‘Like Water for Chocolate’ Is Now a Ballet

Why would you recommend it?

There are moments in which the choreography transmits very deep and intimate emotions with just one movement. He tells the story in a very passionate, sensitive way. People have this prejudice that ballet is not for everyone, but, in fact, it is for everyone — especially this adaptation.

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Like Water for Chocolate, an international bestseller, has been a film and now a ballet. Can you imagine your novel transformed into any other art form?

The pandemic halted our progress, but in 2020, we had planned the premiere of Like Water for Chocolate the musical on Broadway. I think my producers are just waiting for the premiere of the ballet, and maybe in 2024, we’ll see the musical come to the stage. I saw the whole first act, the music is ready. It’s another gem, another stirring production.

Also, the novel became a trilogy a few years ago. [In addition to Like Water for Chocolate (1989), the trilogy includes Tita’s Diary (2016) and The Colors of my Past (2017).] I just signed the contract for a television series based on an adaptation of the trilogy. An opera was proposed, but the details were never finalized.

The book and ballet, a co-production of the American Ballet Theater and The Royal Ballet of London, tells the story of Tita, a young woman overwhelmed by the sense of duty she finds in the kitchen.

Courtesy Emma Zordon

Did you ever imagine that the book would change your life?

Not at all, I could never have imagined what happened. I was surprised, and I continue to be surprised. More recently, I have also been surprised by young people’s response to the novel. It caught my attention, and I wondered, how can this love story speak to these 18- and 20-year-olds? I have met three readers who have tattooed phrases from the novel on their arms. And I’m asking myself, well, what’s going on here?

To what do you attribute the novel resonating in this way?

I have a theory. When a work moves you, it is because there is a part of you that identifies with a character or a situation. And I wondered, who do they identify with? At first, I thought it was with Tita, as a victim. Tita, at the beginning of the novel, is under her mother’s thumb and then, as the novel progresses, she becomes someone who makes her own decisions. Except today there are no emasculating mothers like Tita’s mother; then I realized that it is not the mother. It is the system, it is the current economic model that is deciding for young people, that is preventing them from having the education they would like, preventing them, even, from living a loving relationship freely. In my youth, by the age of 20, we had already left home. Now there are young people in their 30s and older living with their parents because they can’t afford rent, because they can’t decide what career to pursue. I may be wrong, but that’s my theory.

Is that the main theme of Like Water for Chocolate?

What led me to write the novel is that I come from a generation, in the ’60s, that was convinced that we had to go out to change the world, that one had to go out to revolutionize society or had to behave like hippies, distributing flowers or organizing ourselves to live in communes. And we thought that the new man would emerge from those actions. At my age, I have seen and have suffered the pain of seeing that it did not turn out as expected.

But also women bought into a system, a model — with the best of intentions — but one that led to us radically abandoning the kitchen space. The world outside was important. In the kitchen, we didn’t earn money or public recognition. We had to go out and get a degree that proclaimed that we were smart, and we had to prove that we could do the same as men. But that’s not how the world is going to change. What was understood as progress and development has resulted in ecological destruction, has resulted in a deterioration of the quality of life, has resulted in the destruction of families, in social destruction. Real change will come from ... working to create sustainable, self-sufficient communities.  

Courtesy Penguin Random House ©Roberto Melo

In these 30 years, have you changed as an artist and as a person? Because I get the impression that when you wrote Like Water for Chocolate, you already felt the way you do now.  

Of course, that’s why I wrote it. I wanted to say, listen, amigas, many things happen in the kitchen that we have not taken notice of; it is a laboratory where we can practice the art of alchemy. In the kitchen, we can truly transform.

In my novel, I use three sisters to tell three different stories. One did not want changes, she was happy, she could get married. With the second sister, I wanted to represent the steps taken by the feminist movement in its beginnings, which included sexual liberation. Seeking revolution, this sister becomes a military general, believing that this is how she will help change the world. The third is Tita. Tita, from the kitchen environment that was on the surface her space of oppression, her punishment, her place of confinement, she is the one that ends up instituting a revolution. What is Tita’s revolution? Saying that this crippling tradition stops here with me, and I won’t pass it on to the new generation. That is a transcendent act.

She is a woman who manages to change the history of the family, and she does it all from the kitchen. That was the message.