BalletLorent Teams Up Again with Carol Ann Duffy & Doctor Who Composer to Create a New "Snow White"

Details are a little sketchy but here's the overview, care of TheLowry:

balletLORENT's dark and mystical adaptation of Snow White is created from an original retelling by Carol Ann Duffy, and reimagines the story of a mother’s poisonous jealousy in a dance theatre production for family audiences. Thwarted desire, deception, compassion and redemption with magical mirrors, and a young woman with beauty as pure as feathered snow. 

Snow White is the second chapter of a planned trilogy of Brothers Grimm fairytales created by balletLORENT, which began with the highly acclaimed Rapunzel (Performance of the Year, The Journal Culture Awards 2012).

There's also a great Kickstarter happening in conjunction with the project, called the Snow White Young Cast project.

Giving children with little to no access to the arts the opportunity to be part of a professional dance production. 

Snow White, the second in dance theatre company balletLORENT’s planned trilogy of fairytales, will see the company’s professional dancers joined by a young cast of children aged between 6 – 8 years old and unique to each middle-large scale theatre that Snow White tours to. We are raising money through Kickstarter to be able to widen our reach to children with natural talent but little access to dance and the arts. 

Our young casts will rehearse and perform with our professional dancers, giving them the valuable experience of working with a professional dance company. We ran a similar model alongside our last fairytale, Rapunzel – but this time, our main aim is to engage with more children who have had little to no access to the arts, or previous dance experience.

You can read more about the 'young cast' project HERE.

And you can see another Snow White workshop video with different groups of children HERE as well.

Sounds intriguing, no? From what I can gather, it appears this production is set to premiere in October this year (2015), in Newcastle, UK.

I have to look up Duffy's poetry again, but especially her newer release for children in late 2014, to get more of an idea of where they're headed with this. The one promotional photo available from the production (in two variations) is quite intriguing...

I think there's a good chance the story will be based off her work in this book, however, published late last year, with illustrations by the amazing Tomislav Tomic. I have included the cover of Duffy's gorgeous looking book, and Tomic's two Snow White illustrations below:

"Disappear to faraway lands of wicked witches, evil monsters and brave heroines in Carol Ann Duffy’s stunning collection of Faery Tales, beautiful illustrated by Tomislav Tomic. This gift set collection of stories is a published just in time for Christmas, by Faber and Faber. Tomislav has created ethereal images of the Poet Laureate’s interpretations of classic stories such as Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He also designed and hand rendered the illuminated letters throughout the book as well as the title for the cover."

Now if I could just get a hold of the actual book..!