Villain or victim? Haughty free-spending queen or impetuous naive girl? In his full-length ballet Marie -- an ambitious storytelling extravaganza -- Houston Ballet Artistic Director Stanton Welch offers a new perspective on the controversial and always fascinating life of Marie Antoinette. Choreographed specifically for Houston Ballet, Marie makes tremendous use of the company’s acting abilities and dancing talent. Marie features a cast of 70 dancers, beautiful and evocative sets, over 170 sumptuous and historically accurate costumes, and a stunning score by Dmitri Shostakovich.
As a 15-year-old girl, Marie Antoinette was sent from Vienna to marry the future King Louis XVI of France. The youngest daughter of Austrian empress Maria Teresa and Francis I, she was sent by her mother from Vienna to Versailles with the expectation that she would further Austrian interests. Sacrificed to eighteenth century power politics, she arrived in France, a foreigner hardly prepared for the court at Versailles and far from interested in state affairs. Marie threw her energies into extravagant parties and patronizing the arts. The French accused her of political interference and wrote scandalous tracts against her, mocking her lack of sophistication. Longing for a family and the birth of an heir to secure the French-Austrian alliance, Marie's marriage remained unconsummated for seven years, and she had to endure more than eight years of public humiliation for her barren marriage before the delivery of the first of her four children. The revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille found the queen a ready target for all that was wrong with France. Torn from her 100-room palace when a mob of some 7,000 women marched on Versailles, she was thrust into jail. At first plunged into deep despair, she was eventually ennobled and transformed by her suffering. She defied her enemies at her trial with intelligence, arousing the admiration of even the most hostile revolutionaries. With new awareness and regal dignity, she mounted the steps of the scaffold to the guillotine, conscious of her failures, doomed by her own tragic flaws, a young woman (aged only 38) trapped in a tumultuous moment of history.
The focus of Marie remains firmly on Marie Antoinette. The heroine is onstage for the duration of the ballet, surrounded by a frothy ocean of court gossips, fussy relatives, frivolous pals and brutal revolutionaries.
By the way, she NEVER said, "Let them eat cake!"
