Sneak Peek at The Royal Ballet's Woolf Works
This
week, The Royal Ballet will premiere Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works, a full-length ballet inspired by the work of modernist writer Virginia Woolf. Paired with a new score by Max Richter, Woolf Works is McGregor’s first full-length piece for the Royal, and it is ambitious.
Woolf hedged a new mode of realism with her beloved texts. This bold, genre-transcendent quality of her work seems to be what has attracted McGregor. Though
Woolf Works
will focus on three of her novels,
The Waves
,
Mrs. Dalloway
and
Orlando
, along with some of her autobiographical work, McGregor is generally interested in the way “the world keeps shifting” in her writing style. It’s true – perspective shifts constantly in Woolf’s works, destabilizing concepts of time, space and narrator. We got a glimpse of how this will translate to movement in rehearsal footage released earlier this week. Alessandra Ferri and Federico Bonelli capture the fluidity of Woolf’s writing in a duet inspired by
The Waves
, and Edward Watson embodies the disruptive quality of her narrative style in a fast-paced solo. (Check out a run of each section in the last four minutes of each video!)