Carrie Ruth Trumbo grew up reading and watching a lot of vintage horror-suspense, from Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to The Twilight Zone TV series. That made her a natural to choreograph a new adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for Ballet North Texas.
Washington Irving’s classic 1820 short story is set 30 years earlier outside of the former Dutch settlement of Tarrytown, N.Y. Trading on Dutch folklore, it’s about a superstitious schoolteacher, Ichabod Crane, whose pursuit of Katrina Van Tassel, the only child of the wealthiest man in town, is frustrated by a ruthless competitor, Bram Bones.
Bram exploits Ichabod’s fears with the tale of the Headless Horseman, the supposed ghost of a dead, decapitated Hessian soldier from the Revolutionary War who’s buried in Sleepy Hollow. He’s said to rise nightly from his grave in search of his missing head.
Irving framed The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as a handed-down story told from multiple perspectives, including Bram’s and an omniscient third-person narrator, offering little of Katrina’s point of view. How did she feel about being pursued by these two men for her money? That’s where Trumbo comes in.
“I decided to make more out of that character since Washington Irving didn’t develop her. I actually have it starting with an older Katrina writing, recalling this time in Sleepy Hollow, so essentially the entire thing is a flashback,” she says in a Zoom interview.
“Throughout history, this was the norm when women were being married off. Of course, they had thoughts on it, they had feelings about it, even if we're not hearing about them. What would that look like for her, if she was involved in this love triangle? Let's have her with more authority over this time in her life. I've also developed the romance between Ichabod and Katrina, even though that's not part of the original text.”
Trumbo added a graveyard scene as well, “to get people dancing and to highlight to the audience just how paranoid Ichabod is, so by the time we get to the end, we've built this feeling that he's been on edge since his arrival in town.”
A Florida native, Trumbo burst onto the Dallas dance scene in 2021 when she became resident choreographer for former Texas Ballet Theater dancer Diana Crowder’s newly formed Pegasus Contemporary Ballet. One of her strengths is that she’s able to invent movement appropriate for each piece rather than relying on a set vocabulary.
She made several noteworthy works for Pegasus, including the Greek mythology inspired Amor Fati, before leaving the company in 2023.
Last fall, just before relocating to New York City, Trumbo formed New Narratives Contemporary Dance and showed her immersive piece Whistling in the Dark at Arts Mission Oak Cliff. Its macabre themes referencing Lizzie Borden, Leopold and Loeb, and Edgar Allan Poe played out in multiple rooms.
After Ballet North Texas artistic director Nicolina Lawson saw it, she thought Trumbo was the right person to tackle a new ballet based on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Though the story has been told countless times on stage and screen, Trumbo agreed there was room for reinterpretation.
“I think the Headless Horseman as an image is stronger than the actual story,” she explains. “Most people are familiar with who the Headless Horseman is, but they don't really have the context. There's not a lot of detail to go off of because the story is so short, which is kind of fun as a choreographer because I can expand it.”
Of course, there are limitations, like you can’t put a horse on stage. Instead, the piece uses projections from Dallas’ Lightware Labs, which Trumbo also employed for Whistling in the Dark, to depict the critical climactic scene between the Headless Horseman and Ichabod.
“I derive a lot of the storytelling inspiration from the idea of suspense being scarier than the actual image,” Trumbo says.
She visited the real Sleepy Hollow last winter to get a feel for the setting. In addition to using the music of Samuel Barber for the score, she built a soundscape to create the mood. For example, during a schoolroom scene, you can hear chalk scraping across a blackboard.
“It’s this really beautiful little town,” Trumbo recalls. “Being in that cemetery and being in the woods, the sounds that you hear, like the crunch of the leaves, the animals, you really feel like you’re alone. There’s just enough noise for it to be eerie. I’m using that to get the fear across. Ichabod is ultimately run out of town because he lets his fears get in his way.”
Details
Oct. 24-25 at 8 p.m. at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. $27-$79. balletnorthtexas.org.
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