A thought-provoking and complex ballet

The Northern Ballet Theatre's revival of Nixon & Schönberg's Wuthering Heights ballet is being performed at the Milton Keynes Theatre (Milton Keynes, UK). The Oxford Times talks about it:

David Nixon of Northern Ballet Theatre has made a speciality of telling a dramatic story in sequences of dance that make both the events, and the feelings of the characters, clear. Wuthering Heights, one of hisearliest, is also one of his strongest, most dramatic achievements.
Emily Bronte’s bleak story of passionate, frustrated love on the Yorkshire moors, hovers on the verge of melodrama, but Nixon never allows it to go over the top. His choreography is at its best and most moving in the agonised solos he has made for Heathcliff, and in the passionate duets for Heathcliff and Cathy – especially their final encounter on the moors during yet another storm. It’s least convincing in the ensemble dances at the Lintons’ Thrushcross Grange, where David Brohn’s heavyweight orchestration of Claude-Michel Schonberg’s score becomes a caricature of a formal dance.
Nixon has used the device of having a young version and an adult version of the two lovers. Ben Mitchell is young Heathcliff and Ayana Kanda young Cathy.
We meet them at once, as the tormented Heathcliff remembers happier days on the moors. The youngsters are maybe 12 years old (hard to tell with adult dancers, however small and young), but certainly still innocent. Their dances are as much a romp as a coming together of future lovers, but there is a moment when playfulness is suspended, and they seem to understand what the future holds for them. Kanda, in particular, is believable as a girl who will become the passionate Cathy. Mitchell is a bit too cute for the Heathcliff-to-be, but plays his role with great conviction.
Keiko Amemori, one on the company’s best and most popular dancers, is Cathy, and she too is required to play against type. Small, pretty, dainty, it’s hard for her to conjure up the earthy, sexy Cathy, ravaged by an overpowering love for a man she cannot have. Having said that, she dances with great passion, and – as always – with great intensity, and gradually makes her version of the character believable.
But it’s Kenneth Tindall, as Heathcliff, who dominates this production. Tindall shows us an essentially decent man completely overpowered by the love that has grown since childhood. A man deeply embittered by a social system that makes him inferior to snotty Edgar (well played and danced, by Ashley Dixon). It’s life, not his nature, that has turned him into the cruel tormentor of the unfortunate Isabella – another good performance by Pippa Moore.
This is a fine piece of work by David Nixon, powerful and moving. It’s on until Saturday (tel: 0870 060 6652).

And Whatsonstage reviews the production:

As a novel Wuthering Heights is baffling and fascinating in equal measure: it is a great love story, a tragedy of hatred and false consciousness, a promise of spirutual sublimity, an intriguing textual puzzle, a powerful expose of C19 inheritance laws and class hatred, a feminist protest, a gothic horror story and a cultural icon. It is a story which touches on core human experiences, a story about the power of erotic love.
David Nixon’s balletic interpretation pares the story down to something much simpler and more immediate in narrative terms. Indeed, had this ballet been titled Heathcliff instead of Wuthering Heights that might have been closer to the mark, since the references to the Heights are all but excised from the story, and what is given focus and pre-eminence is the passionate and doomed affair between Cathy and Heathcliff, the everything and nothing of their bodies. As a metaphor for the transporting nature of erotic love which is both of the body and superior to it, ballet articulates those principles more economically and powerfully than any other art form.
The ballet commences with the anguished Heathcliff, haunted by Cathy, lamenting upon the moor. As he grieves the emotion is translated into reminiscence as Ben Mitchell and Ayana Kanda representing the younger incarnations of Cathy and Heathcliff take the stage with a playful and intense duet. Nixon’s choreography, encompassing both the contemporary and the high-church balletic vocabularies, strives for passion and despair in equal measure, a wild individuality undercutting and outlining the sweeping romantic expressions.
That it doesn’t always come off is in part due to the lack of story, but also owes something to the emotional register of Kenneth Tindall’s (Heathcliff) dramatic expression: he is too given to melodrama for the power of his emotional journey to be conveyed. The staging was somewhat monochromatic in its emotional variety. Heathcliff lacked emotional credibility: we never quite believe in his despair, or his cruelty to Isabella, sweetly played by Pippa Moore who brings a doll-like fragility to her role. In the novel Heathcliff retains our sympathy because his revenge is not merely neurotic, it has a moral force. The weapons he uses against the Earnshaws and the Lintons are their own weapons of money and arranged marriages. Here the story is so pared down that it loses much of its subtlety and magic and the dance manoeuvres are left isolated and repetitive without the anchor of good storytelling.
That said, there are moments when the dancing does elegantly and vigorously convey the different ways in which love is experienced. Heathcliff and Cathy’s pas de deux for example are passionate and almost feral in their intensity: wild, romantic and edgily unrestrained. In contrast, Edgar and Cathy’s relationship is much more formal, they touch only barely, when convention requires it, for grace, and decorum and the completion of social expectation, Amemori successfully conveying the minute adjustments she has to make in dancing style when dancing with her legitimate husband and her authentic lover.
To his credit Nixon has retained some of the wild, harshness of spirit that we associate with Bronte, but stripped of context the gesture occasionally falters and gets lost. However this was a thought-provoking and complex ballet which aspires to retell the story of passionate romantic love in a new form. It is to be commended for its ambition and with a little dramatic tweaking could make something memorably resonant of this tale of transcendent love. (Claire Steele)

