Gonzalo Galguera Reimagines Frankenstein

PENSACOLA, FLORIDA — Ballet Pensacola opens its 48th Season with Frankenstein, a new two-act choreographic interpretation by internationally acclaimed Cuban-German choreographer Gonzalo Galguera, presented October 2–4, 2026, at the Clark Family Cultural Center.

Inspired by Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Galguera’s production preserves the philosophical and human core of the original while significantly reimagining its narrative structure.

Rather than approaching Frankenstein primarily as a Gothic horror story, Galguera centers the ballet on creation and responsibility, grief and mortality, abandonment, and the fundamental human need for recognition.

Who creates the monster: the creator, the creation, or the society that refuses to recognize it?

A decade after Liam Scarlett’s 2016 ballet adaptation, Galguera approaches Shelley’s novel from an entirely different dramatic and musical perspective, creating an original two-act interpretation centered on the human and psychological dimensions of the story.

A NEW READING OF SHELLEY

One of Galguera’s most significant departures from the novel lies in the relationship between Elizabeth’s death and the creation of the Creature.

In Shelley’s original, Victor creates and abandons the Creature long before his marriage to Elizabeth. After suffering repeated rejection and isolation, the Creature ultimately murders Elizabeth on her wedding night.

Galguera reverses that chronology.

His ballet begins within the ordered beauty of Victor and Elizabeth’s wedding celebration. Elizabeth discovers evidence of Victor’s secret experiments and later disappears during a blackout. When the light returns, she is found dead, but the cause of her death is never revealed.

Unable to accept her loss, Victor pushes his research beyond its limits.

In Galguera’s interpretation, the Creature does not cause Elizabeth’s death. Her death becomes the decisive rupture that drives Victor beyond the boundaries of science and mortality, ultimately leading to the creation of life.

This reversal transforms the act of creation: what begins as scientific ambition becomes inseparable from grief, obsession, and Victor’s refusal to accept the limits of human mortality.

The Creature awakens seeking contact with its creator and is immediately rejected. It then enters the human world as an observer, learning through movement, imitation, affection, and brief experiences of friendship.

Fear eventually overtakes curiosity, and the Creature becomes the object of suspicion and persecution.

Yet Galguera resists presenting it as inherently monstrous. Again and again, the Creature seeks connection before violence, and its increasing isolation becomes inseparable from the human response to its difference.

The ballet ultimately turns the Creature into a mirror of Victor’s own choices.

FROM ORDER TO SHADOW

Galguera structures the ballet as a journey from order into shadow.

The first act emerges from an aristocratic world defined by symmetry, ceremony, and control. That order progressively fractures following Elizabeth’s death and Victor’s creation of life.

The second act moves into a more intimate and exposed human landscape, where the Creature encounters play, friendship, and the possibility of belonging before once again confronting rejection.

Victor, meanwhile, remains imprisoned by grief and increasingly consumed by his pursuit of what he has created.

A recurring visual language of mirrors, darkness, flashlights, and fractured architecture reinforces the relationship between creator and creation, while a striking image of the Creature carrying Elizabeth in a composition recalling the Pietà deliberately complicates assumptions of guilt and innocence.

Galguera also brings Victor’s father more directly into the central conflict, creating a generational structure of Father, Son and Creation.

In one of the ballet’s defining moments, the Father acknowledges the Creature without rejecting it, offering Victor’s creation the recognition Victor himself has consistently withheld.

The final confrontation leads not to the destruction of the Creature, but to Victor’s own self-destruction.

As Victor dies, the Creature attempts to save him and receives, only when it is too late, the gesture of human recognition it had sought from its creator from the beginning.

The ballet concludes in snow and silence as the Creature passes through a corridor of black-clad figures who watch without approaching before it disappears into the frozen landscape.

The image echoes the isolation of Shelley’s Arctic conclusion while leaving Galguera’s central question unresolved:

Where, ultimately, does monstrosity reside?

A CURATED MUSICAL LANDSCAPE

Galguera further distinguishes his Frankenstein through its musical architecture.

Rather than using a single newly commissioned score, he has created a carefully curated musical landscape drawn from works by Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Giuseppe Martucci, Modest Mussorgsky, Gustav Mahler, Antonín Dvořák, Arnold Schoenberg, Gabriel Fauré, Benjamin Britten, and Samuel Barber.

The selection moves across contrasting musical worlds, from classical proportion and Romantic expansiveness to the psychological tension and fragmentation of late Romanticism and modernism.

These contrasting musical voices become an integral part of Galguera’s dramatic architecture, drawing the audience into the fate of Victor Frankenstein and the intertwined destinies of the characters who inhabit Mary Shelley’s extraordinary literary world.

GONZALO GALGUERA

Born in Camagüey, Cuba, Gonzalo Galguera is an internationally acclaimed Cuban-German choreographer whose career has spanned Europe and Latin America.

A graduate of the prestigious Cuban National Ballet School in Havana, Galguera began his professional career in Cuba before continuing internationally and later joining the ballet of the Komische Oper Berlin as a soloist under renowned choreographer Tom Schilling.

Galguera subsequently established a significant part of his career as a choreographer and artistic leader in Germany, serving as Artistic Director and Chief Choreographer of Ballet Dessau and Ballet Magdeburg, as well as Artistic Director of the Compañía Colombiana de Ballet (INCOLBALLET) in Colombia.

Over the course of his career, Galguera’s choreographic work has received numerous international distinctions, including First Prize at the Ibero-American Choreography Competition in Spain and the Italian dance award The Golden Nutcracker (Lo Schiaccianoci d’Oro), presented within a festival whose artistic tradition is associated with legendary Italian ballerina Carla Fracci.

His extensive body of work encompasses full-length narrative ballets, reinterpretations of classical repertoire, symphonic works, and contemporary creations. Throughout this diverse repertoire, his artistic language has remained distinguished by a strong classical foundation combined with theatrical imagination, musicality, emotional depth, and psychological complexity.

With Frankenstein, Galguera brings those elements together in a work that returns to Mary Shelley not in search of a monster, but in search of the humanity, and the absence of humanity, that creates one.