A while back, Historica Canada put out a call for new Heritage Moments. With two producer friends, I was part of a pitch to create something different. Heritage elected to go another direction, but I’m very proud of this pitch, posted here for posterity. It’s not funny, at all…I just think if it had been done, and done right, it would have been beautiful.
HISTORICA CANADA TREATMENT 2 – CELIA FRANCA & THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA
Premise: A re-enactment, through dance, of the early days of the NBOC, in the style of LA-LA-Land (reference that final imaginary sequence of the way their lives could have gone). To be filmed on a sound or theatre stage, with backdrops flying in (out of frame) to create each new “location”.
An orchestral score, Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” Op. 66 plays. A woman small, lithe, with severe eyebrows and a striking profile is dancing in a spotlight (SUPER: Celia Franca, London, UK, 1951).
As she finishes and bends in a curtsy to an unseen audience, two people enter and plead with her to join them. She agrees, they twirl across a map of the Atlantic to land in Toronto. Dancers rush in to join her, and she pulls some into a group, others she rejects and hurls aside. A company slowly forms around Celia, learning steps, suddenly coalescing into a unified whole. The backdrop whips away, and the company is now dancing in an old vaudeville theatre. The dancers drop into rows, and a cutout of a tour bus moves briefly in front of them, framing them in its windows as the dancers look exhausted.
The bus moves off, the backdrops whips up and the dancers are performing in a hockey arena in Leduc, AB. The camera swings around to reveal a new backdrop, now they are in a high school auditorium in Truro, NS, still performing the same ballet.
The camera spins away to a mother, dressed in the style of the mid-60’s, dragging her two children, a boy and a girl, into auditorium seats, the boy clearly bored. Close on the children’s faces, pushing slowly in on the boy as the lights of the stage illuminate his face, registering the power and beauty of the performance: the whole world opens up in his eyes.
We pull back and the boy is now standing, in white shirt and black leggings, in the National Ballet School, practicing, learning, growing. Other children of all backgrounds are with him, going through a routine. Another woman (SUPER: Betty Oliphant, 1966) is correcting the boy’s posture, as Celia Franca watches from the side. As the boy starts to repeat the move we push in on Ms. Franca. The camera swings around behind her to follow her gaze, and now she is backstage, watching as the boy, now fully grown, is performing in the corps de ballet of Sleeping Beauty, one of the greatest critical hits of the NBOC’s illustrious history. SUPER: New York, 1973.
Only now does the voice-over begin: “The National Ballet of Canada began performing on shoestring budget in barns and hockey arenas across the country. Today, thanks to founder Celia Franca, the company tours the world, inspiring a love of dance and music in every generation.”
As the VO beings, we push forward onto the stage and swing in front of the corps as they whirl past the camera and, for one moment the young boy, now a man, is in the spotlight, his face still shining with the joy we saw in the arena and finally, we swing over to another family, and another child, awestruck in the dark, as a new world opens up for them forever.
The Dave Pearce 