Ever since I was a child, I have been E drawn to dance because it expresses emotions and bodily impulses without words. Once, when I was a young dancer, standing in the wings and nervous that my mind was blank, a senior colleague told me not to worry. "It's when the words come that you're finished," she said. "They destroy everything." Words are now my trade, but I still harbor a dancer's suspicion of them, and this is perhaps one reason that I have been reluctant to embrace the recent trend toward dances that tell stories or make statements. I appreciate classics like "Swan Lake," pure dance stitched into a story with pantomime and gesture, but I experience them as music and dance; to this day I can't quite remember the plots. And recent ballet adaptations of novels including "Of Love and Rage," "Jane Eyre," and "Like Water for Chocolate" have left me unmoved, struggling to find some connection between plot and steps, rather than absorbing dance as a language in and of itself.
The British choreographer Wayne McGregor's "Woolf Works," a triptych inspired by Virginia Woolf that was recently given its U.S. première by American Ballet Theatre, seemed to promise something different. For one thing, Woolf's move away from conventional plot, the way that she folds readers into sensual experience and into the wandering nature of our memories and inner lives, has some affinities with the inchoate and associative character of dance.
And although McGregor has chosen three specific novels-"Mrs. Dalloway," "Orlando," and "The Waves"-he is not trying to literally act them out; rather, he is making a kind of dance analogue of Woolf's vision and her prose.
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the {{IssueName}} edition of {{MagazineName}}.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
QUARTET ISLAND
Mendelssohn on Mull celebrates chamber music away from urban pressures.
FIX YOU
The self-help positivity of Coldplay.
ILLUMINATIONS
Suzanne Jackson captures the transformative power of light.
RAT PACK
The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future.
ROYAL TREATMENT
The unrivalled omnipresence of Queen Elizabeth IL.
WELL, WELL, WELL
Eating—and not-in the epicenter of hype diets.
NEWARK STATE OF MIND
Mayor Ras Baraka's reasonable radicalism.
DOOM SCROLLING
Social media and the teen-suicide crisis.
THE WORKER REVOLT
Harris and Walz try to stop blue-collar Americans from drifting to Trump.
THE CHIT-CHATBOT
Is talking with a machine a conversation?