Jane Eyre's ballet lessons

As we informed some days ago, this year's London Children’s Ballet production will be a Jane Eyre adaptation. The Times gives some more details:

The London Children’s Ballet commissions a new narrative ballet each year and we have a special matinee for children’s charities and the elderly. We discovered that getting to the theatre and the lack of wheelchair spaces meant that it was an ordeal to attend so we decided to take the ballet to them instead.
We look for stories with strong moral and dramatic contact. This year our production is Jane Eyre. We have adapted it and have managed to include a little humour. To make sure that there are enough roles for our 50 dancers we have created some exciting corps numbers for the company dancing as smoke and flames for the fire at Thornfield Hall. (Victoria Collinson)

The press release from Film Squared concerning the Brontë movie biopic appears today in The Star:

The £350,000 funding gap arose when a backer pulled out due to problems with the international money markets.
But Nick Wild of Film Squared thinks it is a good opportunity for Yorkshire businesses to invest in the production.
"We have already had great support from some passionate local private investors and financial professionals. Now we are looking to extend that opportunity," he said."With global cinema and DVD distribution the project offers great possibilities for local brands.
"We are working with many local agencies and have a raft of opportunities - from high-level corporate sponsorship to tax-efficient investment regimes for private investors.
"We are also calling for help from companies who may be able to reduce production costs by providing support services - anything from hotels to car hire. The project is an important media project for Yorkshire that will boost the local economy and stimulate tourism." (Amy Burns)

The paperback edition of Edward Mendelson's book The Things That Matter (reviewed on BrontëBlog here) gets a review on Gather. Concerning the Brontë topics covered:

In the section on Wuthering Heights Mendelson explores Brontë's idea of romantic childhood, tracing its roots to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Freud. His Wuthering Heights is a very different one than the one commonly studied in high school. Heathcliff and Catherine are desperate to recapture the total unity experienced as children, to merge two selves into one. Whereas the commonly held perception is of a novel of thwarted passion and cruelty, Mendelson believes Brontë deliberately led readers to this conclusion and away from her true meaning. "She disguised Wuthering Heights as a story of doomed sexual passion perhaps because she regarded her potential readers with something close to contempt "they could not understand what this book tells them." (Janelle Martin)

The Independent publishes an article about Zhang Hanzhi, Chinese diplomat and Chairman Mao's English teacher:

She moved with her adoptive family to Beijing after the revolution. As a young woman she read Charlotte Brontë and dreamt of being a novelist or an actress while studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University. (Clifford Coonan)

Now some blogs. frogma has read Jane Eyre and Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair: Eyre & Eyre, the perfect pair. The Brontë Parsonage Blog informs about next Sunday's broadcast in the UK of Wuthering Heights 1998 (check our TV alerts sidebar section). And lastly The Pedalogue writes about Haworth.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Dance, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV