Wuthering Heights in all its forms

With one small exception today all news items are connected to Wuthering Heights.

Trespass by Valerie Martin is again reviewed by two websites: Salon.com and Chronogram, both sites highlight Chloe's work illustrating Wuthering Heights.

icWales opens an article on a football match with this hilarious start:

There was enough passion, misunderstanding and ultimate disappointment in this match to send brooding lover Heathcliff wailing and gnashing his teeth over the nearby Yorkshire moors. (Steve Tucker)

Kathy Grossman reviews the Wuthering Heights ballet in Paris. She quotes Belarbi - the choreographer:

Belarbi explains his obsession with Wuthering Heights, a book with characters unknown to most French dancers. “The adventure began nearly three years ago”, he said, “when Agathe Berman gave me a series of 16 illustrations in India ink from a 1933 edition of Wuthering Heights. They were so beautiful and so expressive that I not only read the novel, but made a trip to the north of England . . . it’s an extraordinary part of the world.

“Everything in the book still exists, as though time had stood still. I saw the withered, stunted tree that is part of the actual decor of my ballet, and although it was only early autumn, the wind was howling round my ears. The atmosphere was amazing. and the idea of an “histoire dansée” began to take hold of me. I saw I could establish a parallel between Emily Bronte’s book and the Romantic ballets, as both seemed to me pure escapist fantasy. Catherine, after she dies at the end of the first act, returns as a spirit and continues to enslave Heathcliff, making it impossible for him to live in the real world.”

Because I was seated in the fourth chair in a narrow box, I had to stand for the entire performance. I enjoyed the gorgeous dancers and the set’s windblown tree and shimmering scrims simulating a desolate moor. The final scene as Catherine and Heathcliff join for eternity was so sublime there was not a rustle, a cough, nor a shifting of legs in the entire theater. The final moments had the two dancers lying motionless on the stage with hands joined; the audience sat breathless with the romanticism of the story.“The ballet is freely adapted from the book”, Belarbi explained, “[that’s] why the work is called Hurlevent, and not Les Hauts (”the heights”) de Hurlevent, as it is really a journey through time.” It certainly reached les hauts for me.

Hell on Frisco Bay has a very interesting post on a couple of classic film adaptations of Wuthering Heights: Wuthering Heights 1939 and Abismos de Pasión. Windy Willows complements this by reviewing Wuthering Heights 1992 - in Russian.

The small exception we mentioned at the beginning of this post is the overview on the Brontë sisters and the work that Das regt mich so auf! has posted. It obviously includes Wuthering Heights as well.

Categories: Dance, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights