{"id":32123,"date":"2024-06-24T13:38:06","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T17:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/virginia-woolf-but-make-it-a-polyphonic-sensory-ballet\/24\/06\/2024\/"},"modified":"2024-06-24T13:38:06","modified_gmt":"2024-06-24T17:38:06","slug":"virginia-woolf-but-make-it-a-polyphonic-sensory-ballet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/entertainment\/virginia-woolf-but-make-it-a-polyphonic-sensory-ballet\/24\/06\/2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Woolf, but Make It a Polyphonic, Sensory Ballet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

\n

He was interested in adapting something of Woolf\u2019s, because she experimented with form, and because she was interested in music and dance. After considering a \u201cMrs. Dalloway\u201d ballet, he arrived at a more expansive idea: a triptych that also takes off from \u201cOrlando,\u201d a parodic, gender-fluid fictional biography; and \u201cThe Waves,\u201d an experiment in collective storytelling that elegiacally traces the arc of life. Using an original score by Max Richter, McGregor also wove in Woolf\u2019s biography and mental illness, blurring the boundaries between her life and her characters, and building a third act around her suicide.<\/p>\n

When \u201cWoolf Works\u201d premiered in 2015, Judith Mackrell wrote in The Guardian<\/a> that, \u201cin the depth and the scope of its ambitions, and in its haunting meditations on memory, madness and time, it takes both McGregor \u2014 and the concept of the three-act ballet \u2014 to a brave and entirely exhilarating new place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first act, \u201cI now, I then,\u201d is the most traditionally narrative of the three. It opens with the only surviving audio of Woolf\u2019s voice, and has aspects of \u201cMrs. Dalloway,\u201d with roles including the title character and her husband, Richard, as well as the war-traumatized soldier Septimus. But at times, it\u2019s not clear whether the female protagonist is Clarissa Dalloway or Woolf herself; whether Richard is Woolf\u2019s husband, Leonard; or whether the woman she dances with is Sally or Vita Sackville-West, Woolf\u2019s friend and lover.<\/p>\n

Next is \u201cBecomings,\u201d a conjuring of \u201cOrlando\u201d and its breathless romp through hundreds of years of history. Of the three acts, it is the most recognizably McGregor, with athletic, hyperextending bodies bolting through space. \u201cI wanted to make something,\u201d he said, \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He ends with \u201cTuesday,\u201d a focused treatment of \u201cThe Waves\u201d that includes a recording, by Gillian Anderson, of Woolf\u2019s suicide note, written to her husband, and unfolds as a long farewell. \u201cI see it as a celebration of life,\u201d Teuscher said, \u201ca collective grieving of a life, and an honor and homage to Virginia Woolf.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He was interested in adapting something of Woolf’s, because she experimented with form, and because she was interested in music and dance.