Jean Paul Gaultier creates costumes for Snow White ballet by Preljocaj

A new vision for a much-loved fairytale ballet features a heavy dose of un-ballet leather and vinyl.

The Queen in Snow White resembles an S&M high priestess. Picture: Yang Wang

Picture the scene. You invite Jean Paul Gaultier to dinner. At some point during the meal you nervously float your proposal: you want the Parisian haute couture legend to design all the costumes for your new ballet. Gaultier, to your disbelief, says yes — and, what’s more, he will do it gratis. In a blaze of creativity, he produces almost 300 sketches in 10 days.

Then, like fashion’s version of Santa Claus, he arrives at your studio bearing the finished product — piles of dazzling costumes in very un-ballet leather and vinyl. “For the dancers, it was like Christmas,” recalls Angelin Preljocaj. “It was so exciting for everybody.”

Preljocaj, one of Europe’s leading contemporary choreographers, tells the story with relish. When he started his hunt for a designer for his new ballet Blanche Neige, or Snow White — crafted for his sleek, celebrated 26-member dance company, Ballet Preljocaj — Gaultier was on the top of his wish list.

Fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier. Picture: Rainer Torrado

He had seen one of the designer’s catwalk shows in 2008 with models dressed in gloriously ornate costumes inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid — think seashell bras, dresses with fish scales, seaweed and net, hair wreathed in algae — and “so when I was thinking who could do the costumes for this, I was really orientated towards him. I was fascinated, thinking, ‘Wow, he’s the right guy for it.’ ”

Little did he imagine that the designer would say yes — or that Gaultier would be a fan of his work. The designer had been impressed after seeing a production at the Avignon Festival. “At first, he was thinking I am asking him to do an abstract ballet because the works he had seen from me were abstract. But when I proposed to him that it was a fairytale, he was really enthusiastic. I asked him to come to the atelier of the set designer and see the maquette, the — comment dire — set model? I showed him my vision for Snow White … and during this time he is writing, writing in his notebook.” Two weeks before the premiere, the costumes finally arrived. After a fitting with the dancers, the perfectionist Gaultier basically started all over again, says Preljocaj.

“I was thinking, ‘OK, good, we’ve got the costumes’, and then he starts to remodel and change things — it was another scale of creativity.” And he did it for free “because, yes, when we started this project, we don’t have enough money [to afford] Jean Paul Gaultier, but he was so excited to accept. He was very enthusiastic and very generous — he is a kind of co-producer of this work.”

So what did audiences see when the curtains rose at the premiere of the work at the Biennale de la Danse de Lyon in 2008? This being Gaultier, Snow White’s look was pure sex. Think horns, latex bustiers, suspenders, bustles, leather strapwork, and thigh-high vinyl boots strutting across Thierry Leproust’s magical set with its giant silver mirror and rock wall. The effect in a snapshot? “Renaissance festival meets bondage club”, in the view of one bemused critic.

The Queen, arriving in a clap of thunder, is an S&M high priestess in black gloves, black hood and PVC dominatrix boots who later orally “rapes” Snow White with that notorious apple. The young boar killed by the Huntsman is a bare-breasted woman with huge horns. And Snow White? She’s dressed in something akin to a toga or thong or baby diaper with plenty of leg and loin flashing. According to Gaultier, “it clings to the skin like a … a … like a miracle! Like she’s wearing nothing.”

Audiences and critics gasped at the spectacle. There were jeers (too fantastical and fetish club-by) and cheers (emotionally powerful, visually spectacular) in equal measure. Australian audiences get their opportunity to judge when Ballet Preljocaj premieres Snow White at Queensland Performing Arts Centre tonight as part of the QPAC International Series 2016. The Brisbane Festival also will feature a bloody reimagining of the tale in a new opera, a collab­oration between La Boite Theatre and Opera Queensland under the direction of Lindy Hume, as well as screenings of the 1916 silent film and 1937 Disney Snow White at the Gallery of Modern Art.

To Preljocaj, there’s nothing prurient in his version of the story. This state of onstage deshabille, as the French put it, is central to the tale, he says — sexuality with all its weird and twisted tributaries is the engine that drives this dark 1812 Brothers Grimm classic. This is a story of sexual attraction, love, lust, obsession, revenge and hate — a fairytale, then, that could have been made to order for a choreographer long celebrated for being outre noir, or beyond black.

