Deborah Dunn's dance piece Nocturnes, inspired by Wuthering Heights (check these previous posts for more information), is touring Montreal in Canada since last December. There are still a few chances to see the performances:Trial & Eros Company presentsThe Globe and Mail reviews these new performances:
Nocturnes
Maison de la culture Ahunstic, December 11 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Montréal Nord, December 16 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Plateau Mont-Royal, January 13, 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Frontenac, January 18, 8:00 p.m.
Le Centre Segal des arts de la scène, January 22, 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Villeray-Saint Michel-Parc-Extension, January 28, 8:00 p.m.
Nocturnes, involving six dancers representing Emily Brontë’s classic characters, will be presented around Montreal throughout January. Dunn had read Wuthering Heights many times, and always at the back of her mind was the idea that the complex personal relationships at the heart of the novel would translate readily into choreography. That is, until she actually began creating the piece with her dancers.Progrès Villeray:
Originally, Dunn envisioned the three female dancers as young Cathy Earnshaw, married Cathy, and Cathy’s ghost. The three male dancers she saw as young Heathcliff, adult Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. These characters and their internecine connections formed the initial inspiration for the choreography, but during the creative process, the plotline morphed into elemental abstractions.
“Getting Brontë’s characters onto the stage proved to be very difficult,” Dunn says. “From specific people, they dissolved into generalized gothic archetypes. I just couldn’t get across the story. I was resorting to pantomime, and those scenes had to go.”
As art does tend to take on a life of its own, Dunn now sees the piece as representing the book’s symbolic nature. “Take Jane Austen’s characters,” she explains. “They are well defined. They function as real people in real situations. The more research I did on Wuthering Heights, the more it became clear that it is a long prose poem rather than a novel, that the characters aren’t really characters but ideas. Bronte was playing with stereotypes and archetypes.” (...)
Nocturnes is not the retelling of a story, but one conveying images and complex relationships through partnering. Rough-hewn, weight-bearing physicality is the modus operandi over refined choreographic architecture.
In fact, Dunn now sees the Brontë family itself in the dance. The three women are the Brontë sisters. The three men are the distant father, the weak, alcoholic brother, and perhaps the third male is Emily herself, the most masculine (metaphorically speaking) member of the family.
For the original score, composer David Cronkite deconstructed Chopin’s Nocturnes, which gives the dance piece its name. “I wanted a bilingual title that captures the heart of the dance,” Dunn explains. “The quintessence of the piece is gothic and romantic in the true sense of both words.”
Dunn defines gothic as being attracted to death, darkness, depression and despair. “Brontë saw nature as interacting with the story, and she projected the elements onto the characters. In the studio, elemental powers took over the story. I also found myself being influenced by the surrealists and absurdist humour. In Nocturnes, Brontë intensity is matched by Magritte irony.” (Paula Citron)
Trois couples, ou plutôt six personnages, se rencontrent et se fuient en de multiples géométries. La chorégraphe Deborah Dunn dissèque ici le rêve avec humour et fantaisie dans un univers surréel et une atmosphère teintée de romantisme « à la Brontë », le tout sur la musique de Frédéric Chopin, déconstruite et modifiée. (Microsoft translation)Categories: Dance, Wuthering Heights
More choreographies based on Wuthering Heights. Today, May 2, Nocturnes opens in Montréal, Canada:NocturnesAccording to Le Devoir:
Deborah Dunn
COMPANY : Trial & Eros
A coproduction of Danse-Cité and Trial & ErosDATES : 2 au 5 + 9 au 12 mai 2007 ; 20 H
AGORA DE LA DANSE
840 Cherrier Montréal QC H2L 1H4PHOTO Patrick Baker
CHORÉGRAPHE Deborah Dunn
INTERPRÈTES Stéphane Deligny, Sara Hanley, Audrée Juteau, Dean Makarenko, Sonya Stefan, Daniel Villeneuve
MUSIQUE David Cronkite
COSTUMES Deborah Dunn, Josée Gagnon
ÉCLAIRAGES Deborah Dunn
Cette création pour six danseurs revisite le roman Les Hauts de Hurlevent d'Emily Brontë. La chorégraphe croit bien que les lecteurs de Brontë y reconnaîtront l'histoire de ce classique de la littérature, bien que le texte n'y occupe pas une place prépondérante.EDIT: More information on Voir. With this picture by Nicolas Ruel.
«On explore les clichés romantiques de la femme en blanc, de l'amour au-delà de la mort, rapporte-t-elle en entrevue au Devoir. La première partie, très théâtrale, présente les personnages, puis on verse dans un monde plus onirique et surréel. Les personnages y sont toujours, mais beaucoup plus absurdes. Dans la troisième section, ces relations continuent, mais ça devient plus une exploration du romantisme du point de vue des archétypes.» (Frédérique Doyon)
Babelfish translation->
This creation for six dancers revisits the novel the Wuthering Heights by' Emily Brontë. The choreographer believes well that the Brontë readers will recognize there the story of this classic of the literature, although the text does not occupy a dominating place.
"One explores the romantic stereotypes of the woman in white, of the love beyond death, says in an interview to Le Devoir. The first part, very theatrical, introduces the characters, then one pours in an oniric and surreal world. The characters are there always, but much absurder. In the third section, these relations continue, but it becomes more an exploration of the romanticism from the point of view of the archetypes."
If only The New Yorker had started earlier it could have helped the 19th century authors too. Of course, the celebrated opening lines would have been a little different.We don't really get the point of the article, or whether they like or dislike the New Yorer kind of openings, because then they go on to ruin some of the most famous opening lines in Literature by 'New-Yorker-ising' them. Had Emily Brontë been an avid reader of the New Yorker, her only novel would have begun thus:
Emily Bronte, Wuthering HeightsHonestly, we still don't know whether this is supposed to be better or worse than the actual opening line:
"On the evening after the rainiest summer day, I returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."
1801.But we know perfectly well which one we prefer.
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
Sparks fly in Deborah Dunn's Nocturnes, a new Danse-Cité production about couples, their loves and other misadventures. The dancer-choreographer is an all-out original. In her dance landscape, Dunn is able to infuse her romantic vision (inspired by Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's sprawling tale of doomed love) with audacious irony, odd beauty and absurd sight gags.And Juliet Wittman, reviewing the play Squall for the Denver Westword, is briefly reminded of Wuthering Heights.
There's plenty of hearty laughter here, and visual jokes that click, but beneath the humour Dunn laces her dance with ideas about the pressures of society, suggesting in her duets a certain tangibility to suffering. But she isn't stuck in melancholy; in fact, most of the physicality is a gas! Dean Makarenko jousting in a swooping cloak (on the wild moors?), Sonya Stefan's jagged laughs that erupt and erase into wails, the stifled rage and mock insistence that drives Stefan and Daniel Villeneuve's intimacy, and Sara Hanley's gliding avenging angel... heck, Stéphane Deligny and Audrée Juteau even exorcise demons. (Philip Szporer)
There's a woman alone in a house on an island off the coast of Maine; a thunderstorm batters the windows. The woman is packing. She has set out three boxes: one labeled Trash; one, Remains to Be Seen; the last, Perpetual Care. The pale face of a younger woman glimmers briefly at the window. I think of Cathy's ghost in Wuthering Heights, rapping against the pane, terrifying the traveler, Lockwood, with her moaning: "Let me in...twenty years I've been a waif." This young woman is fleshly, though. Her name is Cordelia and, as we soon discover when she enters the house, she's barking mad.But Emily Brontë also had her own sources of inspiration, such as the moors. Smarter Travel talks about them.
