Choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa Premieres a Portrait of Elvis for Smuin Ballet's Dance Series 2

March 26, 2024—One of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa's signature choreographic accomplishments is her narrative ballets about famous women in recent history: Frida Kahlo, Eva Peron, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Delmira Augustini, etc. It may seem surprising, then, that her upcoming world premiere, Tupelo Tornado for Smuin's Dance Series 2 tells the story of the iconic American singer Elvis Presley. Yesterday, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa graciously met with Michael Phelan of BayDance.com at the Smuin Center for Dance in San Francisco to explain her thoughts about this new piece.

A very animated talker, Lopez Ochoa speaks passionately and with conviction, not only about her work, but also about women's roles. She explains that she has created works about, "people who fought and struggled to have their voice heard. And they make for good theater. My life would be so uninteresting as a ballet," she laughs, "because I don't have those dramatic moments in my life." Although she denies being a feminist, she says, "By putting those historic women on stage, we are reminded of the way that was paved for us." She explains that her grandfather gave her mother two career choices: nurse or nun. "We are still fighting for some equality and equity," she asserts, "but we've come a long way. And putting those women on stage also shows that."

So how did Elvis come into this picture? Lopez Ochoa relates that while watching a Michael Smuin piece for the first time, she noted that Smuin had made ballets around iconic American songs. She said offhandedly to Smuin Artistic Director Celia Fushille, "If I were using someone, I would use Elvis Presley, just off the top of my head." Some years later, Fushille took her up on the idea and asked her to choreograph a piece on Elvis. "I was like, oh yeah, that's true," Lopez Ochoa recalls. When researching the life of Elvis, she found that his image had been "sugar coated" compared to his experiences and motivations for his music. "I started finding him really fascinating," she recalls.

Lopez Ochoa explains that much of Elvis' early songs were influenced by Black American music. When his music was played on the radio, Black music became widely accessible to White audiences. "Actually, I'm very happy I said Elvis Presley," she admits. "When you dig deeper and go through the layers of sugar-coated music, it's a mosaic of a broken mirror. And all these pieces I'm trying to put together to create a portrait. So it's not a narrative about his life, it's more like a portrait of who he was. And of course, my interpretation is that he was caged." Lopez Ochoa believes Elvis was "caged" into performing "little, packaged songs" suited for radio. A frustrated actor, he did different kinds of songs for television, but when he performed in Las Vegas, he had to play the expected role of Elvis Presley.

There's more to the story of Elvis. "I love stories," she says, "but I don't like fairy tales. That's contradictory, but I find the complexity of a person fascinating... It's not easy to understand, not so black and white like in Hollywood, where you have the good guys and the bad guys. I find that more exciting to portray on stage because it's about human behavior. We recognize ourselves, I find, more when it's more nuanced, and there's always a context for why people make decisions. Usually the context is that our biggest dramas come from our childhood."

And Elvis had an unusual childhood. Lopez Ochoa says that he had a symbiotic relationship with his mother, which stunted his emotional maturity toward the opposite sex. As a young man, she says he surrounded himself with teenage girls between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. But the relationships didn't go beyond affectionate. "He felt safer than with a grownup woman," she says.

As for the music for Tupelo Tornado, rather than simply using recordings of Elvis, Lopez Ochoa worked with Bay Area sound designer and composer Jake Rodriguez to create a soundtrack consisting of interviews, videos, and sound bites. "I said I want you to take those sound bites of people talking about him, put a beat underneath it, and see how we can extend those songs." The result is, she says, "a very deconstructed way his music is going to be heard. It's an original composition of thirty minutes of nonstop music. It's a soundtrack, and in that soundtrack we have six or seven songs."

"We did use some sound bites," Lopez Ochoa states, "but that was too judgmental, too much like, Oh, he's a pedophile, and I didn't want to go there with the piece. We're making art. We're not making a documentary. With all the historical characters that I choose, I don't want to judge them. I want to make a portrait so that we are informed about who they were. We can see into their souls, their fears, their pains, and their dreams. Human behavior is a fascinating thing to put on stage. When I see ballets that make it clear who is a bad guy, it's infantilizing our audiences."

