Jennifer Homans reviews “Woolf Works,” a triptych of dances by the British choreographer Wayne McGregor, based on the life and work of Virginia Woolf, which was recently given its U.S. première by American Ballet Theatre.
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. McGregor, who is fifty-four and was recently knighted, emerged on London’s contemporary-dance scene in the early nineties, and began choreographing for ballet companies a decade or so later. Although he has always had some interest in narrative, he is best known for an abstract, tensile style . In recent years, he has incorporated aspects of science and technology, including A.I., into his dances. For “Woolf Works,” he takes a multimedia approach, with a score by Max Richter and film elements by Ravi Deepres. The piece opens with Virginia Woolf’s own voice—the only recording we have of her speaking, from 1937—booming into the theatre. She is talking about language: “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations—naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.” As Woolf speaks, we see her words projected on a large screen; then the letters shrink and dissolve into black marks, which fly into abstract patterns. From these pixels, an image of Woolf as a young woman emerges, and, as it fades, the dancer Alessandra Ferri stands before us, alone at center stage. It is just the kind of metamorphosis that McGregor wants us to believe in—words into dance—and, with that, the first act, “I now, I then,” drawn from “Mrs. Dalloway,” begins. Ferri takes off her coat with the ease of a woman in charge, and we realize that she is both author and character, Woolf and Clarissa Dalloway. Ferri is one of the great dancers of the last half century, and, at sixty-one, she carries herself like a woman with a past. Even the smallest movements register in her aging shoulders; her body, though still lithe, is also stiff and fragile, young and old in the same breath. She keeps an eye on herself as she moves: Can she trust that step onto pointe? Will it hold? And, when it doesn’t, quite, we watch her body gracefully rebalance. She doesn’t hide her limitations, instead allowing them to sharpen her physical attention. Her sense of distance from her own body gives us the long view from youth to mortality that the novel also evokes. We see Ferri dancing with a younger self, with Clarissa’s old flame Peter Walsh, and with her husband, Richard, buttoned up in his Edwardian best—or is this Woolf’s own husband, Leonard? Ferri has a long kiss with a dancer who plays Clarissa’s friend Sally Seton but must also surely be Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf was falling in love while writing “Mrs. Dalloway.” At moments, Ferri retreats and stands watching from one of the large empty square structures rotating slowly on the stage, or wanders blankly past the other characters, like a woman out of time. We meet Septimus Smith, the First World War veteran whose descent into madness and eventual suicide frame the novel. McGregor produces a dance of feints and falls that Septimus performs with the ghost of a dead comrade, then suddenly they are running in large circles, never meeting, and the stage seems to open to their desperation. Septimus, playing out the memory that is the source of his madness, walks across the stage pointing his fingers as a gun at us, and, when he shoots, his comrade falls beside him. Soon Ferri’s dance is mad, too, as McGregor underlines the way that the war shadows both the characters and their creator. The end is simple: Ferri, alone again in the middle of the stage, turns simply, hands behind her back, head bowed, “for there she was,” as the curtain falls. The final act is based on “The Waves” , perhaps Woolf’s most experimental work, but McGregor’s real interest here is her suicide, on Friday, March 28, 1941. The act is titled “Tuesday,” the day at the top of a suicide note that Woolf wrote to her husband, probably some days before, as she struggled with the mental illness that had plagued her intermittently all her life. The dance begins with a recording of Gillian Anderson reading the note, while Ferri stands center stage, listening under a large projection of slowly breaking waves. What follows is a repetitive and conventional dance by men, women, and children pretending to be water and waves. Ferri walks into their midst and is gradually taken into their flow. Toward the end, the watery corps de ballet bows to the four corners of the world, and one of the wave-men finally lays poor Ferri down on her back and slips into the receding sea, as the lights dim. In the end, it is hard to make sense of a work that undercuts both itself and its subject with such spectacular assurance. How can McGregor, who uses dance to embody the interiorities of “Mrs. Dalloway” so sensually and intimately, then wipe that achievement away with the techno stampede of “Becomings” and the calculated sentimentality of “Tuesday”—neither of which has much to do with Woolf or her novels? By the time we reached the suicide, McGregor’s use of literature and the tragedies of a life seemed to me a coldly instrumental way of lending emotion to dances that otherwise have none. Dance, not words, had failed, and this felt like a betrayal. After all, Woolf ’s death had nothing to do with oceanic waves, or with her novel published a decade earlier. That day in 1941, she simply walked to the River Ouse, dressed in a fur coat, Wellington boots, and a hat, dropped her wooden cane, placed a large stone in her coat pocket, and stepped into the depths. ♦
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