Word: Gesture: Language:
Dance
I’ve been reading all the reviews I can find of Woolf Works,
the new ballet by Wayne McGregor for the Royal Ballet (see list of links to
reviews below), and while they teach me much about the music, sets, and
chorographical style, the one thing they do not seem to encompass fully is the
relationship of the dance to the works of Virginia Woolf. I had the pleasure of seeing the ballet
Wednesday, May 13, and have been thinking about it ever since. Talking it over with my friend Ellen
McLaughlin, who accompanied me to the performance, I’ve come to the conclusion
that it is a thoughtful and detailed interpretation of Woolf, one which Woolf
scholars and aficionados can celebrate and even learn from.
The ballet is a triptych: the first movement, “I Now, I
Then,” responds to the narrative structure of Mrs. Dalloway; the second, “Becomings,” is a phantasmagorical riff
on the many selves and genders invented and parodied in Orlando; the third, “Tuesday,” weaves a series of choruses in and
out of the rhythm of The Waves
towards the ultimate cessation of death.
Despite several reviewers who claim the dances are largely unrelated to
each other, the trilogy is united by a series of subtle themes, all well-known
to dedicated readers of Woolf: the relationship between past and present, the
simultaneity of different versions of the self, the variability and
reversibility of genders and relationships between genders, and perhaps most
importantly a subtle over-arching understanding/ testing of the parallels
between words and language, gesture and dance, emotion and motion. This last
represents a serious philosophical contribution to an understanding of Woolf.
The first movement on Mrs.
Dalloway provides an easy entrance to this new way of seeing Woolf through
dance. Announcing the thematic centrality of the motion of words and of movement as a kind of vocabulary of emotion, the curtain
opens with Woolf’s voice reading an excerpt from her essay on “Craftsmanship”
about how words are stored and storied with a multitude of meanings built from
association with other words over time, paired with a series of images of
deletions from Woolf’s holograph manuscripts: words crossed through and
therefore not said, which fly like birds into patterns that briefly coalesce
into what one critic calls a “pointillist” vision of Woolf’s face, a breath-taking first glimpse of the delicately accurate impressionism of what will follow.
The scrim then rises to reveal a single dancer holding
attention center stage: is it Woolf or Clarissa? Alessandra Ferri’s tensile
strength and flexibility, her fragile and eloquent expressiveness are the polar
star around which the entire triptych swings, the astonishing fact that she is 52 only adding to the depth and resonance of her portrayal.
She drops her coat to reveal a vaguely twenties style, transparent,
embroidered dress. What follows is a
series of shifting pas-de-deux between different characters: Clarissa and
Richard (or is it Leonard?); is it young Clarissa and Sally Seaton? Septimus
and Evans, Peter and Sally, or is it the young Clarissa? And finally Septimus
and Clarissa/Woolf. Photographic images of London are projected on large empty
wooden squares, which turn into columns, stairs, rooms, or frames, suggesting a
continual shift of perspectives and locations. A sudden tunneling into an image
of the garden at Monk’s House prepares us for the shift back in time to the “I
Then." I thought immediately of the passage from “A Sketch of the Past” where
Woolf speaks of the past as a long avenue at the end of which lie “the garden
and the nursery”; later I found the exact quotation in the Program, suggesting
the evocation was deliberate. This kind of delicate and wide-ranging knowledge
of Woolf is everywhere apparent in the play. One of the most breath-taking
examples is at the beginning of the dance between Septimus and Clarissa where
he supports her body, hanging from his arms like a tree with spread branches,
while a misty image of tree leaves is projected behind the two of them, evoking
the passages where Clarissa thinks of being “laid out like a mist between the
people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the
trees lift the mist” (MD 9) and where Septimus feels “the leaves being
connected by millions of fibres with his own body” (MD 22).*
Perhaps the most moving moments of the first dance have to
do with Septimus. Ed Watson’s rendition
of trauma through the fragmentation and dis-articulation of movement is
brilliant and heart-wrenching. As with many moments in the dance, I found
myself reciting words from memory: in this case T.S. Eliot’s “these fragments
have I shored against my ruin.” The duet with the uniformed Evans figure
adds a dimension of physical tenderness to the presentation of the relationship
in the novel, which seems like a completely appropriate extension of the text,
an intimate portrayal that will forever deepen and enrich my reading. At the same time, like the female-to-female
pas-de-deux between the young Clarissa and Sally, this dance plays with the
heteronormative conventions of classical ballet, preparing us for the explosive
pan-sexuality of the next dance. The
tenderness between the two men and the exuberance between the two women are
eloquent variations on gender expectations.
