In June I visited New York to spend time with dear friends, and while in town I also got to see the American Ballet Theatre perform Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works, a three-act ballet based on the works of Virginia Woolf.
encouraged me to write about it, and I have been thinking about practising having an opinion about art, and where else to begin besides dance, which I have loved for almost as long as I have loved books?Ballet is a niche interest in itself, and contemporary ballet an even tinier niche, within which not all are fans of McGregor; but surely most would agree to his pioneering influence on dance. Born 1970 in the UK, McGregor grew up training in disco and contemporary and ballroom – and no ballet whatsoever. Yet he was eventually appointed resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet in London, where he premiered Chroma in 2006.
The 25-minute, plotless piece broke the dance world. McGregor’s vision was unheard of: it featured sets by minimalist architect John Pawson, music adapted from The White Stripes, and what would become known as McGregor's signature style: stark aesthetics, blurred gender dynamics (a breath of fresh air from the stifling heteronormativity of classical ballet), shapes and hyperextensions pushing the human body to unforeseen limits, lines lines lines. Since then there has been a worldwide flurry to stage McGregor: he has choreographed over a hundred works for everyone from the Paris Opera Ballet to Radiohead, and his collaborators run the gamut from artists Olafur Eliasson and Edmund de Waal to composers Mark Ronson and Nico Muhly. I think of his influence as the dance corollary to starchitecture in cities: look, we too have a glitzy contemporary commission.
I had stumbled upon Chroma as a Hong Kong schoolgirl scrambling for dance content in the early days of Youtube, and was immediately hooked. Fast forward all these years, I still turn to Chroma when I yearn for something comforting-yet-extraordinary to rewatch at the end of a long day; and its younger sibling, Infra, has gotten me through many lonesome nights of heartbreak. McGregor's canonical work has been a salve, a revelation, my Roman empire.
The sophistication of McGregor's work is such that it is more taxing and physically demanding than even rigorous ballet repertoire, and not all companies do it well; even newer Royal casts of Chroma and Infra can make me cringe. His narrative ballets also give me pause: his last, Raven Girl, had been an awkward attempt with gothic storybook sets and over-the-top costumes. The positioning of Woolf Works is exceptionally curious: McGregor has spent his career challenging the boundaries of what the human body can do, and caters to a specific, even acquired taste; online clips of his work elicit plenty of hate from those unaccustomed to his superhuman designs. What do his genre-bending contortions have to do with Virginia Woolf? When it first premiered with the Royal in 2015, I watched a stream online and found it unremarkable: it was just standard McGregor fare, dancers twisting about in fancy costumes and fancy lights. When ABT first announced they would be premiering Woolf Works this summer, I had been uninterested whatsoever.
Things changed this spring. ABT started preparing to perform Woolf Works in Costa Mesa, and the rehearsal footage on social media was promising: dancers executing McGregor's jaw-dropping leaps and lifts with unhurried aplomb, their expressions the exact stoic detachment requisite of a good McGregor staging. And then they announced that Alessandra Ferri will be performing two nights.
Ferri, who turned 61 this year, is a ballet legend from another era: she joined the Royal in 1980, later became an ABT principal at Baryshnikov's invitation, and is regarded one of the world's greatest ballerinas of her time. Woolf Works had been created on her when she had first emerged from retirement to return to the stage. She is slated to become the artistic director of the Vienna State Ballet next year; these two performances may well be her last.
I arrived at Lincoln Center on a bright summer evening, the light on the plaza still not quite dusk, with enough time to pick up my ticket and find my seat on the fifth row. Surveying the company around me, I was once again reminded of the typical ballet-goer crowd, especially on a Tuesday, especially for a ballet on Virginia Woolf: disproportionately older, disproportionately rich, ostentatiously genteel. (And yet: the cost of my prime ticket was equivalent to the back row of a hit Broadway show.) The two women next to me, dressed in chiffon suits and pearl earrings, recited factoids of Woolf's life to each other, with dramatic emphasis on her suicide. The elderly lady seated in front of me needed a walker to get into her seat and binoculars to see clearly from the fourth row; the gentleman next to her could not have been younger than 80. Knowing there are extreme lasers in the performance ahead, I braced myself for the possibility of an imminent seizure in my vicinity.
Woolf Works is a triptych of Woolf's most well-known works: Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves. The production starts with the only living recording of Woolf's actual voice, overlain on a video projection of her handwritten drafts, and then we see Ferri alone in the centre of the stage. Two interwoven narratives follow: Mrs Dalloway reminiscing her lost youth, including the innocence of adolescent friendships and a coying kiss shared with a girl with golden hair; and Septimus Smith, a war veteran unable to let go of battleground scars. Once again McGregor's choreographic attempts at storytelling prove amateurish. Characters wearing conventional outfits from the interwar period run on and offstage and through a few large rotating frames that remind one of a modernist set for a play. After waltzing around with younger versions of herself and her friends, Ferri's Dalloway snaps out of her reverie by simply catching herself in a shudder and wandering around as if lost; and when Septimus, played by the criminally good-looking, long-limbed Daniel Camargo, repeatedly leaps with his arms outstretched in futile search of escape, the results reminded me of a high school choreography competition. We receive an elegant sequence of two characters wrestling with the ghosts of their pasts and not much more; that is to say, my mind was not blown the way one expects to have her mind blown by a McGregor piece. By the conclusion of the first segment and intermission came around, I had to run for an emergency $8 coffee from the refreshments bar (in my defense, I had also just spent the day in the sun on the beach). Chugging it down, I was starting to wonder if it had been worth it to come all this way to catch this performance.
