✦ Origins ✦
Christopher Wheeldon's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was commissioned jointly by The Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada - the latter's artistic director, Karen Kain, approached the Royal Ballet to propose a co-production after learning of the project - and had its world premiere on 28 February 2011 at the Royal Opera House, with Lauren Cuthbertson created as Alice, Sergei Polunin as Jack/the Knave of Hearts, Edward Watson as Lewis Carroll/the White Rabbit, and Zenaida Yanowsky as Alice's mother/the Queen of Hearts. The scenario, by playwright Nicholas Wright, frames Carroll's 1865 novel inside a Victorian garden party, with real-world characters doubling as their Wonderland counterparts - a structural device that let Wheeldon root the story's fantasy in a legible emotional world before Alice ever falls down the rabbit hole.
The score, composed by Joby Talbot, ran to roughly 100 minutes and was the first full-length score commissioned by The Royal Ballet in two decades, and the company's first newly commissioned full-length narrative ballet since 1995. Talbot built much of the score's character around an expanded percussion section and four wordless female voices, aiming for a sound distinct enough to read as Wonderland's own sonic world rather than a generic fairy-tale score. Sets and costumes were designed by Bob Crowley, whose stagecraft - scaling architecture, trap doors, and forced perspective - did much of the work of making Alice's changes of size and the story's constant transformations theatrically legible.
What Makes It Distinct
The production is best known for a string of inventive set-piece sequences that solve, in choreographic terms, problems the story poses for a stage adaptation. The Caterpillar is built from eight dancers stacked and layered into a single sinuous body, their sixteen legs dressed in matching, crystal-encrusted pointe shoes so that the creature reads as one continuous animal rather than eight separate performers. The Mad Hatter's tea party interpolates a full tap sequence into the classical vocabulary - created on and closely associated with Steven McRae - an unusual crossover of technique for a Royal Ballet mainstage production. The Cheshire Cat is achieved through puppetry, its body able to appear, dissolve, and reassemble onstage in ways pure dance could not manage alone, and the ballet's trial and croquet scenes, with the Queen of Hearts' card-suited court, flamingo mallets, and hedgehog balls, keep the story's satirical logic intact rather than smoothing it into conventional fairy tale.
Wheeldon originally staged the work in two acts and restructured it into three in 2012, adding a substantial pas de deux for Alice and the Knave - a rare instance of a choreographer significantly revising a full-length ballet's architecture after its premiere run, rather than treating the original staging as fixed.
Legacy
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has gone on to become one of the most widely restaged new full-length ballets of the twenty-first century, taken into repertory by the National Ballet of Canada (2011), the Royal Swedish Ballet (2016), the Royal Danish Ballet (2016-17), The Australian Ballet (2017), the Joffrey Ballet, Miami City Ballet, and the New National Theatre, Tokyo (2022), among others, and released twice on DVD with Cuthbertson reprising the title role. Critics were not unanimous - some found the first act overstuffed with incident relative to its dancing, and reviews have periodically debated whether the production leans too heavily on stagecraft and spectacle - but its sustained international restaging record marks it as one of the defining full-length narrative ballets of its era.
Alongside The Cellist and other contemporary narrative commissions, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is frequently cited as a turning point in convincing major companies to invest again in newly commissioned, full-evening story ballets, rather than relying primarily on nineteenth-century repertory to fill their main stages.
See Also
Read the full profile of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.