Choreographing Shakespeare

Dance Adaptations of the Plays and Poems

Elizabeth Klett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351238663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Choreographing Shakespeare presents a hitherto unexplored history of the choreographers and performers who have created dance adaptations of Shakespeare.

This book investigates forty dance works in genres such as ballet, modern dance, and hip-hop, produced between 1940 and 2016 by choreographers in Britain, America, and Europe, all of which use Shakespeare's plays and Sonnets as their source material. By combining scholarly analysis of these productions with practice-based conversations from six contemporary choreographers, Klett offers both breadth of coverage and in-depth analysis of how Shakespeare's poetic language is translated into the usually wordless medium of dance, and shows exactly how these dance adaptations move beyond the Shakespearean texts to engage with musical and choreographic influences.

Ideal for students of Shakespeare and Dance Studies, Choreographing Shakespeare explores how dance adaptations strive to design legible and intelligible stories, while ultimately celebrating the beauty of pure movement.

1

Choreographing Gender, Power, and Desire in Dance Adaptations of the Comedies

Shakespeare’s comedies nearly always deal with “wooing and wedding”: the process of courtship, culminating in marriage, often of more than one couple, in the final act. Dancing is regularly involved in both stages of the couples’ relationships. This can be enacted literally, as in Much Ado About Nothing, which includes a dance in Act 2 that highlights the fraught process of wooing, and concludes with another dance that takes place (somewhat unusually) before the lovers are married. Shakespeare also uses dance figuratively: through, for example, the opening conversation between Rosaline and Berowne in Love’s Labor’s Lost, who have previously danced with each other, but who decline to repeat the experience, preferring to engage in a verbal dance of wit instead. In Shakespeare’s time, as Alan Brissenden has noted, dance was familiar as “a symbol of harmony and concord,” which made it particularly appropriate for use in the comedies (3). Although comic plays might dramatize disorder through such devices as misunderstanding, disguise, familial conflict, and unrequited love, they move away from chaos toward harmonious resolution. Brissenden finds that dance therefore communicates “the essential basis of [Shakespeare’s] plays,” since it symbolically represents “the resolution of disorder” (111). The dances that we find in Shakespeare’s comedies are not only entertaining; they have a significant narrative and symbolic function.

Given the prominence of dance as a metaphor and embodied practice within the comedies, a number of them have been successfully adapted for the dance stage. This chapter focuses on dance versions of four comedies – As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night – which have proven most popular with choreographers. Of these four, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been the most commonly adapted and successfully translated into dance; the tradition of choreographing the Dream dates back to the nineteenth century, and is still very much alive in the twenty-first century. The play includes more dances than any other Shakespeare play, and the dramatist uses the image of dancing “to comment on and affect the major pattern of order and disorder in the action” (Brissenden 41). I analyze four of the most influential choreographic versions, by George Balanchine (1962), Frederick Ashton (1964), John Neumeier (1977), and Jean-Christophe Maillot (2005). The Taming of the Shrew has also proven popular with choreographers, despite the fact that the play includes no actual dances and very few references to dance. John Cranko’s 1969 ballet version has been influential and often staged, and perhaps partly accounts for why choreographers – such as Louis Falco (1980) and Stephen Mills (2004) – continue to create new dance versions. As You Like It and Twelfth Night have each been adapted for dance several times. Neumeier has choreographed ballet versions of both plays (in 1985 and 1996, respectively), and this chapter compares his As You Like It with Hannah Bontrager’s recent “Wild West” adaptation (2011).

I approach these dance works through the lens of the pas de deux: the “duet form” which “has been the centerpiece of ballets over the centuries” (Bales 176), and which is used by choreographers working in a variety of dance genres. The pas de deux is very commonly employed in narrative pieces that focus on love in all its forms. It can be choreographed to express the ecstasy of first love and the whirlwind of desire, as well as the more negative aspects of romantic relationships, such as jealousy, competition, and discord. As Julie Sanders writes, “the pas de deux is a particularly striking expression of … spatial dynamics … of nearness and distance” between characters (65). In classical ballets from the nineteenth century, the pas de deux is often the narrative and choreographic culmination of the romantic plot. In Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890), for example, the entire third act is devoted to celebrating Princess Aurora’s wedding, and concludes with a grand pas de deux: “a virtuoso dance for the ballerina and her partner” (Garafola 159). Laura Jacobs elaborates: “The grand pas is the high point of a ballet, the crest of its momentum, and it is here that great partnerships are made manifest” (71). Due to the fact that the comedies are primarily focused on the wooing and wedding of heterosexual couples, a close reading of choreographers’ stagings of the pas de deux between these couples will illuminate how the plays become re-envisioned for dance. In As You Like It, Neumeier and Bontrager use the pas de deux to create expansive opportunities for two couples – Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver – to interact that are not available in the text. Similarly, Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream adds a non-textual pas de deux that celebrates marital love in his second act, cutting duets between characters – such as Titania and Oberon and the four human lovers – that could be drawn from events in the play. Ashton, Neumeier, and Maillot, by contrast, explore the conflict and reconciliation between Titania and Oberon as a central concern in their ballet adaptations, culminating in three different pas de deux that all nonetheless undercut the potential misogyny of Shakespeare’s play. The dance of male dominance and female submission between Katherine and Petruccio is likewise mitigated and softened through a series of pas de deux in ballet versions of The Taming of the Shrew by Cranko and Mills. Only Falco reveals the triumph of patriarchy in his modern dance version, but in a manner that is clearly critical of Shakespeare’s text. Finally, I turn to Neumeier’s Vivaldi, or What You Will to analyze same-sex pas de deux between Viola and Olivia, and Sebastian and Antonio, arguing that to a certain extent, these duets reframe the ways in which desire is visualized on the dance stage.

