Woolf Works is a beauty – a ballet of ravishing feeling and radical intellectual intent. When it premiered at the Royal Ballet in 2015, it felt like a breakthrough for its choreographer, Wayne McGregor. Now, returning for only its 19th performance, it appears like a classic – one of those rare moments when form and content in dance are reshaped and repurposed.
At its centre stands Alessandra Ferri, who came back to both the stage and the Royal Ballet to create the role of Virginia Woolf. Now almost 60 (and sharing the role at other performances with Natalia Osipova and Marianela Nuñez), she lends it even more depth. It’s her grave, graceful presence, full of tremulous hope and dragging, drowning sorrow, that anchors the piece.
Woolf Works’ deep cleverness is contained in its structure, which makes each of its three acts reflect a different novel. It opens with I now, I then, based on Mrs Dalloway, with Ferri literally walking forward into Woolf’s words, spoken by the author herself and flooding down a screen. The act that unfolds continues that sense of Woolf in the midst of her own imagination by conflating her with the character of Clarissa Dalloway, surrounded by her memories of her youth and haunted by the war veteran Septimus Smith.
In a flow of dreamlike groupings, McGregor establishes patterns of movement that recur throughout the whole work – images of standing on the brink of things, either in excitement or fear; moments of diving into water; a repeated gesture where Ferri delicately raises her arms across her face, as if warding off danger or simply saying goodbye.
These steps mean that even in the second act – Becoming, based on Orlando – when the Woolf figure is absent from the whizz and whirr of dancers swirling across the stage in a thrilling pageant of fluid time travel, she is a continued presence. By the concluding section, Tuesday, drawn from The Waves, she is centre stage once more.
To a recording of the actor Gillian Anderson reading Woolf’s suicide note, full of the writer’s fear of madness and her love for her husband Leonard, Ferri and William Bracewell perform a duet of gentle tenderness. Ferri then walks away until she is subsumed in a flood of dancers who engulf her in eddying movements that mirror the film of the sea playing above their heads.
What’s astonishing about Woolf Works is how many elements McGregor throws into the mix, shaping them all to his purpose: Max Richter’s score, which perfectly captures the changing moods; designs by the architectural practices Ciguë and We Not I; Lucy Carter’s vividly evocative lighting; Ravid Deepres’s video; Chris Eker’s elegant sound design; and Uzma Hameed’s sophisticated dramaturgy.
All allow the dance to embody a complex meditation on time, memory and death in ways as fragmentary and haunting as Woolf’s own writing. The dancers rise to its challenges with commitment and abandon, whether it’s Calvin Richardson mining the agony of Septimus, or Joseph Sissens, Fumi Kaneko and Francesca Hayward catching the tilt and wildness in Orlando’s changing shapes, or Bracewell’s great grace and intensity. Above all there is Ferri, grounding the work in truth.