The New Orleans Times-Picayune interviews Patsy Marcantel, illustrator and hardcore Brontëite:

Word is that you have a kind of idiosyncratic reading life, much of it centered on one book. Right? Well, there's this one book that has my heart and that would be "Jane Eyre." (...)
How many times have you read "Jane Eyre?"
Too many for me to count. Dozens, for sure.
What is it about this book that appeals to you so?
It's intensely romantic. And the characters are wonderful. I love Jane, I love Rochester, I love the story, the plot, the setting -- all of it. I love the prose, the beauty of Charlotte Bronte's prose. And it's got lessons in it, too: Stay true to your values and your principles; believe that you're worthy of love, even if you're plain and small and you don't come from a wealthy family.
When did you first read it? Did it have a grip on you from the start?
It has stayed my favorite since I first read it, yes. Nothing has shoved it off that pedestal. I was 13 at the time. I bought it at a bookstore in the mall and I still have my first copy with my name on the inside front cover in my little girl's scripty handwriting. That's my most valuable copy. I own all these other ones but that's the one I've carted around my whole life, from my house in Lake Charles to dorms to apartments to this house in New Orleans.
How many copies of the book do you own?
I don't know exactly, but close to 60. I started off wanting the Edmund Dulac edition. He's a favorite illustrator of mine and this was his first paid commission. So I had to have that one. And from there I started trying to find out who else illustrated this, and I was researching and buying and then it snowballed and suddenly there were so many books.
Do you have a favorite character?
I love Jane. But I love Rochester equally. He was my first literary crush. It was like wow, the ideal man. He was funny, he was smart, he was well-traveled and cultured, he had a generous nature and a kind heart. And he recognized in Jane all the beautiful things that made her who she was. He wasn't bound by convention and that was appealing, too.
What about film adaptations? Has there ever been a really good "Jane Eyre?"
Yes, the last one from the BBC in 2006 with Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson. They had chemistry. The settings and the costumes were incredible. It had topnotch production values. There's another one coming up this year from the BBC with Ellen Page. (Elizabeth Mullener)

Another Jane Eyre fan is blogger Bella Aire Holland who is interviewed on Reviews of Young Adult Literature:

Stranded on an island (or the airport, in an elevator, etc), which 3 books do you HAVE to have:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - I'll admit it, I'm a bit of an Eyrehead. I read this first in fifth grade and have never stopped loving it. Romance, Mystery, and Morality. Love, Intrigue, and Social Commentary. What is there not to love?

An exchange of letters in the Times Literary Supplement concerning The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland 1800-1880 Volume 3 happens to mention Branwell Brontë via Blackwood's Magazine:

Sir, – Bill Bell (Letters, April 24) is right. George Eliot is mentioned in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, and I apologize for the error. I should have cited other authors with no Scottish connections who chose to be published from Edinburgh, such as William Godwin, Felicia Hemans and Bramwell Brontë [sic] – who was turned down. (William St Clair)

More mentions today in the press: Jane Eyre? It's ok in The West Virginia State Journal, a quiz in The Arkansas Democrat Gazette and Stanbury's Wuthering Heights pub activities in The Telegraph & Argus. On the blogosphere: Talk of Summertime finds parallels between The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, not quite write has read Jane Eyre, Brittas böcker och bibliotek reviews Agnes Grey in Swedish, Cinema, Café e Poesia posts about Jane Eyre 1996 in Portuguese.

EDIT: The Brussels Brontë Blog posts two summaries of the recent talks given at the Brussels Brontë Weekend: Stevie Davies's Emily Brontë and the Mother World and Philip Riley's The Brontë Sisters’ ‘Strong Language”

Emily Smith, who attended the talks given by Stevie Davies and Philip Riley during our recent Brontë weekend, has provided the following summary of them. (Read more)

Categories: Brontëites, Brussels, Dance, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Talks, Wuthering Heights