RWB’s elegant vampire knows he’s getting long in the tooth

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This article was published 29/09/2010 (5821 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The current ad campaign for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Dracula plays on the vampire-themed Twilight Saga, using taglines such as “The vampire who will ‘eclipse’ all others.”

Sadly, career twilight is closing in for two of RWB’s most admired stars, which gives the season-opening remount of the Gothic ballet a poignant bite. The production is on tonight through Sunday, accompanied by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, at the Centennial Concert Hall.

Jaime Vargas, the slender Mexican-born principal dancer who has brought elegance, ease and nobility to the RWB stage for the past six seasons, says he hasn’t decided when he’ll retire. But he has hinted that this season is his last.

He is 40 years old — very senior for the ballet realm. He has danced for 21 years and fought back from recent injuries. So audiences can be almost certain this is their final chance to see him (in two of the five performances) as the seductive villain in the ballet based on Bram Stoker’s horror classic.

“For sure, I’m getting to the end of my career,” says the friendly Mexico City native, dressed in a red hoodie and black sweats at the RWB studios.

This is officially the farewell season for beloved principal Tara Birtwhistle, 38, the only member of Dracula‘s original 1998 cast who is still with the company.

In three performances she’ll dance — for the final time — the role of Lucy, which she originated. (All season, audience members can write messages to Birtwhistle, expressing what she has meant to them over the past 20 years, at letter-writing stations at the Concert Hall or at www.rwb.org.)

For much of his career, Vargas was typically cast as the prince in classical works. Five years ago — the last time RWB mounted Dracula — he welcomed the chance to explore a darker side in the contemporary vampire role.

At that time, Mark Godden, who had created Dracula to music by Gustav Mahler, reworked the ballet. He added choreography that gave more depth to the bloodsucker’s character, suggesting that part of Dracula longs to be moral and decent, just as the mortal characters feel a pull to be wanton and depraved.

Vargas, who has danced the role on tour and at home, says it’s only during performances — not in rehearsal — that he feels the character evolving. “Every time you do it, the character grows into you,” he says.

When Godden visited the troupe again recently, he decided that Vargas’s nightstalker had actually become a little too sympathetic. He asked the dancer to pull it back toward the beastly side.

“Dracula was becoming a little bit tender in certain moments… like he had a soft spot for Mina (the career-woman character),” Vargas says. “That’s not there anymore.”

Vargas’s favourite parts of the ballet are the duets with Mina. “I like the communication; how we are reacting to each other,” he says.

The veteran dancer has started to take a teaching and training role with RWB. He’s not sure whether he and his Mexican wife, former dancer Martha De Ita, will stay in Winnipeg after he stops performing.

But they’ve been very happy here, he says. Their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter were born here. They own a house in River Heights and De Ita enjoys her work as a Pilates trainer.

Vargas has gotten very interested in applying strength training, body conditioning and other athletic approaches to ballet. He hopes to develop an approach that will fill in the “missing link” between dance and sport-style training.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research,” he says. “I feel personally that the athletic part (of ballet training) has been overwhelmed by the artistic part.”

One of the physical demands of Dracula is controlling the count’s swirling cape. Now that Vargas is an old hand, he hopes never to repeat the cape malfunction of his first performance as Romeo with Mexico’s national company.

“You have to wrap the cape around your body, but you’re running… I didn’t stop in time and it went all over my head, at the beginning of the (romantic) pas de deux…

“That was at the beginning of my career —— a very funny moment.”

 

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Dance Preview

Dracula

Royal Winnipeg Ballet

Centennial Concert Hall

Tonight to Saturday at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m.

Tickets $34 to $96 at Ticketmaster or 956-2792