The second dance, “Becomings,” departs from the narrative
conventions of the first composition to emphasize the sheer stylistic exuberance
and historical reach of Woolf’s novelized biography, Orlando. The curtain opens
on twelve figures, dressed in metallic, vaguely Renaissance doublets. As the
spotlight moved from figure to figure, I thought of the passage where Orlando’s narrator muses on the great
number of selves we all have and thought, ah, they are ALL Orlando. Although traces of the narrative remain – a
commanding black male dancer reminds us that it is Othello that is being performed during the Great Frost; a few
passages across the stage remind us of skating across the ice – for the most
part “Becomings” is about how “in every human being a vacillation from one sex
to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male
or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is
above” (O 139).* This fanciful mediation
on sexuality is aided by the brilliant costuming: sheens of gold and black reflective fabric
double as armour or silk as the dancers twirl and transmute themselves, female
dancers leaping into sword fights, male dancers pirouetting high on toes and
falling into arms, strength and grace catapulting from gender to gender. The
flamboyant extensions and twists are lit by shifting rays of lasers in
different colors, combining and refracting, the wooden boxes of the first dance
now liberated into the insubstantial geometry of pure light. As the ballet
comes to its pounding, climactic end, the lasers fan out into the audience: in
a gesture similar to the end of the play in Between
the Acts, we are included in the present moment.
After this display of sheer athleticism, “Tuesday,” the
final movement, shifts into a softer lyricism inspired by The Waves and the inevitable associations with Woolf’s death
engendered by the reading of her suicide note to Leonard. Performed by three choruses of six, including
one group of children as well as the principal dancers from previous episodes,
this piece is a profound study of the rhythm of repetition and variation which
provides a visual rendition of the musical form of The Waves, an eloquent and informed interpretation of her
masterpiece. Gestures – like physical words – are tossed
from the Woolf figure to the various choruses who repeat and change and
elaborate on them. The background image of waves in such slow motion that you
can barely sense the passage of time emphasizes how the language of gesture
from the previous ballets is here extended and modulated into a meditation on
connection and disconnection. The
presence of the dancers from other episodes enhances the continuity of the
triptych, perfectly evoking the autobiographical elements of Woolf’s novel and
weaving it back into the fabric of her other works. As the background motion of waves moves
incrementally towards real time, the swayings and leanings, lifts and supports
of the choruses enclose the central figure, carrying her into the waters of her
imagination; many of the dancers are draped with shiny traces of kelp as they
lower her under the waves and let her go, a gentle counterpart to the
eviscerating moment of Septimus’s death in the first act.
This sketch of the dance can only catch and highlight
moments of the complete performance, multidimensional in its masterful
integration of sets, lighting, costumes, music, and choreography with a
sensitive and intelligent understanding of Woolf that teaches us new ways to
read her in motion and in time. I am so
grateful I had a chance to witness this and can only hope the Royal Ballet will
make it a featured piece in its repertory so that more Woolfians can have a
chance to experience this exuberant new reading.
*All quotations from the Harcourt Annotated editions of Woolf.
*All quotations from the Harcourt Annotated editions of Woolf.
ROYAL BALLET SITE
REVEIWS
·
THE GUARDIAN: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/12/royal-ballet-woolf-works-five-star-review-wayne-mcgregor?CMP=share_btn_fb
·
THE STAGE: https://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/2015/woolf-works/
·
THE NEW YORK TIMES: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/arts/dance/review-woolf-works-by-the-royal-ballet.html
·
THE INDEPENDENT: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/woolf-works-royal-opera-house-review-tireless-dancers-create-brave-thoughtful-work-10244392.html
YOU-TUBE VIDEOS OF REHEARSALS AND COMMENTARY
·
Edward Watson Rehearsing Septimus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_utmdaYpByQ
· Alessandra Ferri and Federico Bonelli rehearse Woolf Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oz3gNlnQFA
· A Conversation abt Woolf Works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UiGc3dJTLI
