Audrey Niffenegger knows nothing whatsoever about ballet. She’s pretty blunt about this. Originally it was because like every other struggling artist she could never afford tickets, and then later it was because she had become the kind of opera person who has season tickets and a regular opera buddy she takes to every show. But Niffenegger does know about stories and wonder and the weird. She has two stellar novels under her belt and has populated her home in Chicago with a pair of human skeletons, an eclectic collection of damaged taxidermy, thousands of books, and two cats (one of whom is called Whimsy). She owns a pair of bespoke Victorian mourning shoes with jaybird wings flicking out from the ankles like those of Hermes. So if you want the skeleton of your ballet to be a story that is dark and weird, Niffenegger can piece together those bones. In May, a ballet debuts at the Royal Opera House with Audrey’s name all over it. It’s called Raven Girl.
Ballet turned up in Niffenegger’s life when David Drew, once Principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, was given a copy of her illustrated book, The Three Incestuous Sisters. Light on words but heavy on imagery and melancholy gothic drama, Drew thought the book was a ballet waiting to take the stage. He rapidly realised Niffenegger knew nothing about dance itself so took her around workshops, rehearsals and to shows whenever she was in London. By seeing how the shows come together in this world of rosin and gruelling rehearsals, Niffenegger found an identifiable hook in what is a fairly alien world to a writer and illustrator:
“I had seen them as working artists. I felt a kinship with them because I could see them making things, and I make things, and I couldn’t make the things they make but nevertheless I understood more or less what they were doing.
“I was hanging out with David for years, and he was introducing me to lots and lots of people in all capacities of the Ballet. Eventually he introduced me to Wayne [McGregor, resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet]. Wayne very much liked my illustrated book The Adventuress but very sensibly said, ‘We should do something together and we should start from scratch. We should do something new that you haven’t already done. And don’t worry about the dance, I’ll take care of the dance, you just make stories’.”
McGregor said he wanted a new fairytale, specifically a dark fairytale.
“My reaction to that is, well, what other kinds of fairytales are there? Some are darker than others – Hans Christian Anderson seems darkest of anyone. But even reading the Grimms’ fairytales there are some that are so incredibly dark that you think, ‘Well, this can’t possibly be for children’. I immediately thought of this thing I’d had sitting around since about 2002. I had a character, this half-girl, half-bird. I had no story for her, she didn’t have any kind of narrative at all. She was just a girl who was inwardly a bird and felt trapped in her girl-body.”
Niffenegger went to see some of the shows McGregor was doing with his own company, Random Dance. She found that that things he was doing there involved a lot of fairly extreme movement and often included some kind of visual element like film, or an LED display. But most unique to McGregor’s work is the thread of mind/body relationship that runs through them – he has worked with scientists at Cambridge and was appointed Research fellow in the Experimental Psychology department where he studied body/brain interaction. “I thought about my little characters and I thought, ‘Well, a fairytale is certainly the kind of story she could be in’. She’s like a fairytale character – she’s halfway between two states and in need of some kind of transformation.”
Everybody knows that birds are a mainstay of those in pointe shoes and seamed tights, girls with battered feet and slicked-back buns. Ordinarily it’s swans. Elegant, long-necked and romantic: in the minds of people who have only the faintest knowledge of the artform, swans are ballet. But ravens? The scavengers who sweep down on battlefields to pick at the dead, the black birds of myth and superstition whose call sounds like they are saying tomorrow, tomorrow in Latin over, and over and over? Ravens: not so much. But if Niffenegger writes the story, things are a little different – there is a certain kind of tale you’re going to get out of her and romantic and ordinary it is not. In Swan Lake the princess is turned into a swan by a curse, while in the topsy-turvy dreamworld of Niffenegger, whose interest is always whacked-out and opposite, it is a girl who has her arms amputated and wings sewn on in their stead.
In this story there is horror, science, death – not to mention the inter-species sex. But we don’t see that bit – where, in the novel, there are three asterisks and then it’s magically, suddenly, post-coitally morning, in an illustrated book there is simply a blank space.
“Suddenly they have an egg. I just decided I needed to leave certain things to the imagination. It’s fun. I feel like I’ve managed to make a fairytale without actually following a lot of the rules. It’s a mash-up, it’s genre-bending – it’s a fairytale, dammit.”
She spent nine months “noodling around” with little gouache paintings and ink drawings and showed them to McGregor over breakfast in London.
“You could tell that there was something about it that wasn’t quite doing it for him, and it was finally made clear that what he really, really wanted was aquatints.” The thing about aquatints – a centuries-old print-making technique used in both Niffenegger’s illustrated books so far – is that they are not only painstaking (“that’s okay, painstaking is my middle name”) but time-consuming. “The problem was just going to be generating enough images because Wayne’s ideal was a book like The Adventuress – mostly image and very little text. Every image you make fulfils a certain chunk of story. And if you can’t make enough then the story becomes very blocky and gappy, unless you’re going to use words. I had 12 weeks to do all the art. My assistant Ken and I were incredibly pale by the end of that summer.”
Niffenegger’s fairytale comes out in May to coincide with the dance’s debut. It’s been years in the making and Audrey has been in London so frequently that she ended up buying a flat here. It houses all the stuffed birds she bought to sketch from – ravens, magpies, rooks, jackdaws. There are ten corvids in her sitting room, perched on bookshelves or swooping with curled toes and tongue. Although she has been absent from the rehearsals for a couple of months now, she’s confident everything will come together in the end. “I’ll be back in April and by then everything will be so far underway that I will just go, ‘Uh huh, amazing’. But I kind of like the idea of being surprised and just walking into it and going, ‘Wow’. I have so much faith in Wayne, unlike my Hollywood experience where I had no faith. I know I can count on him to be interesting and intelligent about it, so even if dance people don’t like it, it’ll be interesting to me because I’m such a little naïve thing about what ballet is. I’m just kind of hanging in, waiting for spring.”
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