Marilyn - Ballet

Marilyn is a full-length narrative ballet about Marilyn Monroe, choreographed by Dani Rowe to an original score by Shannon Rugani. It takes the life rather than the image as its subject, and works forward from the childhood of Norma Jeane into the years of fame.

The structure is closer to collage than to straight biography. A child dancer and an adult dancer share the central role, so the woman and the girl she was stay on stage together, and the piece moves between periods rather than marching through them in order. The husbands, the photographers and the studio apparatus arrive as figures in an ensemble that crowds around her and then disperses.

Rugani's score is her first written for a full-length ballet, composed for this work rather than assembled from existing music. What the ballet reaches for is mostly what the public story leaves out: an unstable childhood, a wanted and unrealised motherhood, the pressure of constant photography, and the treatment she received from the people closest to her. The glamour is present throughout, but it is treated as material rather than as the subject.