Stanton Welch pulls inspiration from retellings of Cinderella to create his own unique version
In preparation for his own retelling of Cinderella created on The Australian Ballet in 1997, Artistic Director Stanton Welch AM looked at past interpretations of the popular fairytale for inspiration, pulling in a combination of elements from Charles Perrault’s 1697 story, the Brothers Grimm’s chilling tale, and Giacomo Rossini’s opera, among others.
Like the retellings preceding it, Welch’s Cinderella is unhappily relegated to a life of labor by her stepmother and stepsisters after her father remarries following Cinderella’s mother’s passing. However, this Cinderella is noticeably different; she gives her sisters guff and refuses to go down without a fight, is guided by the spirits of the dead – including her mother – to the royal ball, and when she realizes just how self-absorbed the Prince truly is, she opts for Dandini, the Prince’s secretary, instead.
Born to a wealthy bourgeois family, French author Charles Perrault is credited with laying the foundation for the fairytale genre when his book Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Tales from Past Times) hit the shelves of the early modern period. Comprised of well-known stories like Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and of course, Cinderella, Perrault’s works were derived from earlier folktales, but his versions are now the most widely known in the English-speaking world.
Perrault’s Cinderella builds the framework for Welch’s ballet. It’s from this work we get the traditional ingredients that make up the story we know and love: a callous stepmother and stepsisters who thwart Cinderella’s hopes for attending the royal ball, a fairy godmother who restores hope and helps Cinderella get to the ball with the caveat of returning by midnight, and the customary missing shoe.
As they did with many of Perrault’s stories, the Brothers Grimm twisted Cinderella into a grisly tale in 1812. The pair of German academics follow Perrault’s premise, but instead of a mystical fairy godmother, they replace her with Cinderella’s deceased mother. In their version, Cinderella plants a stick at her mother’s grave, which grows into a beautiful tree when watered with her tears. From this tree, a white bird comes to grant Cinderella’s wishes. Welch takes this element of using the mother as a guiding force when he has his own Cinderella visit her mother’s grave, but when her tears fall, she awakens the spirits of the dead and her mother’s own spirit who help Cinderella get to the ball. Thankfully, Welch spares us from the Brothers Grimm scene depicting the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet to fit Cinderella’s found slipper.
La Cenerentola, Rossini’s 1817 Cinderella opera, twists the story even more, replacing the stepmother with a stepfather and introducing Dandini, the Prince’s valet. In a consensual rouse, the Prince and Dandini switch places, à la Vanessa Hudgens in The Princess Switch, to find out whose love for the Prince is pure and good of heart. Although Cinderella ends up with the Prince, falling for him as the valet, it inspires Welch’s Cinderella to do the same without the rouse. Instead, she falls for the true Dandini who is mistreated by the vain Prince, just as she’s mistreated by her own family.
“I wanted to create a Cinderella who had choices,” Welch says. “She rises from the ashes. She becomes this great, fantastic woman, and then she picks who she wants to marry and who she wants to be with. It’s not someone who saves her; she saves him. And that was very much the message that I wanted to create.”
By Jasmine Fuller Cane
En Pointe with Houston Ballet 
