A new gender- and age-fluid ballet tracing the life of Mary, Queen of Scots is to take centre stage at next year’s Edinburgh international festival.
The world premiere production by Scottish Ballet, which focuses on Mary through the eyes of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, will include male and female dancers taking on multiple “fluid and intergenerational” roles.
It is the latest in a number of live and on-screen productions in which casting has been gender neutral, including Cinders!, last year’s Scottish Ballet production of Cinderella for which audiences did not know whether the lead would be played by a man or a woman until the curtain lifted.
Nicola Benedetti, the festival’s director, said she wanted Mary, Queen of Scots and other productions in next year’s lineup to stimulate and test the curiosity of audiences.
She said: “I would be very surprised if people leave that performance without perspectives challenged. That’s always the risk, especially when you put across either controversial or bold perspectives or ones that perhaps are uncomfortable for people; the result could be people doubling down on what makes them feel comfortable and their previous belief.
“You always pose a risk when you are offering something different and something new. But without the risk you will never reap the benefits of an upside of a truly radical shaking of someone’s vision [of the world].”
Scottish Ballet is still finalising the casting of the production, which will blend the history and myth surrounding both women, but it announced on Thursday that the Swedish dancer and choreographer Charlotta Öfverholm would play Elizabeth in later life.
Next year’s festival, being held from 1 to 25 August, will also launch a three-year collaboration with New York City’s Carnegie Hall, which was named after the Scotland-born industrialist Andrew Carnegie, and its youth ensembles. The teenage musicians of its National Youth Orchestra 2, known as NYO2, will play in Edinburgh during their first European tour.
The Australian company Opera Queensland will stage the European premiere of its Orpheus and Eurydice, featuring acrobats from the contemporary circus company Circa.
Benedetti, a Grammy-winning violinist who became the first woman and the first Scot to lead the festival, said next year’s theme would be “the truth we seek”. Her previous two festivals included a series of innovations designed to break down barriers between audiences and artists, including the use of beanbags instead of seats, and having audience members dotted among musicians.
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“I’m posing a question around our capacity for curiosity. That is not a new question but is about delving deeper into perspectives that are not one’s own,” she said. “The world of the arts is a place where that can be done with least divisiveness and damage. It’s a place where you are … permitted to show that curiosity and that exploratory part of yourself, in a way that is not damaging.
“[If] we do our jobs well, if we choose and defend only the most powerful visceral quality of art on our stages, and if you are unequivocal on who you put on a stage, you are always presenting the possibility of an audience member having their frame of reference broken down in that moment. What the artists are creating is nothing without the observer.”