The Brooklyn Rail

I arrived at American Ballet Theatre’s New York premiere of Woolf Works with a copy of To the Lighthouse tucked in my bag. Though not one of the novels foundational to Wayne McGregor’s ballet—each of the three acts correspond to Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves, respectively—it had been a couple of years since I touched Woolf’s writing. McGregor and his creative team pulled inspiration from Woolf’s letters, diaries, and essays as well as her novels, and emphasized that the ballet is not a recreation of her work. Cramming an adjacent novel on the train ride to the theater felt like the right thing to do before seeing the performance.

It might have been a mistake, though, to submerge myself directly in Woolf’s vision immediately before witnessing someone else’s interpretation. My curiosity and anticipation were high when I entered the theater, but I was left profoundly disappointed by the time the curtain came down.

British choreographer and director Wayne McGregor created Woolf Works for the United Kingdom’s Royal Ballet in 2015, and American Ballet Theatre debuted it in the United States earlier this year at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California. McGregor is a multi-award-winning artist (recently appointed a Knighthood) whose choreography is characterized by windmilling limbs, quirky movements of the head and spine, and gymnastic pas de deux partnering.

Woolf Works is McGregor’s first full-length effort for the Royal Ballet. Much has already been discussed about why he chose to tackle Woolf, and the answers invariably return to her visionary experimentation with language and form.

The rich physical detail in Woolf’s writing serves as a doorway through which we access a vast interior world of memories, feelings, and impressions. Her characters are made more vivid because of this contrast. Consider Lily Briscoe, a character in To The Lighthouse, who is frustrated by her attempts to compose a painting. She stands before her canvas “like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt.” This as she stands still, alone in the garden.

McGregor does indeed push the limits of ballet’s physical language, but it’s almost entirely toward the extreme. For example, he collapses the conventional space between bodies so that dancers wrap themselves around each other like vines, even when they’re moving at speed. Bent knees and the crook of an elbow offer leverage points for jumps and lifts, while hands and arms push, ripple, and slice, more reminiscent of street styles than ballet. He fails to generate a sense of internal motivation despite the near-constant movement. Without contrast, the audience can’t determine why two people are now together, now apart—and we aren’t given time nor reason to care.

Act I, titled “I now, I then,” references Mrs. Dalloway. Renowned ballerina Alessandra Ferri appears in the roles she originated as both Older Clarissa and later as Woolf herself. The audience sees Ferri onstage, and then large, rotating frames that evoke empty windows. The dancers stand on the frames or step in and out of the shadowy corners as their characters flit from one interaction to another. They are clearly individuals, quite distinct from the beings of pure energy swirling through Acts II and III, yet we never get to know them.

There’s a welcome humanity to Older Clarissa and Septimus’s pas de deux, which stands out as an exception in Act I. McGregor gives the choreography a moment to breathe, and effectively shows the collision of two fragmented people as the dancers circle one another or push and pull against each other as if connected by an elastic band. The characters foreshadow the anguish that drives Woolf to commit suicide in Act III.

Act II, titled “Becomings,” references Orlando and opens with a gorgeous image. Dancers stand perfectly still, scattered across the stage. The iridescent gold costumes, designed by Moritz Junge, are clearly styled after the novel’s protagonist and his/her Elizabethan origins. A searchlight sweeps over the dancers, momentarily wrapping each of them in a bright cocoon. They’re like gestating creatures, gathering the energy necessary to explode into life.

They do, and the hyper-kinetic, hyper-mobile movement is compelling for a few minutes. The lighting design is especially helpful in creating a glamorous, prismatic world onstage. But this unrelenting intensity eventually becomes a blur. It’s devoid of Orlando’s longing, tenderness, and humor.

“Tuesday,” the final act, opens with a voiceover reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. Her naked suffering fills the Metropolitan Opera House in what is by far the most emotionally intense moment of the entire evening. Ferri emerges as Woolf, taking faltering, swaying steps downstage. It’s disappointing, though, that any poignancy in Woolf Works comes from a focus on Woolf’s death when her writing is so much about life.

As in Act I, McGregor’s choreography is most interesting when he deviates from his usual vocabulary. He uses traditional ballet tools—the technology of the pointe shoe, gendered partnering—to give Ferri continuous off-balance movement that washes her across the stage. It produces the sense that she’s buoyed by a substance thicker than air. But “Tuesday” feels anticlimactic even as it builds toward Woolf’s final rest. There’s a bit of an afterimage from “Becomings,” and excitement around the dancers’ sheer athleticism has worn off by this point in the evening. Woolf Works’s frenetic pace might very well demonstrate emotions surging beneath the surface, but I did not feel them.

McGregor seems to care deeply about dance and is passionate about using movement to communicate across various methods of inquiry. The main issue here is not that he fails to appreciate or understand the subject matter, nor that he dared make an abstract ballet from literature. Rather, his choreographic language has only managed to innovate upon the mechanics of movement and not the purpose behind it. Why trade only in physical extremes, when Woolf offers so much more? If her writing teaches us anything, it’s that our outward-facing behavior rarely matches the intensity of our internal experience.