“Those who wish to relive their lives, never lived them in the first place.”
The words of Karen Blixen — the acclaimed Danish writer whose life story is the basis of a brand-new ballet created exclusively for the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen.
Blixen sketches the writer's life story from her childhood years in Denmark through her unhappy marriage to her half-cousin Bror Blixen, her years running a coffee plantation in Kenya—where she embarked on a doomed love affair with Denys Finch Hatton—and the final years of her life, back home in Denmark, when she found global fame at last.
To discover how to tell the life story of one of Denmark’s best-known writers through that most expressionistic yet wordless form of storytelling — ballet — we speak to three of the people behind Blixen: dancer and choreographer Gregory Dean; principal dancer Kizzy Matiakis, who plays Blixen; and costume and set designer Jon Morrell.