Virginia Woolf: From Page to Stage

American Ballet Theatre’s annual summer season at the Metropolitan Opera House centers around long-form storytelling. This is when the company trots out the nineteenth-century full-length blockbusters—this season, “Swan Lake” and “Giselle”—as well as newer, less reliably bankable classics like Frederick Ashton’s “Sylvia” (1952) and Christopher Wheeldon’s “The Winter’s Tale” (from 2014, but new to the ABT rep this year). But the troupe is forever on the hunt for contemporary story ballets to flesh out, and freshen up, its programming. This has been an intermittently successful quest. Some of their biggest gambles in recent years haven’t paid off: Helen Pickett’s “Crime and Punishment,” Cathy Marston’s “Jane Eyre,” Alexei Ratmansky’s “Of Love and Rage” (though the last was partly a Covid casualty).

Performance

American Ballet Theatre: “Woolf Works” by Wayne McGregor

Place

The Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York, NY, July 2025

Words

Faye Arthurs

Cassandra Trenary in “Woolf Works” by Wayne McGregor. Photograph by Heli

Rounding out this season was a revival of Wayne McGregor’s 2015 “Woolf Works,” which the company premiered last summer to a lukewarm reception. It apparently sold well enough to re-air a year later, which thrilled me because I’m a massive Virginia Woolf fan and I hadn’t been able to see it until this June. As far as ABT’s narrative ballets go, “Woolf Works” is an outlier—instead of one source text, it is based on three of Woolf’s novels (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves) as well as her biography. Thus, it is conceptually akin to Martha Graham’s one-act, 1943 ballet “Deaths and Entrances,” which was also revived this year, and which concerned the lives of the Brontë sisters as well as loose plot points from several of their books. Both “D&E” and “Woolf Works” were flawed, but both employed innovative strategies of adaptation and provided a much-needed dash of modernity to the story ballet genre.

Conceptually, Woolf and ballet seem compatible to me for many reasons. For starters, they are natural bedfellows in terms of their perceived snobbishness. Despite Woolf’s feminism and bohemian stance on love, she could never shake her snooty reputation. She playfully wrote in her diary in 1931: “I am in danger, indeed, of becoming our leading novelist, & not with the highbrows only.” The charge of snob is leveled at several of the characters in all three of the “Woolf Works” novels: Clarissa Dalloway is called a snob by her youthful crush Sally Seton. Orlando asks herself if she’s a snob. And Scholar Molly Hite has pointed out how the pretentiousness of the six characters in The Waves is implausibly baked in, as they reference Catullus and Shelley and have a handle on the canon of great literature when they are in nursery school.[1]

Just as Woolf can’t escape her learnedness even when she is trying to be a common reader, bodily scholarship is patently evident in ballet. Unlike more pedestrian or gestural forms of dance, a ballerina’s aesthetic is the result of intense practice and repetition, and her body conveys the history of its elite training in every step. And even though education is different from sensibility, people do not tend to separate those strands when they think of Woolf or ballet. Thus, Woolf is perceived as snobbish even while she was advocating for radical political ideas and sexual mores. In a similar vein, the baby ballet student learning how to separate her pinky finger and turn out her feet is mostly connected to ballet’s courtly provenance even though she is equally linked to the impoverished, sexually exploited petits rats de l’opéra. Like Woolf, ballet cannot escape its elitist repute despite countervailing evidence.

Of all Woolf’s novels, Orlando and The Waves seem particularly suited to ballet. Coincidentally, the very history of ballet involves the same multi-century gender flip as Woolf’s title character Orlando, who organically switches from male to female over the course of her three hundred years (and counting, she is middle aged when the novel ends). Ballet was exclusively the realm of men in the courts of sixteenth century—the women’s roles were danced in drag—yet it transformed into an undeniably woman-centric art during in the Romantic era with the advent of pointe shoes and the glorification of the ballerina. (Onstage anyway, men have always pulled the strings backstage. And Orlando sure felt the patriarchally imposed limitations of womanhood post metamorphosis.)

The Waves, which defies literary genres, practically begs for music and dancing. In 1930, Virginia Woolf wrote to the composer Ethel Smyth that she was “writing to a rhythm and not to a plot” as she was working on the manuscript. Music and dance imagery abounds: the dead are “dancing apparitions” who often “leap” out of the characters’ reveries. Woolf frequently describes her characters’ lives as “dust dances.” She also compares the lives of her sextet of central characters to a symphony: “How impossible to order them rightly; to detach each one separately, or to give the effect of the whole—again like music.”

American Ballet Theatre in Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works.” Photograph by Marty Sohl

Much of The Waves’s dance-based language surrounds Jinny, a character partially based on the Ballets Russes ballerina and Bloomsbury group member Lydia Lopokova. (Her dancerly influence can be felt in all the “Woolf Works” novels: Lopokova is shouted out by name in Orlando, and she was likely a partial model for Rezia Smith in Mrs. Dalloway.) Jinny effuses: “My blood must be bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs. My soles tingle, as if wire rings opened and shut in my feet . . . There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing.”