Top Withins, better known to romantics and English majors everywhere as the supposed inspiration for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, broods timelessly over the Yorkshire moors. Long since abandoned, the tumbledown remains of this old farmhouse are watched over by two windswept trees and a legion of lazy sheep. (Josh Roberts)Categories: Dance, Haworth, Wuthering Heights
Mainstage A2 - And in Arcata, California:
Friday, May 30th | 8pm | Gala/Talkback | 9:30pm | $28
Saturday, May 31st | 4pm | $25
Trial & Eros [Montréal]
Wuthering Heights (2007)
Choreographer: Deborah Dunn
Inspired by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Nocturnes explores the darker side of romantic love. Six characters, finding themselves in three couples, enact the themes of desire, possession and loss within a piece that unites melancholy and humour. The score mixes pieces by David Cronkite, which were inspired by Chopin's Nocturnes, with three original Nocturnes. The costumes by Deborah Dunn, Josée Gagnon and Sarah Tracey are a gorgeous hybrid of Victorian and contemporary design.
Photo by Nicolas Ruel
Photo of Sara Hanley, Sonya Stefan, Audrée Juteau.
The Humboldt Light Opera Company celebrates its 35th anniversary at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 31 at HSU’s Van Duzer Theater. Over 100 singers from the last 10 years’ productions, including 35 local and returning soloists, will perform medleys from Titanic, The King & I, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Jane Eyre, The Full Monty, King Island Christmas, Quilters and The Music Man. (Maia Cheli-Colando in The Arcata Eye)Categories: Dance, Jane Eyre, Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
Nocturnes, a piece by Toronto's Trial & Eros, took the story of Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights [sic] set to the music of Chopin in a manner which, although parts of the narrative were retained, was not mere translation.The News (Pakistan) talks about religious fanatism in Pakistan and Jane Eyre makes an appearance:
"I didn't feel like I needed to necessarily tell the narrative, just the image and the archetypes of Cathy and Heathcliff, and going from there and allowing my own life to influence to piece," said Trial and Eros's choreographer and dancer, Deborah Dunn.
While she did not entirely abandon a Victorian aesthetic, the sets and costumes and the dancing itself bore a noticeable surrealist influence. As to whether her audience relates to these personal influences, Dunn does not feel that that is entirely essential.
"I understand that it's not always the exact same thing," she said. (Duncan Day-Myron)
Apart from the numerous attacks on girls' schools in northern areas, attempts to stop musical or theatrical functions at educational institutions have been periodically reported from major cities. Books as innocuous as Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' remain a source of controversy at some centres of higher learning and women in many places have reported warnings delivered to them to cover their heads or dress 'appropriately'.Islamic extremism meets Elizabeth Rigby. Who could ever imagine?
Why the fuck I had to write a high school book report on Jane Eyre but had to discover 'The Metamorphosis' on my own I'll never know. I don't even remember most of Jane Eyre other than the girl eating it on the sled on the end. I mean really, who tries to kill themselves by running a sled into a tree? Maybe I was just too young to put the proper 'weight' on it...or it could have just sucked. Wow sorry for that tangent. That one's been building for awhile. My English teacher would be proud. (Aidan Williamson, interviewer)Not so proud, because the described plot incident corresponds to Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. Once again the three magic words: check-your-sources.
