Pointe shoes meet feather boas when the Royal Winnipeg Ballet swirls into Paris’s risqué cabaret with Moulin Rouge—The Ballet

When it opened in 1889, Paris’s Moulin Rouge quickly became known for two things: the-high-kicking cancan and the loose living that the cabaret inspired. By no means risqué today, the theatre still features women launching into the splits wearing little more than big, bright headdresses and feather boas to match. It hardly seems the stuff of classical ballet.

But choreographer Jorden Morris has taken the history of the dance hall to create Moulin Rouge—The Ballet, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s highest-grossing production of all time. Clearly, Morris was onto something when he thought of bringing the cancan to the barre.

“I was always intrigued by the question: how can I to transform this to pointe shoes?” the former RWB and Boston Ballet dancer says on the line from his Winnipeg home. “I really wanted the dancers to be en pointe, so I created a hybrid, a mixed breed of pointe work and cancan work. It looks cool—but it’s hard on the dancers to kick that high and relevé [to rise up onto the toes] en pointe at the same time.”

Vancouverites will get to see for themselves just how cool the unusual fusion is when the company brings Moulin Rouge to the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts from Thursday to Sunday (November 19 to 22). Just as it did in Winnipeg, the organization has added an extra show to its run here—a Saturday matinee—to meet demand. The new ballet for the 26-member company, which turns 70 this year, brought in nearly $700,000 during its five-day Canadian premiere at home last month. Morris beat his own record: his last ballet for RWB, 2006’s Peter Pan, was at the time the organization’s greatest revenue-generator.

Given the global economic gloom, the response to the work is one that naturally gratifies Morris. He says the enthusiasm proves the art form is still relevant.

“There’s been a huge buzz. One of my goals is to make dance more accessible, to nurture a generation of younger audiences to be part of it,” says Morris, noting that the RWB had to get legal clearance from the Moulin Rouge to use the name and is the only dance company in the world to have such rights. (Revue representatives gave Morris positive feedback after they travelled to Minneapolis to see the world premiere in October.)

“I wanted to make something entertaining, so that audiences would get taken away on a journey,” he adds. “I liked the idea of bringing in a cinematic type of story, a creative mix of storytelling and beautiful movement. It’s Paris, it’s French, it’s Moulin Rouge, it’s the cancan, it’s a love story: there’s a lot to love.”

Morris might be the first classical-ballet choreographer to give the “Red Windmill” his own spin, but he’s obviously not the only artist to be inspired by that piece of Paris.

Zsa Zsa Gabor performed in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, which was based on Pierre La Mure’s 1950 novel about the life of bohemian painter and cabaret regular Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Nicole Kidman starred in Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie Moulin Rouge!. Then there was that film’s soundtrack, which gave rise to the “Lady Marmalade” music-video featuring Christina Aguilera and Pink, among others.

Morris says he isn’t bothered by being in the company of the likes of the “Stupid Girls” singer.

“Some people say we’re cashing in on the name,” he says. “If that’s what we need to get audiences in, fine. Then hopefully they’ll have such an incredible experience that they’ll say, ”˜I will come back.’ ”

Morris’s ballet tells the romantic tale of Nathalie, a laundress, and Matthew, a painter. She gets discovered by Zidler, the owner of a cabaret, who falls for her. One of the central characters is based on Toulouse-Lautrec, who evoked Parisian night life in his vivid posters.

“I wanted to picture what was going on in his head while he was painting. I imagined all his swirling thoughts, and what better way to interpret what he’s thinking than to have a dancer turning and swirling?”

After retiring as a principal dancer at the RWB at 31—earlier than he would have liked, but he didn’t have a choice after six knee surgeries—Morris spent a summer at New York University studying early French choreography. Now 42, he’s worked with and learned from some of the world’s most innovative dance makers, including Jirí Kylián, Nacho Duato, and Rudi van Danzig.

“I miss the stage,” the Banff native admits. “I started dancing when I was 10 years old. I pretty much grew up in the theatre world. In a studio is where I’m most comfortable. I love everything about the theatre: the set design, lighting design, everything.”

On-stage, Morris’s team aims to evoke a true sense of the red-light district that’s home to the revue, and to re-create the club’s party atmosphere, all the while keeping in line with classical ballet’s finesse. The production has a flashy “show within a show”, and every female dancer has a custom-made corset. Set to an eclectic score that features numbers by Claude Debussy, Edith Piaf, and Jacques Offenbach, among others, the ballet comes complete with an Eiffel Tower that lights up.

It all promises to resurrect fin-de-siècle Paris—and put a new spin on high kicks.