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Low Tide

Noé Soulier’s “The Waves” ran for two nights at the Joyce Theater in early March as part of the Dance Reflections Festival by Van Cleef & Arpels. Coincidentally, it was the second work I’ve seen this year based on Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking 1931 novel of the same name, after Wayne McGregor’s 2015 “Woolf Works” was revived by the American Ballet Theater in June. The Waves is Woolf’s most experimental work, so it is wide open in terms of translation into other mediums. The three act “Woolf Works” employed numerous approaches. McGregor utilized both classical ballet and contemporary styles, pointe shoes and bare feet. His dancers wore a range of tutus, period dresses, veils, simple shifts and trunks, Elizabethan collars, and military epaulets. He mixed hand-crafted wooden sets with futuristic lasers and film projections. He was covering three different Woolf novels, and his tactics didn’t always succeed, but at least he nodded to Woolf’s oceans of literary references and techniques. Curiously, Soulier’s interpretation was based largely on negation, compressing Woolf’s swells of feeling and formal daring into one shallow tidepool.

Performance

Noé Soulier’s “The Waves”

Place

Dance Reflections Festival by Van Cleef & Arpels, The Joyce Theater, New York, NY, March 4, 2026

Words

Faye Arthurs

Stephanie Amurao and Nans Pierson in “The Waves” by Noé Soulier. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Soulier’s main preoccupation was arrested motion. In other words, anti-waves. The cast engaged in pulled punches and retracted kicks. They torqued as if they were throwing javelins but didn’t release them. Their perambulation was often interrupted by awkward stepping over imaginary obstacles.  In the best passage, an intertwined duet for Stephanie Amurao and Nans Pierson, the dancers rolled across the floor like a tumbleweed—except that they froze at the most inopportune times in terms of momentum.     

The music reflected this thesis of jagged interruption. The highlight of the piece was the onstage drumming by Tom de Cock and Gerrit Nulens, who, alongside Soulier, also composed the score. Woolf wrote that she was “writing to a rhythm and not to a plot” for this novel, so drums are a fine choice of instrumentation. But where I expected cascading drumrolls and steady thumping, the beats in “The Waves” largely resisted cadence. Instead of a tidelike constant, de Cock and Nulens’ erratic, staccato lines made for choppy waters. This upending of expectations was delightful, as was the range of sonorities; there were woodblock trills, engine vrooms, knocks, clicks, rattling, dinging, and soft thuds. There were no waves, but there was still some beachy fun to be had: it was neat how wire jazz brushes on a snare approximated sandy sounds.  

In “Woolf Works,” conversely, composer Max Richter went to great lengths to convey a rolling soundscape, so much so that even on paper, the score was visually made up of sine curves. Interestingly, though the music for Soulier’s “Waves” was largely arrhythmic, the two drummers were often more physically synced up than the dancers. Apparently, you don’t need undulating arpeggios to make musicians enact the same choreography. Nulens and de Cock hit different types of drums and tones, yet they often hovered at the side of the stage over their sticks and mallets in the same catlike manner. In contrast, the six dancers were never in unison, though they danced all together often. Every now and then two would perform the same sequence at the same time, but no motifs rippled through the whole group.      

Meleat Fredriksson in “The Waves” by Noé Soulier. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Meleat Fredriksson in “The Waves” by Noé Soulier. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Every section operated as a non-sequitur: the stop-motion duet, the parallel-play group dances, and a strangely flat, red-lit rave vignette. There were also a few disconnected solos in which the dancers spoke passages from The Waves and/or performed hyper-specific, often juvenile, gestures. Some yanked at their cheeks—or split their butt cheeks—rather like Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura, but without any of his dazzling energy or comedic timing. And their Waves quotes felt shoehorned in. It did not seem like Soulier was engaging with Woolf’s text so much as paying lip service to it. 

In the program notes, Soulier wrote: “The gestures on which we are working are always incomplete, they point to something beyond themselves, and I have the feeling that this incompleteness can allow them to recall these complex experiences associated with movements….I do not mean that the spectator will be reminded of a specific episode of his life, but that the specific character of the gestures created by referring to another movement can activate his own bodily memory with all its physical and psychological ramifications. The incompleteness of the gestures thus aims to set in motion the physical history of the viewer.” That’s a wordy mess but a fine project, and not an uncommon one in contemporary and neoclassical dance. An excellent recent example of incomplete gestures summoning deep emotional reserves can be found in Pam Tanowitz’s “Law of Mosaics,” made for the New York City Ballet in 2024. Tanowitz expertly wielded fragmented and detached story ballet mime to prompt profound feeling.    

Nancy Goldner explains a similar process in her brilliant analysis of the narrative impenetrability of Balanchine’s masterpiece “Serenade.”  In that ballet, the dancers engage in overtly specific storytelling, though it is ultimately unclear what the overarching narrative is; and the mystery contributes to a more personal and emotional experience for the audience. Goldner looked to literature for analogs and found one in Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of “strategic opacity.” Goldner quoted Greenblatt on how Shakespeare, in his later plays, “could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element.”  

Stephanie Amurao in “The Waves” by Noé Soulier. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Stephanie Amurao in “The Waves” by Noé Soulier. Photograph by Steven Pisano

Soulier claims to be working in the same withholding vein. Don’t give people the whole move, or the whole story, so that they meaningfully connect the dots with some of their own experiences. But I’m afraid he went too far in his obfuscation, for his “Waves” roused little audience engagement. Nobody clapped in between numbers; nobody laughed at the mugging. Other than the anti-waves idea, he wasn’t giving us a lot to think about or latch our personal histories onto. Balanchine incorporated imagery from Greek myths, Giselle, Christian archetypes, Modern dance, and Italian Renaissance sculpture to elicit powerful sentiment in “Serenade” despite its murky plotline. Just as in The Waves, Woolf referenced Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Dryden, Catullus, Plato and Dostoevsky to give her radical structure more meaning and cohesion. 

The drumming in Soulier’s “Waves” explored multiple techniques and traditions, but the dancing vocabulary was basic and repetitive. Soulier stuck to a sort of mildly aerobic yoga, with a few stationary tilts and formless jumps. There were backbend hinges to the floor as in Martha Graham technique, but they were done tepidly, without any of Graham’s drama or force. And there were more off-kilter handstands than at my five-year-old’s gymnastics class. Music aside, the dancing and ideas in Soulier’s “Waves” were wishy-washy. 

Faye Arthurs

Faye Arthurs is a former ballet dancer with New York City Ballet. She chronicled her time as a professional dancer in her blog Thoughts from the Paint. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Fordham University. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their sons.

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