Since emerging out of the experimental dance boom in France in the 1980s, the French-Albanian dance maker has made waves with works ranging from his 1990 Romeo and Juliet (with the protagonists reimagined as a homeless drifter and a daughter of a dictator in a bleak totalitarian state) to his 2001 Rite of Spring featuring a gang rape and the stripping naked of the protagonist. His 1996 work Annonciation attracted the ire of Orthodox Russians and conservative US political commentators alike with its depiction of a female archangel Gabriel smooching the Virgin Mary.

His visceral 1998 Casanova for the Paris Opera Ballet featured bloody red cavities and X-rays, with famed ballerina Isabelle Guerin reciting the symptoms of venereal disease from a medical textbook.

But about 2008, after finishing a run of typically cerebral, dark and dense abstract pieces such as Empty Moves and Eldorado (Sonntags Abschied), he craved something different, he says: “I wanted to do something mysterious, romantic, magical — a narrative ballet.” As he has said, every now and then he feels like “coming out of the laboratory” and telling a story.

He settled on the idea of a fairytale, to the shock of his followers. “They thought I’d lost it,” he said in an interview, “no one would even call the work by its name. It was just ‘the fairytale project’, as if they hoped it would go away”.

But why not a fairytale, he retorts. The genre has long been a rich field of inspiration for dance makers from John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid to Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty; fairytales, with their rich psychological and symbolic inner worlds, provide perfect fodder for experimentation in dance, in his view.

A fan of Bruno Bettelheim’s seminal 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, he points to their traditional role in highlighting complex moral states, from emerging sexuality to loss to betrayal and death. Fairytales, Preljocaj says, traditionally have been written to “help young people to face reality and the problems they will see in life, and that’s why they are so creative and rich”. As Bettelheim wrote, “the child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue …”

But which fairytale to use? He briefly considered The Sleeping Beauty but then discarded it as “too simple … whereas with Snow White, you have a real killer!” The tale still resonates in popular culture (recent cinematic incarnations range from Mirror, Mirror with Julia Roberts to Snow White and the Huntsman) because it is so relevant to our modern obsession with youth and beauty, he says. In the tale’s depiction of the tensions between nubile perfection and jealous old age, we see the battles being waged between young women and an older generation that remains curiously youthful through good diet, makeup and cosmetic surgery.

He doesn’t like the term “cougar” — “because if you are a man over 50 and you go for a younger girl you don’t need a special word for that, n’est-ce pas?” — but in a society where women are living longer and “looking more beautiful for longer, even after 50”, you are increasingly seeing a complex psychosexual generational war, rife with desire and anxiety.

“People talk about the Oedipus complex, but I say that in the 21st century there is a new complex, and we call it the Snow White complex, which is the conflict between the [two groups] … I think this is a very modern conflict.”

In his creation, set to extracts by Mahler and electronic music, it is the powerful, narcissistic Queen and not Snow White who rules the show. She is an incredibly complex character, he says, and some of the best dancing in the work has been reserved for her.

Dramaturgically, he remained faithful to the dark Brothers Grimm tale, steering well clear of the sugary Walt Disney 1937 cartoon version that “has totally changed this fairytale”.

The Brothers Grimm “wrote very dark and very hard and very passionate and, how can I say, very sexual stories, and I wanted to bring that out in this work. The Walt Disney Snow White” — he makes a noise of contempt — “she is very compassionate, which is related to the [archetype] of the American female of the 1940s, that traditional image of the woman at home, cleaning, in the kitchen. I wanted to bring back the real Grimm story.” He has done that by including everything from the gouging out of a deer’s heart to having the Queen dance to her death wearing red-hot shoes.

The tale has inspired some unusual, even harrowing choreography; Preljocaj, never afraid to be ugly as a dance maker, has the Prince crawling and manhandling her limp body in a graphic duet; in one brutal scene, the Queen rams an apple down Snow White’s throat.

But there are also scenes of lyrical beauty, from the various pas des deux between the romantic protagonists to the aerial ballet of the seven dwarfs who emerge from holes in a rock wall, twirling on ropes. That was a big technical challenge, requiring an abseiling trainer. “The idea was simple but the realisation of it was a lot of work,” Preljocaj says.

For someone who so prizes movement over mime — Preljocaj calls his work “corporal adventures” and speaks passionately about energy, weight, space and dynamics — has it been challenging to stage a narrative ballet? He says it helped to have such a universally well-known story as a platform from which to launch the dancers’ bodies, “which express all of these complexities … movement brings a state of consciousness that translates into emotion and that’s what I ask the dancers to explore”.

