Fans of this whimsical story were likely introduced to Alice and her wonderland the more traditional way.
“I’m late. I’m late. For a very important date. No time to say hello, goodbye. I’m late I’m late I’m late.”
Walt Disney.
The Disney animated version was released in 1951. And while it’s old, it’s not the original inspiration for the adaptation. That would be Lewis Carroll’s children's novel, Alice Adventures in Wonderland… published in 1865.
“So Lewis Carroll gets the idea for Alice in Wonderland from a friend's daughter, Alice Little, who is a precocious child in his life, and he's just kind of inspired by her personality.”
That’s Dr. Katie Lanning, associate professor of English at Wichita State University.
“And the story goes that he and his friends and the little children, there were three sisters, were in a boat going down a river one summer day, and she, Alice kept, Alice kept asking Lewis Carroll, ‘Tell me a story, tell me a story,’ and so he just extemporaneously tells her this story of Alice's Adventures Underground, it was called at the time, and she liked it so much that at the end of the day she asked him, ‘Can you write that down for me’.”
Katie Andrusak is the creative director for Ballet Wichita’s Alice in Wonderland. She says both the original novel and the Disney film served as inspiration for her adaption of the ballet.
“I read both Through the Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and growing up as a Disney kid, I felt a lot of nostalgia in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and so that is primarily what our story follows.”
And we follow that story… down the rabbit hole. A metaphor so pervasive in our society that I went down a rabbit hole researching the metaphor. And what does it say about a piece of literature that has created such a common metaphor? Dr. Lanning has an idea of why Alice in Wonderland has such staying power.
“Because Lewis Carroll does something quite different in this story than children's literature had seen before that. So, particularly, he's writing in the 1860s we're at the height of the Victorian period, which is very much even in adult literature about decorum and proper behavior, and so children's books had for about a century been all about didacticism, all about lessons on how you should behave, what's the proper way to act as a child in Victorian England, and Lewis Carroll was not really interested in that.”
And neither were audiences of the time. Nor audiences of today, apparently. This topsy-turvy world has captured the imaginations of audiences for more than 160 years. Primarily through its cast of characters.
“A lot of the characters in our ballet you're going to see that are similar to the original work, so we start in the real world with Alice having a family picnic. We maybe flourish it a little bit with a few extra people at that picnic, but she ultimately falls asleep, and then follows that white rabbit who's very late down the rabbit hole.”
But how will audiences of the ballet know the white rabbit is very late without him saying so? How does Andrusak adapt a book of words to a production with no words?
“So two ways I tried hard in the movement that I created for these various characters, like the Cheshire Cat, the caterpillar, the tea party, the Queen of Hearts. I tried to find ways to emulate the character that's built in the story through their rhetoric and how they interact with Alice, and put that into movement.”
Dr. Lanning thinks that a ballet or any kind of dance performance of Alice in Wonderland is really apropos. “This is such a fluid and malleable story. So much of Alice in Wonderland is about wordplay and about the flexibility of language, and that shapes can change. … It's a text that's willing to mold itself to the things that it's talking about, even as the meaning of those words shift from one person to the next, so there's something very.. it's very open to changing, I suppose, in a way that I think would be beautiful rendered visually.
