Feast for the senses Feast for the senses: Hansel & Gretel ballet a sweet treat of candy-coloured delights By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:25 PM CDT Monday, Oct. 6, 2025 Last Modified: 10:35 AM CDT Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025 Updates

Kate Hawley knows costumes are no bit players when it comes to storytelling, both onscreen and onstage.

The New Zealand costume and set designer transformed Margot Robbie into Harley Quinn for 2016’s Suicide Squad and Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt into an armoured, alien-fighting duo for 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow. She helped make Middle-earth come to life as an additional costume designer on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy.

And she’s a frequent collaborator of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s, having designed costumes for Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015) and his forthcoming adaptation of Frankenstein.

Hawley is also the brains behind the candy-coloured couture confections in Hansel & Gretel, a Royal New Zealand Ballet production choreographed by Loughlan Prior, which the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performs at the Centennial Concert Hall this week.

“I’ve always been nomadic and on the road with the film work that I’m doing, but my first love has always been the world of theatre, whether it’s opera or ballet,” says Hawley via Zoom from her kitchen in the future, a.k.a. 18 hours ahead in Wellington, New Zealand.

Several years ago, Hawley had a rare period back in Wellington after working on a couple of films, and met Prior, who was the choreographer-in-residence at the Royal New Zealand Ballet. He mentioned wanting to do a take on Hansel & Gretel.

“Which, of course, is one of my favourites — and the darker the better,” she says.

Working closely with Prior and composer Claire Cowan, the vision for the ballet, which originally premièred in 2019, quickly gelled.

“It was a case where the development of everything across choreography, design and the music itself were all growing together and answering each other. The language grew as we went through the whole process, which is always the thing I love most about collaboration,” Hawley says.

The original Brothers Grimm fairy tale is about an abandoned brother and sister who find themselves lured into the gingerbread house of a witch intent on fattening them up so she can eat them.

In his narrative ballet, Prior wanted to explore the topical issues inherent in the story, such as child-parent relationships, rejection and food insecurity.

“And then there’s this wonderful part of Loughlan that’s just entertainment,” Hawley says.

Hawley’s job isn’t just to outfit the dancers onstage, it’s to build a world. The ballet begins in black-and-white, silent-film style, to convey the hungry, drained-of-colour reality of the children.

“That idea of making it more Expressionist, setting it in the 1920s, still allows you to have elements of a fairy tale,” says Hawley, who also designed the sets for the ballet.

“I remember we talked about whether we were going to do it more modern or not, but for me, it was important to keep that sense of a Germanic tale.”

It also allows for a crowd-pleasing Dorothy-in-Oz-style reveal. When the siblings meet the witch and all her many temptations, their world bursts into a riot of vaudeville colour.

“I think it’s a classic kind of fairy-tale moment, going from grey to colour. It’s a transformation, and there’s a lot in this ballet about transformation,” Hawley says.

The world the siblings find themselves in is a fun feast for the senses, but it’s also a little menacing and overstimulating. That’s by design, too, and is one of the ballet’s allusions to our modern era: whether it’s screens or sugar, we live in a time of too much.

Hawley drew inspiration from everywhere — including, no joke, her cutlery drawer — for the visuals for the Forest of Forks.

“It’s a classic kind of fairy-tale moment, going from grey to colour. It’s a transformation, and there’s a lot in this ballet about transformation.”

“I love seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary,” she says.

She also loves a bit of cheek, as in her design for the bubble-gum pink Gingerbread Men, with their jaunty ice-cream-cone hats and drawn-on faces that read less bakery and more something out of a very different kind of shop entirely.

“Oh yeah, they’re classic me,” she says with a hoot of laughter. “People said to me, ‘Who would’ve thought you’d come up with gingerbread men in gimp suits?’ There’s a few things that are there for the adults.”

Designing for the ballet required Hawley to work differently than how she works in film, since she had to design for movement.

“Sometimes I’d want to do something and Loughlan would say, ‘No, you can’t do that because they won’t be able to move,’” she says.

The other big difference, she says, is in the quality of the costumes.

“The discipline in making costumes that can survive the wear and tear — you’re not just designing one costume for one act. It’s the corps de ballet, it’s the cast changes. I think those clothes have to be made better,” she says.

To that end, she extends heaps of credit to the costume department at the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

“In film, we always make beautiful clothes where we can, but there is always a sleight of hand, like, where’s the camera going? The wear and tear and physicality in theatre, and especially ballet, is a whole new level.”

RWB second soloist Joshua Hidson, who is dancing in the role of the Transformed Witch on Oct. 9 and 11, says his costume has helped him channel his over-the-top, cartoonish character.

“It’s actually quite challenging when you’re in the studio just, you know, in your normal ballet rehearsal attire and shoes and no green face paint, to get out of your head and really take on the role and forget that there’s all these people watching you — it kind of feels vulnerable in a weird way,” he says.

“But once you get the makeup and the dress and red sparkly shoes on, it really helps you get into that role.”

His costume hasn’t been without some challenges: Hidson has to do his stage makeup after dancing in a small role in the first 10 minutes of the ballet, and the first time he tried it, it took him an hour-and-a-half (for reference, the run time of the whole ballet is an hour and 59 minutes). He also has some intense claws to navigate.

But he has been loving the improvisational opportunities afforded by the skirt, something that, as a man in ballet, he doesn’t often get the chance to explore, and certainly not in a way that’s so integral to the character.

“But this, you can play with the skirt. You’ve got these bright-red bloomers underneath; you can pick up the skirt. I’m like, ‘What am I going to do with this skirt?’ It would be a shame to not let the audience see my bloomers,” he says.

After the Manitoba première of Hansel & Gretel this week, the RWB will tour it on to Ottawa later this month. Hawley says she’s absolutely thrilled this ballet still has legs.

“It was a very humble little production, but it’s so true that when the ideas are right, it doesn’t matter what your limitations are, those things grow and shine.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca