 and 2, 2025, Calgary; May 9 and 10, Edmonton
The leaders of major dance companies “need to talk more,” Ventriglia acknowledged. That was his first thought after learning two other Canadian companies plan to tackle Don Q.
But he’s Italian, comes to Alberta by way of New Zealand and had little time to plan his first season. He decided to commission a new Don Quixote, “because it’s a beautiful ballet. The music is fantastic. The story is just perfect.”
Alberta Ballet is the only Canadian company commissioning all new designs for Don Q. Ventriglia’s take on Cervantes will feature costumes by Italian designer Gianluca Falaschi and sets by Alberta Ballet executive producer Małgorzata Szablowska.
That said, if any other companies want to split the costs and make this Don Q a co-production, Ventriglia said, he’s all ears. “I would say ‘yes’ immediately.”
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, May 29 to June 7, 2025, Place des Arts, Montreal
Since taking the helm at Les Grands in 2017, Ivan Cavallari has endeavoured to push what was a contemporary company further toward classical technique. That shift meant bringing more story ballets into the company’s repertoire. This season he added Giselle, and next year, Don Quixote. The new production will be based on Petipa but adapted by Les Grands mistress Marina Villanueva, who spent most of her career in Cuba, working under the famed ballerina Alicia Alonzo.
Rachele Buriassi, a principal dancer with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, as Kitri in the ballet Don Quixote.Sasha Onyshchenko/Supplied
Villanueva said she hopes to make her Don Q more Cuban in flavour than European, although the company will be borrowing most of its sets and costumes from a company in Rome. Several character actors will travel from Cuba to take on some of the comic non-dancing roles, such as Kitri’s fiancé, her father and Sancho Panza. But the role of the elderly knight himself? That’s reserved for the artistic director, with a twist: While Don Q sleeps, a younger alter ego will arise to dance with the Queen of the Dryads, Cupid and Dulcinea, the knight’s fantastical ideal woman.
“If I did it myself, it would not be good,” Cavallari said.
He prefers to view Canada’s trio of Don Quixotes not as a synchronous approach to classical ballet but as affirmation of the benevolent knight’s quest. Cervantes’ hero may be delusional, but there’s truth in his pursuit of goodwill, the righting of wrongs and romance.
“I would love for there to be a million Don Quixotes going around the world, trying to save the world,” he said.
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