Perhaps the best reason that The Waves is a perfect candidate for a dance is the book’s odd narrative style. Against Woolf’s rhythmic backbone (fabricated through nine descriptive interludes which mark the rise and set of the sun over the course of one day) the characters’ thoughts are written in a bizarre tense: the simple present, which scholar Dorrit Cohn has dubbed “the lyric present.” Hite points out that most novels and speeches operate in the progressive present (as in: the dancers on the stage are moving to the music). However, one could argue that dance only ever exists in the lyric present. The dancers move.

So, to my mind, Woolf and ballet have a natural affinity. Did it pan out? “Why impose my arbitrary design? Why stress this and shape that and twist up little figures like the toys men sell in trays in the street? Why select this, out of all that,—one detail?” So asks the wannabe writer Bernard in The Waves as he ponders how to describe a scene, and so must every adaptor ask themselves in the transposition of a text. I ask it of “Woolf Works” now.

Overall, I think McGregor successfully—and often affectingly—communicated Woolf’s major themes, though he was much less formally daring than the novels he chose as inspiration. And curiously, he often fought against Woolf’s grain—especially in adapting Orlando and The Waves. I would’ve thought that Mrs. Dalloway would have been the hardest novel to translate into dance, as it mostly revolves around nostalgic daydreams. But McGregor’s treatment, titled “I now, I then” was the most faithful adaptation in the triptych. The choice to have two dancers portraying Clarissa Dalloway—Cassandra Trenary was the older, Fangqi Li was the younger at the matinee on June 18th —was terrific. This doubling clearly depicted how Clarissa’s ideas about her youthful encounters had altered over time. Where the young Clarissa feels elation and then horror when her friend Sally Seton kisses her (Li tensed up as Kanon Kimura, as Sally, leaned in), the older Clarissa feels nothing but love for her girlhood crush and lost youth (Trenary tenderly intercepted Kimura’s lips with her own). The dancers in this time-traveling love triangle were excellent, though Trenary looked far too young to be the 52-year-old Clarissa/Woolf composite. (The role was made for the great former ABT ballerina-actress Alessandra Ferri, who was incidentally 52 at the ballet’s premiere. She also danced it with ABT last summer at age 61.)

Septimus’s section was also expertly rendered. Calvin Royal III was wonderful as the wiry, haunted WWI veteran who eventually takes his own life. In the novel, he is tormented by hallucinations of Evans (a comrade who was killed in battle) as he tries but fails to focus on his wife Rezia in the present. McGregor prudently made Evans a physical presence—beautifully danced by Patrick Frenette—who engaged in a series of anguished pas de deux with Royal. This is where dance shone brightest as a medium. The doctors in Dalloway consider Septimus’s PTSD to be a purely mental torment, but his grief undeniably afflicts him physically, and it was brilliant to have Frenette manipulate and hound Royal in the flesh. It was also smart to give Trenary an unsettling pas de deux with Royal, to depict how Clarissa processes the news of Septimus’s death—it is deeply felt—and how Woolf herself empathized with his suicidal ideation.

The final section of “I now, I then” featured the quintet of characters pertinent to Clarissa’s past (her doubled self, Sally, also Roman Zhurbin as Clarissa’s husband Richard and Herman Cornejo as her former beau Peter) in a lovely group dance. Sometimes they walked metronomically to symbolize the passing of hours so prevalent in the text, at other times they subdivided into vignettes or gathered in harmonious tableaux. But in the poignant final moments, Trenary was left alone, absorbed in memory. Throughout this section, Ciguë’s set design, featuring three giant, rotating wood frames, masterfully evoked the novel’s multiple readings of events—underscoring how incidents can be framed in myriad ways, depending on by whom and, most importantly, when.

“Becomings,” McGregor’s treatment of Orlando, and “Tuesday,” his take on The Waves, were less faithfully representative of their source material, for better and for worse. Curiously, McGregor reversed their structures. “Becomings” was an ensemble affair, with no discernable characters, even though Orlando is an in-depth study of its title character. “Tuesday,” conversely, revolved around Trenary as Woolf even though The Waves is groundbreaking for having no central character—its six soliloquists are equally weighted. Furthermore, The Waves concerns the death of an offstage character, Percival (based partly on Woolf’s brother Thoby who died of typhoid as a young adult), as its organizing principle—much like the gathering of friends in the film The Big Chill. But in “Tuesday,” McGregor chose to ignore The Waves’s personages entirely and instead depict Woolf’s suicide by drowning onstage.

Chloe Misseldine and Calvin Royal III in Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works.” Photograph by Marty Sohl

Also odd: Orlando is a love letter, written for and dedicated to Woolf’s paramour Vita Sackville-West (though both were married to men). Photos of Sackville-West were incorporated into the text of the novel, and it was so overtly gushy that her mother begged the editor of The Observer not to review the book. Yet McGregor’s “Becomings” was devoid of emotion. The dancers were darkly lit and further obscured by smoke and lasers (the production design was by We Not I, Lucy Carter did the lighting). The steps were sexy but detachedly performed. For a ballet based on a heated lesbian affair, it was ironic that the best passage was an abstract, heterosexual pas de deux (fabulously performed by Chloe Misseldine and Royal). McGregor apparently took the gynomorphic/time-traveling aspects of Orlando as license to create a borderline sci-fi realm of exaggerated lines and contemporary technique. I enjoyed this fierce club scene for a bit, but the dance dragged. Woolf described Orlando in her diary as “gay & quick reading,” but “Becomings” became a lugubrious slog. Except for the gender-bending period costumes by Moritz Junge, the playful spirit of Orlando was lost.

