As ballet Like Water for Chocolate premieres in New York, choreographer Christopher Wheeldon talks about ‘taking the audience on a journey’

Adapting Laura Esquivel’s novel about an oppressed Mexican daughter and her cooking to ballet was tough, but its choreographer didn’t worry about practicalities

As the ballet opens at the Metropolitan Opera, he talks about what his Broadway experience taught him, and leaving people feeling ‘connected’ to his characters

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Christopher Wheeldon, choreographer of the ballet adaptation of “Like Water for Chocolate”, at the 2022 Tony Awards in New York. He talked about storytelling challenges and taking audiences “on a journey” as the production opened in New York. Photo: AP

Published: 4:15pm, 23 Jun 2023

How do you choreograph a scene of mass food poisoning? A young woman in an erotic frenzy? Or a couple whose passion is so intense, they literally catch fire?

These were just a few of the storytelling challenges awaiting choreographer Christopher Wheeldon – for decades one of the most inventive minds in ballet and more recently on Broadway, too – as he adapted the hugely popular 1989 novel Like Water for Chocolate.

It now gets a splashy New York premiere at American Ballet Theatre (ABT).

Wheeldon is no stranger to storytelling challenges, either in ballet, where he adapted Shakespeare’s vexing The Winter’s Tale, or in theatre, where he’s won two Tonys, the latest for choreographing the hit MJ: The Musical, about Michael Jackson.

Dancers Herman Cornejo (left) and Cassandra Trenary during a dress rehearsal for “Like Water for Chocolate”. Photo: AP

But Laura Esquivel’s sweeping tale of food, magic, lust and forbidden passion set in early 20th-century Mexico, which also inspired a hit movie, posed a different issue: how do you convey such a layered, hefty, multi-character story, spanning two decades, without words?