It’s 40 years since Alessandra Ferri became a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, and at 59, she is still holding the stage, playing Virginia Woolf in Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works. This performance isn’t just about marvelling at Ferri’s abilities, long after most dancers have retired, but it’s hard not to. There she is being tossed through the air like a 20-year-old, legs making delicate sketches in the sky, dancing on pointe, light as ever. But the added dimension is that it’s no effort for her to be convincing as an older woman looking back on the accumulation of years – she’s the same age Woolf was when she died – and there’s real emotional power in that.
Ferri isn’t the only dancer to play the central character in Woolf Works this season, but it’s a role the choreographer made for her in 2015, and it’s wonderful to see her dance it again. The piece opens with Ferri/Woolf alone on stage, pensive, tentative, a woman weighed down by thoughts. But as she retreats into memories of youth, and subsumes herself into the character of Clarissa Dalloway, that weight visibly falls away, a flurry of freedom rushing across the stage.
There’s something of the gesamtkunstwerk about McGregor’s ambitious production: dance, music (Max Richter), lighting (Lucy Carter), projections (Ravi Deepres), text (Uzma Hameed is dramaturg) all feeding equally into the total effect. The biggest ambition is the way he aims to explode the idea of the traditional three-act ballet, much in the way modernist writers like Woolf wanted to shed the conventions of the novel. So it is out with the grand ballet narrative, the dancers reenacting a story from the page, and in with trying to get inside a writer’s mindset, to apply their ideas to the creation of the dance itself.
The result is deeply considered and full of rich ideas and imagery, as well as the inevitable confusions and missed connections that come with experimental form (Hameed’s programme notes and synopsis are well worth reading). The show is loosely based on three novels, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves, with Woolf’s life woven in between. The Orlando section goes full-on sci-fi, time-travelling from Elizabethan ruffs to androgynous undergarments. In more frenetic scenes there’s an android nature to the dancers, with constant repetitions as if they’re testing their build quality. Pointe shoes break through laser beams like comets streaking through the air. And who doesn’t love a laser beam? But the strongest parts of this show are the smaller, human moments.
Calvin Richardson has the tall order of dancing Septimus Smith (from Mrs Dalloway), originally created by Edward Watson. He makes the right shapes, but can’t match Watson’s haunted dislocation in evoking the shell-shocked soldier. Yet in the duet with his wartime comrade/lover (Joseph Sissens) their continual supporting, catching and holding of each other is charged and resonant. Richter’s music grows in endless swells that threaten to engulf the stage, much like the hypnotic waves projected in the final act, entitled Tuesday (which was the heading on Woolf’s suicide note), but those final scenes have a welcome focus and simplicity that allows Ferri to bring all eyes back to the author herself at the centre of the stage.
• At the Royal Opera House, London, until 23 March.
