Woolf Works - Virginia's Dancing Words

Two things drew me towards my first visit to the ballet.  The first was that the prolific and thrilling composer Max Richter had written the score.  If the music came half as close to matching his dazzling reworking of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons I was not going to be disappointed.  The second was the story.  Or rather stories: three of Virginia Woolf's novels set to dance and music, each occupying a single act. 

Woolf was the first 'difficult' writer that I ever encountered.  At a time when I had only just begun to read widely, picking writers based on vague notions of the importance of an author, it was the title of To The Lighthouse that caused me to pluck this particular Woolf from the shelf of a Gibraltar bookshop.  I loved lighthouses but knew nothing of Modernism and it was a real baptism of fire for that autodidactic sailor.  Trying to make absolute sense of the narrative was always my first principal then - was Mr Ramsey ever going to work out who had 'blundered'? - and the depiction of character in this novel was very different from, say, those in Dickens, and moreover, that the prose was slippery and had no concern with being made sense of, was utterly alien to me.  Gradually though, through the guidance of night-school and then university, I became clued-up, learning to appreciate and then enjoy Woolf, and eventually choosing Modernism as the area that I would pursue as a Master's degree.  That Wayne MacGregor's Woolf Works featured three novels that I’d read – Mrs Dalloway and The Waves a number of times, Orlando once – was reason enough to book a ticket for a performance at The Royal Opera House.

Mrs Dalloway - Septimus, Sally and Clarissa

And what a rich and diverse experience it was.  Opening with the doleful chimes of Big Ben, followed by a recording of Virginia Woolf's actual voice discussing language - she speaks of how she could never divorce 'that splendid word incarnadine' from its use in King Lear – and then, as a soft and melancholy piano and cello begin to play, the dancing starts.  At first I found it hard to pick out the characters.  But when one of the dancer's movements becomes inflected with an awkward jerkiness I knew that this was one of the most heartbreaking characters in literature, the shell-shocked veteran of The Great War Septimus Warren Smith.  It is testament to the power of Mrs Dalloway, that whenever I walk through the streets of Bloomsbury, I shudder at the sight of those pointed railings that lie beneath almost every townhouse and the spikes that Septimus would impale himself upon after leaping out of a top-floor window.  And then, after an embrace is shared between two of the female dancers, I was aware that the ballet had hurtled back in time to the point which Clarissa Dalloway remembers as 'the most exquisite moment of her whole life', when she was spontaneously kissed by Sally Seaton.  Did it all feel like I was trying to find my bearings though, overly-relying on my knowledge of the narrative in order to make sense of the dance?  

Orlando - "He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it ..."

The next act, using Orlando as its base, dispelled all that and I felt able to free myself somewhat from the tyranny of story.  However, Luke Jennings, The Observer's ballet correspondent, in an otherwise very favourable review, takes this glorious section to task.  "McGregor deluges the sly gender games of the novel in a surfeit of Blade Runner-style effects. Lasers cut through drifting smoke, Richter's score pounds and the choreography is frantic."  That Jennings is thinking of the film Tron rather than Blade Runner betrays a casual dismissiveness of 1980s aesthetics that is still ingrained in much cultural criticism (as an aside, my one quibble with the wonderful La La Land was its mocking and supercilious attitude to eighties pop, in particular the idea that having to cover A-ha's peerless 'Take On Me' was the ultimate humiliation for Ryan Gosling's serious musician).  But for me this decade is an ideal aesthetic base for a novel that places gender fluidity at its core.  You only have to remember Boy George and Annie Lennox shocking Top of the Pops audiences to realise that the androgyny and gold lamé costumes are perfect for this.  Throw in synthesizers amid the lasers and the smoke – almost all of the orchestra vacated the pit for this section – and you are mesmerised.    

Orlando - "Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them"

As a concept, that of setting a ballet to three of the novels, Woolf Works is certainly at its most coherent with the final act based upon The Waves.  This is unsurprising as the novel has been described as a dance (by Malcolm Bradbury, I seem to recall) and the story of six characters, told through snatches of stream of consciousness, interspersed by descriptions of the sea seen from the shore, seamlessly translates into physical movement.  Indeed, those narrative interludes of the sea, depicted here by a background film of waves, captures the paradox of time wonderfully: moving slowly as the children grow up, and gathering pace and force as they enter into tumultuous maturity, it is a perfect depiction of the subjectivity of time.  Slow, almost eternal in our active and noisy youth, sickeningly swift as we slow into our old age.  Using child dancers is a masterstroke here.  They remain on the stage as the adults enter, serving as a poignant counterpoint, memories of our childhood ever-present and formative. 

The Waves - "And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back ..." 

Woolf Works was truly exhilarating.  Richter's score was superb.  The concept was perfect.  And as an introduction to ballet I felt that it was just right.  Whilst I certainly lack the vocabulary or knowledge to comment on the dancing and the movement – I might know what an arabesque and a fouetté are, but I would be incredibly hard-pushed to gauge their quality - I am intrigued enough to investigate further.  After all, those early encounters with Woolf were embarked upon from a real place of ignorance, and if that journey taught me anything at all it is that perseverance and patience yield greater understanding and pleasure.  To the Bolshoi then!