WOOLF WORKS Works On Stage, Screen And CD... Living the past again

Nearly two years ago, we took the plunge - in the year of trying new things artistically - and went to Covent Garden to see WOOLF WORKS, a new Royal Ballet production choreographed by Wayne McGregor.  I remember feeling some trepidation... Virginia Woolf is one of my favourite authors for whom language is the key so how can you silence that but still make it relevant?  Two words... Wayne McGregor.

As you can see from my blog it had a profound effect on us both and it did indeed start a continuing exploration of ballet which has been very rewarding.  But how would the first revival of WOOLF WORKS compare - and would it have the same impact?

I am happy to be able to say that it led to a deeper, richer understanding of the work but also there was the added bonus this year of seeing it on the big screen at the Curzon Mayfair and also being able to appreciate the depth of Max Richter's music with it's release on cd.

Onstage we were blessed with practically the same cast as in 2015, the only major replacement being Calvin Richardson and his breathtaking pirouettes dancing the role of 'Evans' for the unwell Tristan Dyer in the MRS. DALLOWAY-inspired 'I Now, I Then'.  The impact of seeing the company onstage was made even more exciting by seeing the same dancers a few days later on the live cinema screening, giving an opportunity to experience their talent closer than possible at the Opera House although there was some loss too, in particular the glorious digital stage image of the garden of Clarissa's imagined youth flooding the set.

McGregor has choreographed three ballets in distinct styles: 'I Now, I Then' is the most narrative; based on MRS DALLOWAY - and introduced with the only known recording of Virginia Woolf musing on the difficulty of using old English words in new ways - we see Clarissa Dalloway (sublime Alessandra Ferri) meeting old flame Peter Walsh (Gary Aves) and relives the glorious summer she spent as a teenager with Peter and her best friend, the free spirited Sally Seton, and how life seemed full of possibility and choice.  The younger selves were danced wonderfully by Francesca Hayward, Federico Bonelli and Beatriz Stix-Brunell.

As Clarissa is lost in memories of what could have been we also see Septimus Smith (the astonishing Edward Watson) who is tortured with the lasting trauma of shell-shock from his experience in the WWI trenches.  His wife Rezia (Akana Takada) tries to keep him engaged in life but he is lost in memories of his friend Evans (Richardson) who was killed before him.  It is a perfect fusion of performance, choreography, design by Cigué, lighting by Lucy Carter - the moment the stage was suffused with glowing red when Septimus danced with Evans was glorious - and, almost a character of it's own, Max Richter's heartbreaking, longing music.

The second act 'Becomings' takes ORLANDO as it's inspiration and is the most abstract of the pieces although during one of the intervals for the screened event Wayne McGregor was interviewed by hosts Darcey Bussell and Clemency Burton-Hill and said he believed that no dance can be truly abstract as the human element will always lend a dance a narrative sense.  Again Lucy Carter's lighting is thrilling: an overhead beam roams the dark stage picking out 12 dancers in varying degrees of glittering gold Elizabethan costumes before a cold laser beam illuminates two of them and we launch into McGregor's take on Woolf's exploration of gender fluidity.

As Richter's music roams from bone-crunching electro beats to minimal keyboard runs so McGregor's choreography changes from solos to duets to triple routines for his remarkable dancers - pushing their limbs into even more challenging shapes and attitudes; the exhilaration is in seeing male and female dancers fusing into just pure dance.  With each segment, they slowly lose their Elizabethan costumes until they are in shades of grey, all dancing in and out of four overhead spotlights, all individual but all unified, until the lights cut out and the auditorium is criss-crossed with shafts of laserlight.  Again the live screening was wonderful to showcase in detail the astonishing work of, among others, Sarah Lamb, Natalia Osipova, Steven McRae and Watson.

The final act is TUESDAY and takes it inspiration from THE WAVES but also references Woolf's suicide note written on Tuesday 25th March 1941, three days before she actually drowned in the River Ouse.  McGregor has the inspired choice of Gillian Anderson reading the wrenching suicide note while a slow-motion film of crashing waves shows on a stage-wide screen all but dwarfing the stationary figure of Ferri beneath.  Anderson's measured, hypnotic delivery leads you in to McGregor's slow meditation on love and loss, beautifully danced by Ferri and Federico Bonelli who are later joined by Sarah Lamb and an ensemble which also includes young students from the Royal Ballet School.

Ferri is astonishing in her poetry and control as she becomes the embodiment of Richter's dreamlike, ethereal music, solitary notes slowly coming together with Anush Hovhannisyan's soprano to wash over you with waves of strings and brass.  There was one moment that haunts me: Alessandra Ferri starts a solo movement against the ensemble's choreography who slowly, three or four at a time, echo her until they are all bending and stretching as one, it's breathtakingly beautiful.  Slowly the ensemble ebb away into the darkness at the back of the stage, as Bonelli lowers a prone Ferri onto the stage as the music slowly vanishes note by note...

As I have said, the live screening was a wonderful opportunity to see the dancers closer than possible in the theatre and there were the added extras of interviews with Wayne McGregor and Max Richter as well as Maggie Smith reading passages from THE WAVES as well as Virginia's memoir MOMENTS OF BEING.