Born in the Paris suburb of Sucy-en-Brie in 1957 to Albanian immigrants, Preljocaj has four younger sisters (he and his wife, Valerie Muller, a film director, have two daughters, 25 and 22: “they keep me young”). Like Hamburg Ballet director Neumeier, he says he was inspired to pursue a life in ballet by a book. In Neumeier’s case it was a biography of legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky; in his case, it was a history of dance featuring Rudolf Nureyev. A friend at school, a ballet student, had shown him a picture of the dancer, and Nureyev’s sinewy, charismatic form, seemingly transcending gravity in mid-leap, struck a chord: “Suddenly I was totally fascinated by the photo … his face, the light.”

But the path to dance wasn’t easy. When he was nine, he used the money his father gave him for judo lessons to pay for ballet lessons instead — yes, very Billy Elliot, he says, chuckling, in a reference to the British film about a boy who defies the odds to dance. “I went for my first class in ballet in my judo outfit — just a white shirt, and, how do you say? The pantalons. I didn’t have any dance clothes.”

He moved from classical dance to contemporary with an early influence being Karin Waehner, a disciple of German modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman; in 1980, he went to New York to study with Merce Cunningham. Returning home, he joined the company of Quentin Rouillier and trained with American choreographer Viola Farber. He then joined Dominique Bagouet before founding his own company in 1984, now based in Aix-en-Provence.

He burst on to the radar with works such as Marche Noir and Larmes Blanches, and made his name in innovative homages to 20th-century ballet classics such as Les Noces, Parade and Spectre de la rose. His 1994 work for the Paris Opera Ballet, Le Parc, a stylish depiction of the rituals of the 17th and 18th-century French court, was a critical hit, and he would go on to make waves with works as diverse as 1996’s Annonciation, 2001’s Helikopter, 2003’s Near Life Experience — inspired by the lack of oxygen on top of Mount Kilimanjaro — 2010’s Siddharta, about the life of Buddha, and 2013’s The Nights. His ballets are featured in the repertoires of La Scala of Milan, the New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet, among other companies.

“I try not to Xerox myself,’’ he once said. “I’m not interested in a codified vocabulary. I approach each piece as if it’s the only one I’m making.’’ But in all this work there is a Preljocaj stamp: a visceral physicality often married to a highly conceptual framework, though he travels easily between classical and contemporary forms — as he has said: “To me, a body falling to the floor isn’t any more or less beautiful than an arabesque.”

Does he see himself as an intellectual or emotional artist? A bit of both, he says. It is seeded in his sense of duality as a child of immigrants. “There is this side of my family, coming from Albania, this strange country, and making a new homeland and then going to school in France … and it has brought two kinds of ways of thinking for me — one is more instinctive and intuitive, and the other is more mathematical and more cultural in the sense of being consumed by philosophy, mathematics and by the history of art … these are two different streams in my work you can see — there is a melange.”

Talk turns to wider issues. When we chat, Belgium is still reeling from Islamist terrorist attacks that have left dozens dead; a few months later, Nice will be hit in another terror attack.

What role do artists have in responding to these political cataclysms? In an interview with Review, Belgian dance maker Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, speaking soon after the terrorist massacres in Paris, raised the power of dance to express public pain, engender bonds and provide catharsis. “Sharing with people in the same space and same time, that is what I think the performing arts in general does,” she said.

But should dance makers do more in their work to address the causes and effects of violence? Preljocaj is reflective. “I think dance in a certain way is connected to politics but not in the sense of it being a direct message — it is more subliminal, more underneath, mysterious. And the message that dance maybe can show is we have to learn to live together first of all.” A dancer in full flight on stage can “bring something, a kind of a taste of what is humanity, and that’s what I think we are responsible to give to the audience … to fight to stay in union and not to fall into different sides. I think that hate is easy … love is more difficult. To love your voisin, your neighbour, that’s hard work.”

So where to for Preljocaj and his company? Since October 2006, the Ballet Preljocaj has resided at the state-of-the-art Pavillon Noir in Aix-en-Provence, a building the envy of dance makers all over; from this base the company continues an active national and international touring program.

Preljocaj is also busy with offstage activities including working on the movie adaptation of a popular comic Polina, a ballet-themed drama based on the story of a young Russian dancer who strives for artistic greatness, which will feature Juliette Binoche in the central role. Co-directed and co-written by Preljocaj and Muller, the film opens in Moscow in the early 90s and follows the journey of a gifted ballerina from a modest background. “I am very excited to work on the movie, on this story of how a young child can become a great artist.”

Ballet Preljocaj’s Snow White runs at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane until September 11.