For choreographer Cecily Stewart, who has a new ballet based on Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl premiering this weekend at the New Vic, reading and interpreting great books is a consuming passion. Inside State Street Ballet’s rehearsal studio, she runs what may be the city’s most unusual book group — half a dozen or more brilliant and athletic young dancers working as a team to read, discuss, improvise around, and finally dance through the classics.
For this project, the dancers not only read the diary together; they also consulted other Holocaust testimony and met with survivors living in Santa Barbara. The resulting 33-minute ballet, “Anne’s Window,” rises to the challenge of imagining Frank’s excruciatingly poignant situation through a combination of words, dance, and music. Sofia Ross will speak the part of Anne while the dancers play multiple roles in telling the story. According to Stewart, the window of the title refers to both the opening through which Anne observes the world and her eyes, those indelible windows on the soul we all know so well from the famous smiling photo that adorns virtually every copy of her book.
With this new work by a company member as his starting point, State Street Ballet founder Rodney Gustafson went on to curate a full program called Women’s Work that celebrates the creativity of young women choreographers from all over the globe. “Watching Cecily and the company develop “Anne’s Window” gave me the idea,” Gustafson said, “and then I started to think about the wonderful women who have supported us, like Léni Fé Bland and Sara Miller McCune, and it all came together that this should be a program that celebrates strong women’s voices.”