“I like to create roller-coasters in the ballet world, where the audience is really on the edge of their seat,” says choreographer Helen Pickett. Case in point, her ambitious latest creation for American Ballet Theatre (ABT): an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment.
Alive with psychological complexity, the ballet also marks, rather remarkably, the first time in its 85-year history that ABT has staged a full-length work choreographed by a woman. Susan Jaffe, the company’s artistic director since 2022, commissioned Pickett after seeing her adaptation of The Crucible for the Scottish Ballet. A former principal dancer with ABT, Jaffe has sought, in her role, to both preserve classic works from the repertoire and to introduce more diverse creative voices. “Our awareness and consciousness as human beings has changed a lot, especially over the last 10 years,” she says. “It’s a responsibility, and also an honor to reflect those shifts, as well as still understanding who we are as a company.”
While, for Pickett, the distinction of being the first woman to create a full-length ballet for ABT is an important one, her primary focus in developing the project over the last two years has been telling “the best possible story.” Central to that effort has been James Bonas, Pickett’s longtime creative partner and the ballet’s co-director, who came up with the idea to look at Crime and Punishment. While Pickett’s career began in dance (she trained with the San Francisco Ballet before joining William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet) before shifting into theater (including work with the experimental Wooster Group in New York City), Bonas studied acting at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before beginning his career as a director of theater and opera. Together, they’ve developed a unique partnership in the dance world, dreaming up ballets that blend artful theatricality with classical ballet technique and a contemporary vocabulary that Pickett has been honing since her first choreographic commission in 2005.
Long before Pickett begins creating movement, she and Bonas decide exactly how their ballet’s story will unfold. “We crack out a version of the treatment on a shared Google Doc that just bounces back and forth for months while we edit it,” says Bonas, who is based in London, while Pickett lives in Philadelphia. Once they had consolidated the 600-plus-page novel—about an impoverished former student, Raskolnikov, grappling with the aftermath of his decision to commit murder—into a two-act ballet, the duo enlisted the help of British composer Isobel Waller-Bridge. Waller-Bridge has worked across theater, film, and television (including on both seasons of her sister Phoebe’s Fleabag), but Crime and Punishment represents her first foray into the world of narrative ballet. (Also: Until now, ABT had never mounted a full-length ballet scored by a woman, either.)
“Music is about subtext a lot of the time, so you really want to be writing what’s going on underneath all of the action—the core of what these characters are feeling,” says Waller-Bridge. For guidance, she reached out to Dr. Oliver Ready, a professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. “I really wanted an understanding of the story so that the music can feel truthful, and Oliver had done a translation of the book, and he had also written some essays on it,” she explains. When Waller-Bridge then sat down to compose—typically after a stimulating walk around London—she worked out her melodies on a piano before “creating the kind of orchestral sound of it“ on a computer.
As Waller-Bridge found the work’s sound, Pickett was busy matching movement identities to each character. “I’m not making the steps yet, but I get to such a known place that by the time I get to the studio, it flies from there,” Pickett says. (Her assistant, Sarah Hillmer, would eventually help to physicalize Pickett’s ideas—for instance, the way she likes a torso to move, with “more side bend, and more overt épaulement”—for the dancers.) So, too, did she set about establishing the rest of the creative team—including Soutra Gilmour (sets and costumes), Tal Yarden (video design), and Jennifer Tipton (lighting). “Really great works of art or literature like Crime and Punishment are getting at something fundamental in the human condition that will always speak to us and always translate to different periods,” Bonas says. In that spirit, the minimalist sets and costumes aren’t specific to the novel’s period setting, in 19th-century Saint Petersburg; and Raskolnikov’s dream sequences—so central to the text—have been transformed into video projections.
At Yarden’s compelling suggestion, Pickett and Bonas have also cast both women and men in the leading role of Raskolnikov (a character identified as a man in the novel). “Raskolnikov is such a complicated character that it wasn’t about casting genders,” says Pickett. “It was about the emotional, psychological, and physical depth that Raskolnikov needed.” The process of determining which dancers most connected to the nuances of his personality took place early last year, during workshops for Crime and Punishment, though the bulk of studio rehearsals began only last month.
Learning the part has been intense but rewarding for principal dancer Cassandra Trenary, who will play Raskolnikov on opening night next week. (She is also performing in four other ballets during ABT’s three-week fall season, including two more new works.) Beyond the demands of remembering the steps and familiarizing herself with Pickett’s movement style was the character study: In addition to revisiting Dostoevsky’s novel, Trenary turned to television series like Industry and Love Death (starring Elizabeth Olsen as real-life accused murderer Candy Montgomery) to inform her acting choices. “It’s really interesting to pull from these newer stories that can be tied back to something written in 1866,” Trenary says from her dressing room between rehearsals. “Observing how actors approached something similar has helped me on the journey of discovering what it’s like when you are presented with circumstances where you see no other way out.”
She’s found it refreshing to break from the traditional ballerina role and mine new emotional registers. “It has been so much fun to explore what it feels like to bring anger to the forefront—anger at injustice, and anger at oneself, and what does that feel like in the body?” Trenary muses. “Rather than put on the pointe shoe and be in that ethereal place, there’s a more grounded, human element to the work. I think it’s a beautiful example of the time that we’re in now as well; in dance, and in ballet, and in pushing it forward.”
American Ballet Theatre’s Crime and Punishment will run from October 30 to November 3 at the David H. Koch Theater.