In a rehearsal room at American Ballet Theater’s studios earlier this month, Alessandra Ferri and Roman Zhurbin paused during a pas de deux, waiting to take their next steps. “Where’s Big Ben?” Ferri asked. “We need to hear the bells.”
She was referring to a sound cue, a field recording of the famous bell at the Palace of Westminster in London. It tolls throughout Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway,” coldly marking and making clear the passage of time.
Big Ben plays a similar role in the first part of “Woolf Works,” Wayne McGregor’s full-length ballet that evokes elements of Woolf’s biography and the essence of three novels, including “Mrs. Dalloway.” Having premiered at the Royal Ballet in 2015 to strong reviews, it arrives in New York on Tuesday, as part of Ballet Theater’s Metropolitan Opera House season.
The company’s Met season is known for its story ballets, canonical fare like “Swan Lake” and “Romeo and Juliet.” While contemporary works are also programmed, like Christopher Wheeldon’s “Like Water for Chocolate,” which returns in July, “Woolf Works” is something different: a loosely narrative attempt to capture not just the plots of three novels, but also the polyphony and sensory experiences of Woolf’s writing.
“This piece tells a story in a really modern way,” said Susan Jaffe, the company’s artistic director. “Every time I watch it, I am just thrilled.”
Devon Teuscher, who danced the role of Virginia Woolf when “Woolf Works” had its first Ballet Theater run, in California this spring, said it was also nice for a new work to counter the traditional “man-woman love story” of so many classic ballets. “We’re seeing,” she added, a “queer, beautiful story about a woman.”
McGregor, resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet and the director of his own company, had made two full-length ballets before “Woolf Works”: “L’Anatomie de la Sensation,” based on paintings by Francis Bacon; and “Raven Girl,” created with the writer Audrey Niffenegger. But “Woolf Works” was a breakthrough, he said in an interview.
“I realized, after those two stabs, that I wasn’t interested in doing explicitly descriptive versions of novels,” he said. “I needed space for dance to do what it does well: the ambiguity in the slippery feeling in the body, not just the brain.”
He was interested in adapting something of Woolf’s, because she experimented with form, and because she was interested in music and dance. After considering a “Mrs. Dalloway” ballet, he arrived at a more expansive idea: a triptych that also takes off from “Orlando,” a parodic, gender-fluid fictional biography; and “The Waves,” an experiment in collective storytelling that elegiacally traces the arc of life. Using an original score by Max Richter, McGregor also wove in Woolf’s biography and mental illness, blurring the boundaries between her life and her characters, and building a third act around her suicide.
When “Woolf Works” premiered in 2015, Judith Mackrell wrote in The Guardian that, “in the depth and the scope of its ambitions, and in its haunting meditations on memory, madness and time, it takes both McGregor — and the concept of the three-act ballet — to a brave and entirely exhilarating new place.”
The first act, “I now, I then,” is the most traditionally narrative of the three. It opens with the only surviving audio of Woolf’s voice, and has aspects of “Mrs. Dalloway,” with roles including the title character and her husband, Richard, as well as the war-traumatized soldier Septimus. But at times, it’s not clear whether the female protagonist is Clarissa Dalloway or Woolf herself; whether Richard is Woolf’s husband, Leonard; or whether the woman she dances with is Sally or Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s friend and lover.
Next is “Becomings,” a conjuring of “Orlando” 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. “I wanted to make something,” he said, “that 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.”
He ends with “Tuesday,” a focused treatment of “The Waves” that includes a recording, by Gillian Anderson, of Woolf’s suicide note, written to her husband, and unfolds as a long farewell. “I see it as a celebration of life,” Teuscher said, “a collective grieving of a life, and an honor and homage to Virginia Woolf.”
Audience members, though, don’t need to know anything about Woolf or her novels to follow the ballet, McGregor said. “Of course, if you have read Woolf, you can get deeper connections, and you’ll see things that will become more visible,” he added. “But you don’t have to have read anything before to experience the feeling of the work and the kinds of compositional ideas that we’re talking about.”
Some of those ideas extend beyond choreography. McGregor took a Wagnerian approach to unity across theatrical elements: The score, movement and scenography all work toward a single vision. Sometimes, he said, bodies aren’t even “the primary communicator.”
Vincent Rocca, Ballet Theater’s director of production, said the appearance of the show is so carefully thought through that McGregor specifies the ratio of the height of the dancers to the height of a screen used in “Tuesday.” The staging has placed “completely new” demands on the company, Rocca added, including lasers in Act II that had to fit New York regulations.
At 61, Ferri, a former principal at Ballet Theater and with the Royal Ballet, has continued to dance long past her official retirement in 2007. She has been with “Woolf Works” since its premiere, and is appearing in two Ballet Theater performances, which Jaffe described as “like bringing back a family member.”
McGregor said that when he created the ballet he was thinking about Ferri for the Woolf role. “I’ve always loved the blazing intelligence, acting intelligence, that she is able to bring through physical phrases, with great economy of means of expression.”
As “Woolf Works” has traveled, it has followed the path of Ferri’s career, at the Royal Opera House, to La Scala in Milan and now Ballet Theater. She said it feels as though she has put her whole artistic and personal life into the role.
“It is wonderful to be able to be onstage,” Ferri said, “the woman who I am now, a woman with a past, a woman reflecting on the whole of what life experience is for a human being, going through a range of emotions that are deep and thoughtful. I can let it come to the surface from a very intimate place.”
After nine years, “Woolf Works” is all the more demanding on Ferri’s body. (It was remarkable then that Ferri was dancing it at 52.) But, she said, “that is really just work, and work doesn’t scare me.” It’s possible, though, that her Ballet Theater appearances will be her last: She will soon begin as the artistic director of the Vienna State Ballet, the company that serves that city’s two principal opera houses.
Regardless, other dancers will take up the Virginia Woolf role, she said, because “Woolf Works” is a ballet with staying power. “I believe this is really what classical ballet is today,” she said. “Wayne has really turned a page in storytelling, and what he’s given us is a classic which will last forever.”
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