I remember a day in seventh grade during silent reading time I burst into loud sobs while reading the final chapters of Jane Eyre.More musical tidbits, GaydarNation reviews Alphabeat's debut album. The reference to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights (check this previous post) is also mentioned:
I cried so much and so hard my teacher asked if I might step outside so my classmates could read in peace. (Libby Rogers)
Similarly, '10,000 nights' is a car windows down, sing-a-along, summer classic. Again, songwriter and guitarist Anders B refers to musical icons of the past, with a wink to Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights'. But with a chorus of “You're so ooh, you're so ahh, you're so cool”, Alphabeat aren’t exactly aiming for literary par. (Anna Rutherford)Precisely Snowbot talks about Kate Bush's original 1978 song. More things on the blogosphere include: Viciados em Livros reviews, in Portuguese, Wuthering Heights 1939 and Viewpoints does the same with Jane Eyre 1996. Emily Brontë's Shadow is the name of a new Google Group with the following purpose:
Ever since I began to know and love the life and work of Emily Brontë, I began to make a mental list of women who I felt captured her sense of non-conformity, creativity, edge, and valor. It seems time to make it public, so others can add to the list and discuss. (n+Fold)Categories: Dance, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Websites, Wuthering Heights
In the days of the Brontës, the clock at Haworth Church was inscribed with the words “Time how short – eternity how long!”, but this cannot have been the experience of Patrick Brontë, forty years the incumbent of the parish. Tithonus-like, he survived his young wife and all six of his children, living on and on at the quiet limit of the world, a white-haired shadow worn down by loss, and waiting open-armed for the end. When he reached eighty, his immortality on earth was sealed by Elizabeth Gaskell who described him in her newly published Life of Charlotte Brontë, as a child-hating “strange half mad husband” who let off steam by sawing the legs of chairs, shredding silk dresses, burning his hearthrug and his childrens’ boots, and firing a loaded gun from the kitchen door.Now, that April de Angelis's adaptation of Wuthering Heights is being performed at the Chichester Theatre Festival, new reviews are appearing. The Portsmouth News focuses on Amanda Ryan, Cathy in this production:
Aware of being “somewhat exccentrick”, the Revd Patrick Brontë objected less to Mrs Gaskell’s descriptions of his “passionate explosions”, for these had, he said, no basis in truth, than to what he called her “false statements respecting my denying my children the use of animal food”. The story, picked up from a disgruntled former servant, that his children were fed only potatoes suggested that the death from consumption, at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, of his two oldest children, Maria, aged ten, and Elizabeth, aged nine, were the result of constitutions weakened by a poor diet. As to the picture of himself, Gaskell was, Patrick Brontë explained, a novelist and therefore saw things with a storyteller’s eye, but in doing so she had ironically missed the character he felt he most resembled, “the father of Margaret in North and South, peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful – and generally well-meaning”.
Nothing anyone ever said about Patrick Brontë was as strange or surprising as what he said about himself. The oddest of the stories he told Mrs Gaskell, repeated here by Dudley Green, is the one describing how “in order to make them speak with less timidity”, he questioned his children under the cover of a mask. “I began with the youngest [Anne, aged around three] – I asked her what a child like her most wanted – She answered, age and experience – I asked the next [Emily, aged around four] what I had best do with her brother Bramwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy. She answered, reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason whip him.” And so it continued, each child wearing the mask to reveal their true self.
So busy was Mrs Gaskell constructing the masquerade of the Brontë myth that she missed the unmasked man staring right at her. Similarly, Patrick Brontë was unaware, until he was shown his daughters’ published books, that behind another set of masks his tiny house was pulsating with what Mrs Gaskell called, when she read the Brontë juvenilia, a “creative power carried to the verge of insanity”.
Green, who previously edited a fine edition of Patrick Brontë’s letters, is primarily interested in revealing Brontë the clergyman (the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written a foreword), who rose from an impoverished childhood in County Down to take up a scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he befriended Lord Palmerston and William Wilberforce, was in favour of Catholic Emancipation and against capital punishment, who campaigned for a proper water supply, and established a Sunday school. Green also gives attention to Brontë’s published poetry, which contains something of the family grimness. “Verses sent to a lady on her birth-day” begins, “But, hark, fair maid! Whate’er they say, / You’re but a breathing mass of clay, / Fast ripening for the grave”. Overwhelmed by his burden as a penniless widower, he frantically sought to replace his children’s mother, but had his proposals firmly turned down. Resigned to being alone, he emerges as a concerned father who, as Branwell told a family friend, “watched over his little flock with truly paternal solicitude and affection . . . their constant guardian and instructor”.
If he was bad-tempered and took his supper alone it was because of the sheer weight of parish duties. In 1834, he presided over 135 funerals; 301 baptisms took place in Haworth Church in 1835. Sometimes he performed twenty baptisms a day. Green describes a life of graft and grief. When Charlotte told her father a few years after the deaths, one after another, of Branwell, Emily and Anne, that she was being courted by his curate, Arthur Nichols, his rage was surely understandable. Patrick Brontë “was no domestic demon”, as a friend said of Branwell, “he was just a man moving in the mist who lost his way”, and as soon as he had found his way again he gave his consent to the marriage.
