Dancing Virginia Woolf Back to Life: 'Woolf Works' as Critical and Artistic Recycling

First staged at the Royal Opera House on 12 May 2012, choreographed by Wayne McGregor and starring international artists like the Italian étoile Alessandra Ferri, the ballet Woolf Works is a true work of ‘recycling’, as it converts Woolf’s novels – namely Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves – into something else. By interpreting the spaces on stage and letting the bodies of dancers speak for themselves, the choreographer Wayne McGregor manages to recreate Woolf’s free indirect speech and stream of consciousness through choreographies and dance steps, so much so that the public can almost ‘hear’ the voices of the bodies on stage intertwining like in Mrs Dalloway and The Waves. In the first part of the triptyque, I now I then, for instance, Mrs Dalloway – interpreted by Alessandra Ferri – dances the same steps of Beatriz Stix-Brunell, interpreting Clarissa in the past, but a measure behind, thus embodying the idea of Clarissa Dalloway remembering herself in the past. In the second part, Becoming, gender fluidity is represented by inverting the roles of dancers in the pas-de-deux, or leaving soubresaut and temps levé to men and more masculine jumps like grand jeté and tour jeté to women. Finally, the third and last part, Tuesday, is built on the shape and rhythm of waves: the focus here is no longer on technique, as in Becoming, but on style, with music and dancers’ port de bras reproducing the sinusoidal shape of waves. Music as well is not merely an equivalent of the rhythm of Woolf’s prose, on the contrary the renowned West German-born British composer Max Richter tries to set to music the mental processes which led Woolf to write her novels. To compose Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works Richter studied her novels, her essays and her diaries, trying to understand her most intimate writing processes. Thanks to its peculiar reuse of Woolf’s novels, to Richter’s work on music, and to McGregor’s work on bodies, Woolf Works can thus be regarded as both a creative, artistic recycling of Woolf and as a work of criticism on the British writer.