It is in the second act, based on the gender-bending, time-travelling Orlando, where the production fully redeems itself. The stage opens with a lone spotlight swivelling around the stage, highlighting one dancer after another, dressed in reimagined period costumes from Elizabethan to Victorian-era Britain: exaggerated hoop skirts and pom-pom shorts and puffed lace neck collars in black and shimmery gold. Then at once the Max Richter score turns a bubbly electronic, coloured lasers start blaring through clouded mist and straight into the auditorium, and the dancing begins. Acrobatic leaps at ruthless angles, bodies striving to exhibit their truths, pure kinetic energy: it is McGregor language at its finest. It is entirely plotless, no protagonists or narrative arcs to follow: instead, as dancers flit and soar along the length of a laser beam from upstage left to downstage right, and their costumes strip down to nothing but flesh-coloured leotards, I was overwhelmed with the sense that we were witnessing the centuries-long progression along the spectrum of gender expression and experimentation. In lieu of attempting a linear Orlando illustration, McGregor has played to his strengths here, as he told the New York Times: he “wanted to make something that was taking the novel as if it were glass, shards of information, ideas and gender identity, and really finding a virtuosity in the body that matched the aspiration and invention of the book.” He wanted to capture the texture of Orlando and not its plot, and the effect is exhilarating, goosebump-inducing. It is no less groundbreaking than Chroma had been.
When the black screen came down -- in lieu of the Met's red velvet curtain -- cheers and a kind of breathless applause broke out from around the auditorium: we knew we had just witnessed something truly special. My patch of audience, however, stayed notably silent. I watched the octogenarian seated inches ahead of me reach his hand to his cheek and slowly move it towards his temple.
The short, final act is ostensibly about The Waves, but once more the plot of the polyphonic novel, told by six childhood friends over the span of a lifetime, is entirely irrelevant; McGregor centres Woolf's impulse to take her own life instead. It opens with a wave crashing in slow motion on a LED screen spanning the width of the stage, the voice of Gillian Anderson reading Woolf's suicide note to her husband Leonard, and Ferri standing alone centre stage once again, barefoot and wearing a diaphanous dress the colour of smoke. Before long she is joined by a chorus of dancers whose repetitive, flowing movement mimics that of the undulating wave towering above their heads; Ferri is propelled back and forth between their folds and carried on their backs, letting herself be lulled and taken by the water. Watching her roil and fall in melancholy, I am reminded of what McGregor once said: that his work is about "bodies misbehaving beautifully" -- perhaps an acceptable antidote for the ballet crowd. The effect is spare, gorgeous, perhaps gentler than most things McGregor has produced, but the depth of emotion Ferri elicits from the movement is formidable. As the music moves from "On the Nature of Daylight"-esque austerity to swell towards a deafening high tide, I found myself lifting my hands to my face and, to my surprise, starting to cry.
How did a production I had so easily dismissed upon first viewing end up moving me to tears? Perhaps the way that McGregor's creations lean so heavily on elements outside of choreography alone -- eerie orchestral compositions, sculptural sets, mind-boggling costumes -- simply make them unfit for streaming on a 13" laptop screen. The pure spectacle of his visions demand that they be experienced in person, and explains why his work has enjoyed enduring popularity in ticket sales. The choice of choreographing to the work of an iconic author also guarantees that Woolf Works stands distinct from the other hundred-odd samples of McGregor fare.
This may also be a good time to mention that while I adore Mrs Dalloway, and love the ideas Woolf explores in Orlando and The Waves, I have never actually been able to read the latter two in their entirety, despite multiple attempts; the language she uses is simply too experimental, too alien for me to follow on the page. Here McGregor has brought her incredible foresight to life in a multisensory, expansive medium transcending the technicalities of language and voice, so that lesser readers like me can experience their majesty, too. And for this I am grateful.
A few standout performances: newly-promoted soloist Jarod Curley, with his sharp features and long limbs and gravity-defying jumps, reminded me of Edward Watson, the Royal Ballet legend who created many a McGregor role. The other newly-appointed soloist Jake Roxander, whose Puck I saw in The Dream last fall must surely be the best I will ever see, proved he can do contemporary just as well. Cate Hurlin performed the pivotal pas de deux of the second act with delicious precision and attack: as she mounted Camargo's head, wrapped her legs around his neck, and folded her torso backwards flat like a piece of paper, the lady beside me winced audibly, and yet at the end she sighed, She was so good.
But the real marvel was Ferri herself. The choreography itself is deceptively simple, not physically demanding for her age. But her capacity to embody Woolf’s gentle agony, and with it to move audiences beyond measure, is her true gift. For this is the singular power of dance performance: emotion made alive with every fibre of the body so that the audience can be absorbed in the devastation no matter how far they are seated from the stage or how little they know about the subject. Language and narrative are almost superfluous, mere pretences for dancers to get to the heart of the matter. The last time I recall being so destroyed by a ballet had also been watching Ferri, in the neoclassical Ashton piece Marguerite and Armand. It was as far as McGregor as one could imagine – Lady of the Camellias packed within a half-hour affair, with four costume changes – but then, as now, I was taken with tears by the end. If there is one thing I hope for you, for everyone, it is to experience art that can move you like this.
If you have made it this far: come next February, Chroma is being staged by San Francisco Ballet, whose director Tamara Rojo had been in the original cast. If you are in the area, I hope you consider catching a glimpse of McGregor’s brilliance then. I will be there!