When asked if she could be a character from one of her ballets, who would she be, she thinks awhile and answers, "I think all my ballets contain a part of me. It's not that I am Doña Perón or Coco Chanel, but I try to dive into their psyche and guess why they did things and how they reacted, but ultimately, there's always a part of me in them. It's trying to capture somebody's essence without imitating them. Who would I be? I don't knooow." She laughs and says, "I'm all of them."

Lopez Ochoa's ability to put herself into other viewpoints informs her choreography. "I always say when I create, I am two people," she muses. "I have a child in me who has limitless imagination. I need to play, and I'm not judging it. Then the piece is done, and the adult comes into play and says, Excuse me. How about we look at this phrase, or this transition, or this musicality? And then we have the judging. And the child is like, Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So sorry. So sorry. That's how I create. I have these two sides in me, like one side of the brain and the other side of the brain...I'm not making this to please you. I'm making art to communicate with you. Some of you will understand. Some of you will be bored. Some will say it's weird, but they like it. Weird is good."

"What I like as an artist," she declares, "is that I don't want to do two pieces that are the same. I don't want people to say we're going to see an Annabelle piece. I said to the (Smuin) dancers, for all the people who have seen Requiem for a Rose, we're going to do this one movement from Requiem for a Rose just for those people as a joke. And they were like, Yeah! Let's do it! And the rest, I don't think they would know it's by the same choreographer."

The world premiere of Tupelo Tornado opens on May 3rd, after San Francisco Ballet presents the North American premiere of Lopez Ochoa's Broken Wings on April 4th. The timing is entirely a coincidence, but it's fortuitous in that she can rehearse with both companies on the same days, Smuin in the mornings and SFB in the afternoons. "Broken Wings and Tupelo Tornado are two completely different genres," she says emphatically. "The language of this work (Tupelo Tornado) is house and street dance. It's rhythmical. They're wearing boots. I'd say Broken Wings is dance theater with classicism in it. They're two completely different pieces."

Reflecting on her experience, she says, "I used to be very nervous when a piece of mine would premiere. But the older you get, the less you care what people think. You can't change yourself. The only moment where I'm going like Ahhhh! is when the lights go down and the curtain is about to go up, and I'm thinking, Oh! Nobody told me somebody would look at this! I suddenly realize that it's going to be viewed, and I never made it to be viewed. I made it with the freedom that I'm just a child playing. And there's this one split second I'm thinking somebody should have told me. I would have made a completely different piece."

Lopez Ochoa doesn't get nervous anymore. She has choreographed over 100 ballets for 79 companies. How does she do it all? "Mother Nature gave me a lot of energy," she explains. She describes herself as very disciplined and organized in preparing her work. Whenever she has two weeks off, she prepares her pieces for the following fall. "That discipline and my energy mean that I can do all these projects in a year. But that means sometimes on a Sunday I am preparing and looking for music. So as I am doing this (Tupelo Tornado), I am preparing for the next project." The day after San Francisco Ballet opens the North American premiere of Broken Wings, she will travel to meet with the dramaturge of another project.

Currently, Lopez Ochoa is developing a full-length Carmen for Miami City Ballet. She will meet online with the entire team of her ballet Frida to discuss how to reduce that production for Ballet Arizona. Requiem for a Rose is being performed in Germany, so she is going back and forth between there and San Francisco. Before she came to San Francisco, she was in Sarasota, Florida, checking on a work for Ballet Hispanico, a revival of a work she did in 2010, which she is recreating by making the lead role a drag queen. And after San Francisco, she will go to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a piece she's working on there. "That's just for the months of April and May," she laughs, "It's a lot."

In addition to Tupelo Tornado, Smuin Contemporary Ballet's Dance Series 2 includes works by Amy Seiwert, Brennan Wall, and Michael Smuin, and runs from May 3rd through May 31st at four locations. For more information, see smuinballet.org and the BayDance.com May calendar.