Apart from the relatively recent advent of the same-sex duet, the history of the pas de deux has been overwhelmingly heterosexual, given that they tend to be danced by a man and a woman. Many dance critics have read the pas de deux as an inherently patriarchal dance form, particularly in ballet. As Christy Adair argues, when men and women dance together, the woman “is displayed [by the man] to be looked at, reinforcing ‘feminine’ passivity which does not have the status of active ‘masculine’ assertiveness” (116). Daniel Nagrin agrees that “men are defined as supporters, carriers, and ingenious benders of the bodies of lithe women, and women are the passive clay … of the pas de deux” (93). Judith Lynne Hanna develops this argument at greater length:

[In] the heterosexual pas de deux … the man supports, manipulates, and often conquers the woman … [T]‌he classical pas de deux is an overstatement of a life situation where man, as gallant gentleman, helps woman and voluntarily endures hardship for her comfort. She, through her submissiveness, leads him to virtuosity … The woman “looks up” to the man, rises en pointe to meet him … Unable to stand alone, the male supports or assists her.

Hanna 166–168

Hanna’s description of the ways in which the pas de deux appears to reinforce patriarchal gender roles corresponds to the conclusions of many of Shakespeare’s comedies, which likewise seem to endorse compulsory heterosexuality and male dominance. Katherine’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew directly echoes the “ideal of romantic love” that Hanna finds inscribed in the pas de deux:

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance commits his body

To painful labor both by sea and land …

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,

Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,

But that our soft conditions and our hearts

Should well agree with our external parts?

Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
5.2.150–153, 169–172

Katherine’s very public submission to Petruccio, enacted in front of her father and other male community members, suggests the degree to which, as Louis Montrose argues, “the ultimately harmonious marital unions” in Shakespeare’s comedies are often “achieved or imposed only at the end of an agonistic dramatic process, in which masculine authority over the unruly woman is reasserted by means of degradation and coercion” (111–112). If we accept that Shakespeare’s comedies usually end with the affirmation of patriarchal power through heterosexual marriage, the traditional pas de deux, in which a passive female body is held up, displayed, and dominated by a strong, assertive male body would be the perfect dance equivalent of the play’s concluding nuptials.

However, as Shakespeare scholars and dance critics have pointed out, this is too simplistic an interpretation of either form. As I will argue, neither Shakespearean comedy nor dance adaptations of those comedies can be read as unproblematically endorsing male supremacy. As Penny Gay notes in her study of gender in performances of the comedies, “the peculiar materiality of drama, its embodiment, is always potentially disruptive of the conservatism of social theory … moving bodies are, first and last, the producers of the texts of drama” (3). Further, Shakespeare’s comedies often include an unruly heroine who, even when she capitulates to marriage at the end, “has spent much of the play flouting patriarchal protocols” (178), making her absorption into the community potentially incomplete, or even threatening. It is similarly impossible to dismiss the female dancers who embody these roles as merely enforcing the stereotype of female passivity. Sally Banes argues that:

the central performers in both ballet and modern dance are young women at the peak of their powers as dancers. And on stage their job is to move – to be active … the physical prowess of the dancer performing the role may saturate it with agency. Thus, even dances with misogynist narratives or patriarchal themes tend to depict women as active and vital.

Banes 6, 9

The female dancer can be read as a figure who combines strength and softness simultaneously, undercutting the gender binary: “we may see that the sylph has wings, but we also know that she has to have legs of steel … however ethereal she may look” (Carter 94). In the pas de deux, the man and woman rely on each other’s sheer physical strength and balance in order to perform a wide range of choreographic lifts, turns, holds, poses, and floor work. Even in the most seemingly “traditional” of movements – such as when a male dancer lifts a female dancer into the air and holds her above his head – it is not only his muscles but also hers that make it possible.