Green is the first biographer in forty years to attempt to repair the damage caused by Mrs Gaskell. “I thought I carefully preserved the reader’s respect for Mr Brontë”, Gaskell said, but “the desire of doing justice to [Charlotte] compelled me to state the domestic peculiarities of her childhood which . . . contributed so much to make her what she was”. It follows that the peculiarities of the children must have contributed to the man Patrick Brontë became, but there is no sense in these pages that his children were peculiar at all. This is in many ways the book’s strength; rather than rehearse the nature of the “genius” Patrick “fathered”, Dudley Green describes the nuts and bolts of the working life that allowed such talent to flourish.
The Georgia Straight presents Deborah Dunn's new choreography: Elegant Heathens. Her previous piece, Nocturnes, inspired by Wuthering Heights, is mentioned:While training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and working as an usherette at the Odeon, Leicester Square, Amanda Ryan decided to fill a gap in her literary education.'Once I'd worked out how to sort out the popcorn, there wasn't much left to do,' she says, 'so I started to read Wuthering Heights.
'I was completely shaken by its anti-romanticism and by its portrait of Heathcliff, the ultimate anti-hero. The book is so relentless, so brutal and so incredibly modern.'
Amanda is now playing Cathy, the heroine of Emily Bronte's novel, in a new stage adaptation by April De Angelis at Chichester Festival Theatre until Saturday. (...)
Amanda - whose credits include Shameless (Channel 4), Closer (National Theatre tour) and Shekhar Kapur's film, Elizabeth - says: 'I'd love to travel back in time, join the Bronte sisters in the parlour and have a conversation with these extraordinary talents.
'You have to wonder how this young woman could have written a novel of such dark passions. But I took a walk over the moors while I was there and thought about the way Cathy is rooted in the landscape.' (Mike Allen)
She's created pieces around subjects from Elizabeth I (The Little Queen) to Wuthering Heights (Nocturnes) and silent-film star Louise Brooks (Pandora's Books).(...)The Yuma Sun talks about the upcoming release of the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight:
In fact, Dunn seems so steeped in history, one pictures a weighty copy of Wuthering Heights sitting on her bedside table. It turns out that image is not so far from the truth. "I've read it five times," she states matter-of-factly. When the artist thinks back to what got her interested in the classics, it wasn't necessarily at home. (Janet Smith)
Lemmon says she considers herself a "literary snob" who prefers reading Pearl S. Buck and Charlotte Bronte, and thought she'd never get sucked in by the series, which is mostly written for teens. (Darin Fenger)A few days ago, we linked to a comment where BrontëBlog reader Faye told about not really finding the much-mentioned similarities between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and the Twilight series. Now, in an effort to tip the balance, we bring you a link to a comment where reader ThisbeCiel states that the parallels are there indeed. The debate is on!
The book that started it all: “My favorite book is “Jane Eyre.” I responded to the book in the most positive of manners. I still get shivers thinking about reading it for the first time. Rochester, he’s so handsome and manly. [The book] is so fascinating. I haven’t been able to read it in awhile. I was 13 when I read it. It was hard to get started. I think I read the beginning four to five times.” (Carol Shedd interviewed by Abigail Crocker)Brief news: The Grant County Chronicle-Tribune announces that next month's reading choice of the Gas City-Mill Township Public Library Book club: Jane Eyre.
Not sure about you, but we have this ongoing love-hate relationship with Emily Bronte’s seminal work. We didn’t want to read it in high school. Then we kind of liked it, despite its frequent lapses into soap opera-style melodrama. Then we forgot about it, until that interminable MTV “modernization,” which made us reach for the book on the shelf just out of sheer reverence. So, yes, we’re excited to see the live version of Heathcliff and Cathy. All that’s missing is the foggy moors and that six-page essay due Monday. (Jordan Bartel)Procastinando posts a series of curious Amsterdam's graffitis including one with a Brontë mention! (in Spanish) and Other Stories posts about Classical Comics' recent edition of Jane Eyre. The Graphical Novel.
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