"Dancing Cathy was absolutely the highlight of my career"

The Scotsman devotes an article to the forthcoming performances (March 11-13) of Northern Ballet Theatre's Wuthering Heights production at the Edinburgh Festival:

IT'S A snowy day in Leeds, and the man responsible for the world's longest-running musical is giving advice to the dancers of Northern Ballet Theatre (NBT). They nod appreciatively before resuming their rehearsal, incorporating his comments into their movement.
Yet just a few years ago, Claude-Michel Schönberg was "not interested in ballet". He was far more at home in the world of blockbuster musicals such as Les Misérables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre – all three of which he composed. Two things catapulted Schönberg from a ballet virgin to a veritable expert: he was asked to write the score for a dance version of Wuthering Heights and married Charlotte Talbot, a former principal dancer with NBT.
Today, both husband and wife are helping the company restage the show that brought them together. Originally created in 2002, with Talbot in the lead role of Cathy, the ballet takes Emily Brontë's 19th-century novel and transforms it into two hours of passionate dance. Although choreographed by NBT's artistic director David Nixon, it was Schönberg who came up with the initial structure for the piece.
"I was not a ballet expert before, but I thought that the best version would be the simplest one," he says. "So I read the book again and watched the films, and I thought the Laurence Olivier version was the most straightforward and clear in terms of storytelling, so I used that to write the script of the ballet."
It took Schönberg nine months to write the score, working eight hours a day in the south of France."This ballet was a completely new experience for me," he says. "But I looked at a lot of other ballets before I started writing, and I began to understand that it's not miming, it's using the body to express what's happening in the story and the spirituality of the characters." (Read more)
When the curtain rises and Heathcliff sweeps Cathy up into his arms, what's going through Talbot's mind? "Dancing Cathy was absolutely the highlight of my career," she says. "And when I listen to Claude-Michel's music I still feel it in my body. But I don't wish it was me up there on the stage – I just remember the feeling I had back then and I'm happy with that." (Kelly Apter)

China Daily interviews Yang Jia, elected as a model for Chinese working women for 2009 by the All-China Women’s Federation:

She imagined herself as the strong-willed and independent Jane Eyre, who struggles to be her own individual, or as the rich and beautiful Tonia Tumanova from the Russian novel How the Steel was Tempered.
Instead, Yang said, she ended up more like the blind characters in those same books - Jane Eyre's love Mr. Rochester, or Pavel Korchagin, the hero who fought against his disability to achieve success. (Yang Guang)

The Progress magazine talks about International Women's Day.

The anti-feminist nature of our society is to blame for this. It has two main, damaging characteristics: female hypersexualisation, and the idea that women are irrational, illogical and hysterical. The latter is rooted in a long history of literature and language. From Shakespeare's Ophelia to the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, literature's image of the hysterical woman is as stubborn as it is ugly. (Gary Nunn)

Renaissance of Reading interviews Hannah Tinti, Brontëite:

Who were some of your favorite authors growing up and who are you currently reading?
I loved the Bronte sisters. I re-read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights every few years. I am currently reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, which just won The Story Prize.

PRWeb reports that the CliffsNotes-To-Go series, including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, are now available to download on the iTunes Apps store. A teacher who uses Facebook to teach Wuthering Heights in the Jackson Free Press. The Reader Online posts about Anne Brontë's poem The Captive Dove, the Kindred Spirits Book Group announces that April's reading will be Agnes Grey, Spacebeer reviews Wuthering Heights and Randomness and All write with coffee... Jane Eyre.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References, Wuthering Heights