This chapter looks at an array of pas de deux between couples drawn from Shakespeare’s comedies to analyze the gendered implications of the physical relationships created between these characters. More often than not, as I will show, the choreographers challenge and even undo the binary of the active male and passive female, revealing through movement that it is impossible to permanently fix these gendered characteristics on either body. This is particularly true in dance adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Taming of the Shrew, the more potentially patriarchal of the plays considered here. For instance, when analyzing the development of the Dream ballets from Balanchine to Maillot, moving from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, we see a tendency to liberate Titania from the confines of Shakespeare’s text, making her into an erotically fluid character through the evolution of her pas de deux with Bottom and Oberon. Although it is possible to achieve this characterization in a stage performance of Shakespeare’s play, this analysis will show how interrogations of gender and power can be manifested through choreography and the agency of the dancing body.

This chapter further argues that even when a pas de deux has a clear textual referent in one of the plays, this does not mean the text is the primary frame of reference through which we can read and understand the dance adaptation. As Ray Miller puts it, the interplay between choreography and literature is “not meant to be a one-for-one correlation, but rather ‘a response’ of one artist to another’s creation, across generations and media” (306). The pas de deux is first and foremost a dance convention, a visual and kinesthetic device that demands we focus attention on the bodies and movements of the two dancers that perform it. Given the long-standing dance tradition of the pas de deux form, these duets are in dialogue with other historical examples, as well as with each other. Further, musical and danced legacies outside of the pas de deux are significant sources of inspiration for the choreographers considered in this chapter. Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, is an important influence for all four adaptations, even though most combine it with other musical sources. Scott Joplin’s American ragtime provides the fundamental basis for Falco’s revision of The Taming of the Shrew, just as Vivaldi constitutes the primary inspiration for Neumeier’s What You Will. We can also see the influence of dance traditions on Ashton’s The Dream, which includes movement inspired by the Romantic ballet, and on Bontrager’s As You Like It, which engages with the work of Agnes de Mille. Further, I contend that in certain cases these choreographers are responding to each other’s work, as we can see in particular with the design and movement choices made by Neumeier and Maillot, whose Dreams take a darker approach to the story than their predecessors. I also read Falco’s Kate’s Rag as a riposte to Cranko’s Shrew, indicating that dance legacies are often more important for choreographers than the textual source material. The work of all these choreographers creates visual “alternative histories,” as Laura Levine argues, that are detached from textuality, challenging the oft-presumed supremacy of Shakespeare and his plays (120).

Transcending textuality in Pas de Deux from As You Like It

Neumeier and Bontrager both endeavor to make their ballet versions of As You Like It legible and intelligible for their audiences; however, they also transcend Shakespeare’s text in ways that allow them to explore the characters through movement, particularly through the pas de deux. Interestingly, both choreographers provide a narrator who speaks to the audience, neither of whom use Shakespeare’s language. In Neumeier’s work, created for the Hamburg Ballet, Jaques is an interlocutor and narrator, appearing onstage at the top of the show dressed in contemporary clothing, indicating that he stands outside the action. He speaks directly to the audience, introducing each of the ten “themes” that structures the ballet, and quoting fragments of poetry by Ovid and Karl Krolow. Some of the themes he references are designed to advance the narrative – such as number three, “escape and disguise,” and number seven, “all the bad guys turn good” – while others, such as “nature” (number one) and “time” (number nine), are more abstract. Bontrager is also clearly concerned with communicating the plot of her ballet to a certain degree: her narrator is Touchstone, whose rugged cowboy demeanor and clothing reflects the piece’s subtitle and setting, A Wild West Ballet. Touchstone intervenes periodically, much as Jaques does in Neumeier’s version, to keep the audience updated on the narrative. For example, after Rosie (Rosalind) and Lando (Orlando) meet and dance a pas de deux early in the action, Touchstone swaggers on, fingers hooked in the belt loops of his jeans and his cowboy hat set back on his head, to tell the audience in a slow, gravelly voice that “Rosie and Lando have fallen into strong liking, the thunderbolt of love flashing in their eyes.” Although Neumeier and Bontrager include nearly all of the central characters from Shakespeare’s play, as well as the main events from the narrative, they nonetheless both use non-Shakespearean textual insertions to ensure that their audiences can follow the action.

Both c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Choreographing Gender, Power, and Desire in Dance Adaptations of the Comedies
• 2 Creating and Transcending Traditions in Dance Versions of Romeo and Juliet
• 3 Staging Psychological Trauma in Dance Adaptations of the Tragedies
• 4 My Heart Dances: Choreographing light and dark in the late romances
• 5 Poetry in Motion: Dancing the sonnets
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Production details
• Appendix B: Glossary of dance terms
• Index