Like Water for Chocolate

Christopher Wheeldon's Like Water for Chocolate is a ravishing full-length ballet that brings Laura Esquivel's beloved magical realist novel to the stage in a riot of colour, sensuality and emotional intensity. Created for The Royal Ballet in 2022, with a specially commissioned score by Joby Talbot, designs by Bob Crowley, and lighting by Natasha Katz, the ballet was immediately hailed as a major achievement in narrative dance-making — a work that honours the spirit of its source material while finding its own purely balletic language.

Esquivel's novel, set in early twentieth-century Mexico against the backdrop of the Revolution, tells the story of Tita, the youngest of three daughters, who by family tradition must remain unmarried to care for her tyrannical mother Mamá Elena and is thus forbidden from marrying her beloved Pedro. The novel's central conceits — that Tita's emotions flow directly into the food she prepares, affecting all who eat it with overwhelming feeling — give Wheeldon and Talbot rich material for theatrical magic. When Tita weeps into the wedding cake she must bake for Pedro's marriage to her sister, all the guests fall into inconsolable grief; her mole sauce fills diners with passionate desire.

Wheeldon's choreography is at its most imaginatively exuberant in the magical sequences — the rose petals, the food preparations, the supernatural intrusions into the naturalistic domestic world. But the heart of the ballet is the relationship between Tita and Pedro: their stolen pas de deux, their aching separations, and the final transcendence that the novel's extraordinary ending makes possible. Like Water for Chocolate represents Wheeldon at the height of his powers as a story-teller in dance — lyrical, funny, passionate and deeply human.