As I have written this I have been able to relive the experience by playing the cd THREE WORLDS of Richter's score; I wondered if it would work separately from the experience of seeing it with the dancers but it works beautifully.  It has been great to be able to explore this work in depth for the past two weeks - I would love the opportunity to see it again.

WOOLF WORKS: Moments of Being...

I was lost for words when Owen told me he had booked tickets for the Royal Ballet's WOOLF WORKS at Covent Garden.  I just couldn't grasp it... three short ballets based on MRS DALLOWAY, ORLANDO and THE WAVES?  How could this be?  What can there be of Woolf without her writing, it's rhythms and the power to connect moments of her life with ours.  How could this succeed robbed of her words?  It was with this air of quiet bafflement that I took my very good seat in that most sumptuously decadent of London auditoriums and the light lowered as the curtain raised...

Within seconds my central question was resolutely answered.  Virginia's voice sounded out, steady and strong in her only recorded piece for the BBC in 1937, talking about the difficulty with trying to find new forms of writing when English words are so over-familiar through being used again and again.  As we listened, her writing appeared on a screen, meshing and re-forming into a likeness of Virginia then coming apart again.  It was as if choreographer Wayne McGregor was saying that if words have lost their imaginative use then their must be other ways.

The first in the triptych was I NOW, I THEN based on the main characters in MRS DALLOWAY and the atmosphere and mood of the story.  Again after a few minutes not only did the penny drop but I found myself deeply involved.  This was helped by Lucy Carter's sombre lighting, the hazy video projections of London as seen through a dream and the striking set design of Cigué, 3 wooden oblongs that rotated slowly to open up new vistas and configurations, occasionally revealing a new dancer as if from nowhere. 

The hypnotic Alessandra Ferri, returned from retirement, danced the role of Clarissa Dalloway and as the title suggests, she was joined onstage by Francesca Hayward as the younger Clarissa who danced with Beatriz Stix-Brunell as the quicksilver Sally Seton and Gary Avis as the younger Peter Walsh, the older Peter was danced by Federico Bonelli.  Max Richter's intriguing score kept returning to the chiming of Big Ben, ticking clocks and watches, all suggesting Woolf's subject of time, the past and memory.

Edward Watson enthralled as he interpreted McGregor's disjointed choreography as the shell-shocked Septimus Smith partnered by Akane Takada as his despairing wife Rezia.  In a marvellous visual cue, the stage was bathed in a warm reddish light when he danced with Tristan Dyer as Evans, his dead friend from the trenches.

What was good about WOOLF WORKS was that each of the three sections felt totally different, the only connection being the source novelist.  Totally different in tone was BECOMINGS, the second of the three and based on ORLANDO.  Twelve dancers appeared on a darkened stage as an overhead spotlight searched them, their golden costumes gleaming as it swept around them as if trying to find a single person.  It finally alighted on one and the dancers soon started dancing in pairs, male and female, again suggesting Woolf's theme of gender confusion.

This was the longest of the three and it's abstract form did rather outstay it's welcome but what made it all the more thrilling was Richter's crunching music which at one point got so loud I actually thought the circle might give way!  The lighting was all very 80s with laser beams illuminating the dancers, suggesting the other-world space of Orlando's changing gender. The lasers swept into the auditorium too, lighting up each of the circles with beads of light and in a dramatic, sudden finale end with countless lasers firing all over the auditorium, just like the last Pet Shop Boys concert!  It was all very thrilling - and again not what I had expected.

After a second interval - each about the same length as the actual dance pieces themselves - oh and after a second wild strawberry champagne cocktail (I LIKE Covent Garden), it was time for the last of the three, TUESDAY (based on THE WAVES) as the curtain rose on a bare stage apart from a long screen on which a slow film of crashing waves played.  

Gillian Anderson was then heard reading Virginia's heartbreaking suicide letter to Leonard and, as usual when confronted with it, I soon had tears running down my face.  Beautifully read by Anderson and with nothing on stage to distract from the words it was incredibly powerful.  It affects for many reasons: the private nature of a suicide letter to a husband by a writer who always strove to find new ways of describing life, the sheer beauty of the writing even though the content is so tragic, that in describing all she knew she shared with Leonard was not enough to stop Virginia from doing what she did to end her losing battle with her insanity.

Alessandra Ferri was magnificent as the spirit of Woolf, painfully moving through her duet with Federico Bonelli, his attempts to hold her and keep her aloft ending with her escaping away, her sheer force of personality filling the auditorium.  They were joined on stage by children dancing with Sarah Lamb, again Ferri interacting with a dancer playing her younger self, for the children to vanish into an ensemble of dancers who filled the stage with slow, sinuous movement which culminated in Ferri joining them, at first moving on her own but slowly becoming one with their repeated moves, as if subsumed by the rhythm of the waves.

Slowly the ensemble pulled away, moving forward and back, forward and back as Richter's moving composition for strings reached it's climax as Bonelli carried Ferri for the last time to slowly lower her on to the stage to retreat away with the others.  It was powerful, emotional, impossibly moving.  She deserved every minute of her extended ovation, as indeed did her fellow dancers.

At the start of this year, Owen suggested that this should be a year of discovering new cultural things to see and on the back of this visit, Owen has indeed booked to see two more non-Matthew Bourne ballets.  I suspect however that nothing will come close to the emotional tour-de-force of Wayne McGregor's WOOLF WORKS.