Virginia Woolf rewrote the rule book for English literature, deviating from the traditional format of storytelling and instead getting under the skin and searching the soul of the characters. Wayne McGregor has employed something similar with choreography, shifting the rules to dissect the body in so many interesting ways. I don’t feel narrative is McGregor’s natural expression but, in his triptych, Woolf Works, and especially in the final act, based on The Waves, in collaboration with Max Richter’s music and Ravi Deepres’ film, he reaches poetic depths.
The evening offers three different landscapes. Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931) are the most revealing as Woolf offers a microscopic view of the emotional turmoil that drives the characters under their controlled exteriors. Deepres’ slow motion video of waves with the slow drawing back of the water as it builds to the next wave reveals the hidden power behind the calm exterior, so like the well-mannered characters as they harness their feelings.
Natalia Osipova has proved her acting credentials. Her Tatiana in Onegin plumbs the dramatic depths and her comic performance in Jo Strømgren’s The Exhibition showed her range. In I now, I then, she captures, so well the omniscient voice of the Older Clarissa, a constant observer, who fully absorbs the pain and sensitivities of her acquaintances. Her opening solo is one of doodling with steps. The complexity and multilayered texture of Woolf’s writing can’t be translated directly to movement, but McGregor manages to catch the essence of the deep-thinking author whose emotional antennae never stopped twitching. She steps out of the shadows when Peter, her former lover arrives. William Bracewell, a dancer who enhances each move with honest emotion and rich subtext, reveals to Clarissa a life that could have been but is now, uneasily, stored in memories.
The Young Clarissa, Sae Maeda, dressed in a gorgeous wisp of a period gown, flirts innocently with Sally, Leticia Dias. Their kiss seems to take the older woman by surprise and the warmth of their relationship stands in contrast to the other polite engagements.
It was an exceptional night for Marcelino Sambé as Septimus, viewed first on the battlefield with Marco Masciari as Evans, a fellow soldier. The fog and the fear are intelligently reconstructed, and he returns to civilian life wracked with the memories that eat into his soul and give no respite. Akane Takada as Rezia, his wife is loving but helpless and like Woolf herself, he determines his own death.
Sambé, with Fumi Kaneko, feature strongly in Becomings, constructed on Woolf’s fantasy novel Orlando. Here, in a quite brilliant display of lighting effects, from Lucy Carter and We Not I, the fireworks are supplied by the cohort of a dozen top dancers dressed in gold lamé in capricious period style from Moritz Junge. The effects are amazing, the scenario bordering on magic realism and the choreography some of McGregor’s best. It makes a startling contrast to the rest of the ballet.
In Tuesday, the stage is dominated by the video of waves breaking on the shore and opens with a reading by Gillian Anderson from Woolf’s last piece of writing; her painfully tender suicide note. Richter’s music finds that same raw edge and features the solo soprano voice of Marianna Hovanisyan. Here the six characters in her novel are introduced as Woolf’s young nieces and nephews, the children she never had. The individuals soon merge into the ensemble in patterns of rising and falling with Osipova and Bracewell taking centre stage. It makes a profound sombre close to a seminal work.
