The Sound of Waves

"Woolf Works," Wayne McGregor’s Impressionistic, Collage-like Take on Virginia Woolf

Alessandra Ferri, after “Woolf Works” on opening night

There are story ballets and then there are story ballets. In “Onegin,” which American Ballet Theatre performed at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, the choreographer John Cranko approached the nineteenth-century Pushkin novel in the most direct, literal manner possible. This week, the company unveils Wayne McGregor’s 2015 ballet “Woolf Works,” an evening-length exploration of themes from Virginia Woolf’s writings. Its sources include “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Orlando,” and “The Waves,” as well as Woolf’s diaries and suicide note, written just moments before walking into the River Ouse, pockets weighted down with rocks.

The two ballets could not be more different. Where “Onegin” is solemn and literal—and yet still superficial— “Woolf Works” is impressionistic and collage-like, dipping into its literary sources to draw out ideas that are then spun into loops of choreographic material. This material is then encased in layers of scenic and technological sophistication: gorgeous slow-motion film projections, endlessly revolving architectural “frames,” golden-hued Elizabethan dress and stage makeup, sculptural lighting, lasers. But once all is said and done, it turns out that McGregor’s approach is, in its own way, just as superficial.

Actually, the sophisticated production elements—Lucy Carter’s lighting designs, scenic designs by Ciguë, We Not I, and Wayne McGregor, costume designs by Moritz Junge—serve mostly to distract from a shallowness at the core. How much will an audience-member not already familiar with Virginia Woolf understand of the imagination and lyricism of her writing? Or, in the case of the second section, inspired by her 1928 novel “Orlando,” of its narrative boldness and flights of the imagination? In that novel, the central character—inspired by Woolf’s friend and sometime lover Vita Sackville-West— ricochets through the centuries, skating on the frozen Thames with a mysterious Russian before traveling to the Middle East as an ambassador and then, years later, molting into a woman, dressing in pearls, cavorting with famous writers, even picking up the pen herself? In “Woolf Works,” all that remains of this is the idea of gender-fluidity, performed as a series of costume alterations, additions and subtractions of elements like ruffs, panniers, and tutus, while lasers pierce the air and clever lighting creates three-dimensional wedges of glowing light. It’s danced storytelling as eye candy.

That feeling of opacity is further augmented by Max Richter’s score, a series of compositions whose internal loops repeat again and again, usually leading into a great crescendo—climax!—before coming to decisive end. Each section evokes a mood, through instrumentation: violins and piano bring to mind deep thought or love, marimbas the urge to act, etc. In the first section, we hear the bells of Big Ben; in the second, the sound of graphite on paper; in the last, the sound of waves and children’s voices. One passage—I think it was in the “Orlando” section—is driven by a chugging ostinato that brings to mind the battle scenes from “Game of Thrones.” Meanwhile, the bodies onstage coil and unfurl their limbs.

Catherine Hurlin and Jake Roxander i Woolf Works. Photo by Marty Sohl.

Like the music, McGregor’s choreography tends to go on in self-perpetuating loops. Backs ripple, heads dive forward, shoulders buckle, legs stretch upward, or are held up to their maximum extension, particularly to the side, or forward, like weapons. In partnering, the women tend to wrap their limbs around their partners, or partners bend, twist and pull away from each other, as far as they can go. In the final tableau, inspired by Woolf’s watery death, the movement takes on a more floating, aqueous quality. (The dancers’ faces are covered by masks—they become the waves.) Throughout, the choreography is a remarkable demonstration of the dancers’ capacity for expansion, balance, flexibility, strength, a kind of extreme beauty. Expressively, it is mostly opaque, uninflected. And yet the dancers clearly relish the challenge. In the Orlando role Catherine Hurlin, in particular, looked as if the choreography unleashed a new power in her. But she was only the first among many.

The first section, “I Now, I Then,” is the most restrained, and also the most narratively inspired. We see the figure of Clarissa Dalloway, the anguished heroine of Virginia Woolf’s novel, who is also a stand-in for Woolf herself. She was played, on opening night, by the extraordinary dramatic ballerina Alessandra Ferri, now 61, just under a decade older than Mrs. Dalloway in the novel. (The role was created for her by McGregor.) As three giant frames revolved around her, she emerged out of the darkness, her girlish yet mournful face gazing into the empty space before her as if at a film of her own life. Other characters appeared: her husband, the stolid and loving Richard Dalloway; the man who once hoped to marry her, Peter (Herman Cornejo); the young woman with whom she shared a kiss, Sally (Trenary); a younger version of herself, danced by Léah Fleytoux with touching delicacy and purity. Ferri walked among and around them, watching, remembering.

The cast of “Tuesday,” the final section of “Woolf Works.” Photo by Marty Sohl.

Later, the shell-shocked soldier Septimus Warren Smith (Daniel Camargo) appeared, followed by his battle buddy Evans (Jake Roxander), killed in the war. Their collapsing bodies, held up by friends and partners, evoked the mental collapses suffered by Clarissa, Septimus, and Woolf herself. Unsurprisingly, this is the most evocative section of the three, the most grounded. The bells of Big Ben create a sense of time; the fragmentary projections of early twentieth-century London, one of place.

The projections in the final section, of ocean waves recorded in extreme slow motion, are, too, suggestive and strikingly beautiful. This section begins with children playing with a rope—an image from “The Waves”—and ends with Woolf’s (Ferri’s), slow walk into the waves. All around her, dancers ripple, bend, turn, fall, bathed in pools of light, while others enact a kind of ceremony of death, a balletic adagio. Ferri’s body is tossed and caught, pulled and dragged, as if by the currents. At times her slender frame takes on the quality of a pietà. The melodrama of the scene is starkly at odds with the words of Woolf’s suicide note to her husband, read earlier in a recording of the actress Gillian Anderson. “I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came,” Woolf writes. “You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that.” Simple, direct, clear-eyed; heartbreaking in its lack of sentimentality. Nothing in “Woolf Works” comes close to that.

Wayne McGregor with the full cast of “Woolf Works.”