McGregor’s deviations from Woolf’s text worked better in “Tuesday.” Eliding The Waves’s characters and centering the piece on Woolf’s own death was bold, but McGregor sold it. He pulled it off even though the final passage in The Waves is Bernard’s defiant raging against death despite his middle-aged malaise. But McGregor was right to assume that this battle cry is a little disingenuous, rather like when Kurt Cobain sang “I swear that I don’t have a gun” in “Come as You Are.” For, Woolf’s darkness is eminent in all three of these novels and beyond. Clarissa, Septimus, Orlando, and The Waves characters are obsessed with death—often watery death, as when Septimus murmurs “Now we will kill ourselves” as he longingly eyes the river in Mrs. Dalloway, much to the horror of his wife Rezia. Rhoda also kills herself in The Waves, and though it is ultimately unclear how, she fantasizes: “We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling me over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”

Woolf’s novels are threaded with wave imagery, and McGregor aptly wove undulating moves into all three sections of “Woolf Works” too. I loved a flat-footed lean back in attitude front in “I now, I then” that was echoed by both Clarissas and Sally. They rocked back and forth in a canon like the tides. There was also a pike lift that dipped like a happy dolphin, executed by Clarissa and Richard as well as Clarissa and Peter. It was then echoed by Trenary and Cornejo in “Becomings.” Indeed, there were plunging, rolling spines all through “Becomings.” And in every section, McGregor featured plashing lower legs like mermaid tails, with the dances’ gorgeously arched feet calling to mind Woolf’s refrain of a “fin in a waste of waters” in The Waves.

McGregor utilized the large corps de ballet in “Tuesday” like a roiling sea. Likewise, in this section Max Richter’s score was ingeniously constructed around rippling, sonic waves. McGregor’s choice to commission Richter for this ballet was one of his best coups. For, like Woolf, Richter has been obsessed with memory, nature cycles, and the passage of time for the whole of his career (a shortlist of his works includes “Memoryhouse,” “Songs from Before,” and “On the Nature of Daylight”—which could be a subtitle for The Waves). Richter’s score also featured voiceover, but not from The Waves. The actress Gillian Anderson vividly read Woolf’s suicide letter, firmly establishing McGregor’s focus on Woolf’s personal life in “Becomings.”

Ocean imagery whirled around Trenary as Woolf, who, clad in a sheer black slip dress, interacted with important figures in her life as they drifted in and out. Cornejo returned as her husband Leonard for two fluid pas de deux. In the closing one, he laid Trenary gently down under the large video screen of slow-motion waves (designed by Ravi Deepres). Isabella Boylston also appeared with children from the ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School to represent the starkly different, maternal path taken by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell.

Trenary was luminous in “Tuesday,” and her own imminent departure from ABT gave this section even more weight. She is to join the Vienna State Opera Ballet, which now happens to be under the directorship of the original “Woolf Works” Woolf, Alessandra Ferri. Like a latter-day Ferri, Trenary is a gifted actress; her absence will be felt in ABT’s narratively inclined summer seasons. It was sad to think that this was the end of Trenary’s fruitful partnership with Cornejo as well. When Trenary sat and untied her pointe shoes onstage it was heavy—even moreso than that final, submerged repose. It symbolized the small death that all ballerinas must face, even if, like Ferri, they don’t face it until very late. Here, McGregor hit upon the perfect gesture to broadcast this ballerina-Woolf’s readiness to cast off her mortality. Though Trenary’s back was towards the audience as she unlaced her ribbons, I imagined the soft falling of those rippling, satiny waves too.

However, it was simultaneously exciting to think of the new partnership Trenary will forge with Ferri. This development cast “Tuesday” in a much more hopeful light than it wanted to operate, suggesting auspicious cycles of mentorship and artistic renewal. And yet, this emotional tug-of-war surrounding Trenary’s future might have been the most Woolfian thing of all. At this serendipitous June performance, the lives of multiple characters, creators, and performers—Clarissa and Woolf, McGregor and Richter, Ferri and Trenary—churned and swirled in symphonic splendor, just like the characters in The Waves.

The moment when Trenary removed her second skin-like, yet restrictive, footwear—oh, the freedom of bare feet!—the act communicated some glimmer of the resignation and counterintuitive liberation Woolf must have felt when she walked into the River Ouse in March of 1941. As this passage from the beginning of Dalloway attests, Woolf had been dancing around the idea for some time.

So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying ‘that is all’ more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.”

*For the incomparable Woolf scholar Anne Fernald, with whom I was fortunate enough to study.

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.

footnotes

Hite, Molly. Introduction. The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, Harcourt, 2006, pp. xxv-lxvii.

comments

Rachel Howard 7月 25, 2025

Thank you for your depth of engagement and your brilliance.

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