Dance movements inspired by words

The New York Times is not too impressed by Cathy Marston's Jane Eyre ballet.

Cathy Marston’s telling, at American Ballet Theater, takes an admirable feminist stance, but is undone by monotonous choreography. [...]
This production, originally created for Northern Ballet in 2016 and opening on Tuesday at American Ballet Theater, takes an admirable feminist stance. But its unrelenting grimness and monotonous choreography give that point of view little room to grow and add nothing to the poetry and page-turning drama of Brontë’s novel.
The wan lighting by Brad Fields and bleak sets and costumes by Patrick Kinmonth don’t help to illuminate the story or the choreography. On the bright side, it’s not hard to relate to the torment endured by Young Jane, a character played with cold relish by Catherine Hurlin. [...]
The deranged wife is played by Cassandra Trenary with the feral tenacity of a backup dancer in a hair metal band. Her performance can’t redeem this otherwise listless production, but she’s a campy diversion. Another such moment was slight yet memorable: Stella Abrera, as Rochester’s other love interest, the socialite Blanche Ingram, shoves his young ward (Zimmi Coker) out of the way. Ms. Abrera always shines when she’s playing evil. [...]
Over and over, we see Jane pressing the backs of her hands against her cheeks with her elbows crossed at her chest. Lifts are frequent, usually initiated from behind, as is the kind of push-and-pull partnering that ends up with dancers rolling around on the floor. It’s not legible on the vast stage of the Metropolitan Opera — and the frequent use of scrims doesn’t help.
Ms. Marston displays a basic, balletic distortion of modern dance in which movement phrases and numerous angular poses are on continual rewind, as if repeated viewing gives them more weight. The opposite is true, especially when Rochester sticks out his straight leg from a seated position to hamper Jane’s movements or to seduce her; on both occasions, it looks like an erection. (Whether that was the intention not, it’s just silly.)
The refined Ms. Teuscher is her usual understated self as she explores not only Jane’s love for Rochester but what it means to be an enlightened, confident woman in any time. Yet she’s trapped in this ballet’s hokeyness right up to the final scene when, after reuniting with Rochester, she leaves his embrace to step grandly into the spotlight. It’s an aspirational, sentimental touch, but Ms. Teuscher — even standing half a second too long in the pose, even in a “Jane Eyre” that gets lost in the mist — can give off a glow. (Gia Kourlas)

The Wall Street Journal and All Arts feature the production.

Tuesday brought the American premiere of “Jane Eyre,” Cathy Marston’s two-act work based on Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel that was first given in 2016 by England’s Northern Ballet. A 10- sceneplus-prologue synopsis spells out Patrick Kinmonth’s and Ms. Marston’s scenario for the ballet, in which select incidents from the book play out as a swirl of gesturefilled action that calls on ballet’s distinct vocabulary in at-best-cursory fashion. (...)
The production, which stretches over two hours including intermission, features prominent roles for Jane Eyre and a Young Jane, as well as for Edward Rochester, with supporting roles for any number of Brontë’s characters. But without a familiarity with the novel—and given the monotonous and at best mushy classical tone of the choreography, in which ballet’s formal carriage of the arms becomes so much generic wringing of the hands—this telling of the life of a young woman who struggles amid
an often hostile environment to finally find love taxes the attention span more than it engages interest. (Robert Greskovic)

When Cathy Marston was commissioned to translate Charlotte Brontë’s novel into a full-length ballet, the choreographer turned to the text.
“I don’t go to the studio with movement already, but I always have a list of words for every character,” said Marston, whose parents, both English teachers, introduced her to the heroines of classic literature. “The first part of a creative process, for me, is making movements inspired by those words.” [...]
“I think with ‘Jane Eyre,’ or with all the stories that I end up bringing to the stage, I have to feel the emotion that is going to provoke that movement to come out,” Marston said.
Jane’s pronounced physicality — the way that she moves through space with extreme emotions and explosive gestures — was something that the choreographer latched onto while rendering Brontë’s descriptions into dance.
“In the beginning, she’s very clenched, and she tries to really push all these repressed emotions and things that she wants to say — and she’s quite explosive — down. And then, slowly, throughout the course of her journey, she becomes able to control those things and express them with passion, but not in an angry manner, necessarily.”
This tension manifests in Marston’s movement through leitmotifs of fists and what is referred to by the choreographer as “ambition arms” — a move where one arm reaches forward while the other crosses and grasps in the other direction.
“She has ambition to see the world and to see what’s beyond the hill in front of her,” Marston said, explaining the recurring position. “And so those arms are to do with her reaching towards somewhere that she can’t see but she knows she wants to get to.” [...]
“Men block her path,” Marston said. “Most of the journey through the book, they do things that stop her getting to where she wants to go. They kind of whisper in her ear. They undermine her confidence. They crush her, in a way.”
These “demonic” men swirl around Jane during the ballet’s emotionally pivotal moments, such as the death of Jane’s best friend Helen and her subsequent quick transition into adulthood. How Jane comes to deal with these constant impediments on her movements serves as a testament to the tenacity of her character and the strength at the heart of Brontë’s commentary on womanhood — a quality that Marston teases out through the technique of the choreography, which mixes contemporary dance language with classical idioms.
“There are moments when Jane really physically, and not only emotionally, supports Rochester [her love interest],” Marston said, going on to note how contemporary choreography has opened up the ability to expand the typical narrative for a ballerina. “We have ways that women can take weight. And without that, I don’t think you can really convey and express the qualities of Jane Eyre as a modern woman. Because women are not only living on pedestals. And we’re not only fairies and waifs.” [...]
“At the end of the ballet, it felt important to me to let her voice have the last word and not this sort of image of ‘happily ever after with a man,’” Marston said, explaining the conclusion of her ballet, which depicts Jane moving toward the audience, as if to place herself in communication with them rather than with Rochester. “Jane Eyre is a voice that has inspired and been an example for so many young people, particularly young women. And I think that just taking her forward connects her voice to the audience in a direct way. It doesn’t leave her in the past and in her story. It brings her out and into our present.” (Britt Stigler)

The Telegraph shares 'Eight lessons classic literature can teach you about your finances', such as

7. The Brontës: don’t get caught up in crazes and trends
While Wuthering Heights's Cathy and Heathcliff are consumed and eventually destroyed by their passion for one another, the author who set their story down on paper was also almost left ruined by an obsession.
During the 1840s the British public was hit by “Railway Mania”, with many inspired to invest in the railroads by publications such as 'The Railway Investment Guide: How to Make Money by Railway Shares'. Emily Brontë was one such person.
When she and her sisters inherited shares in the York and North Midland Railway, Emily took charge of the investments. According to the letters of her sister, Charlotte, she would spend hours carefully scouring every mention of the railroads in the newspapers.
But while Charlotte recognised the dangers of getting caught up in the mania and wanted to sell out before it was too late, “headstrong” Emily refused. More and more money poured into the railways from speculators until the bubble burst and the market collapsed − a situation which may sound all too familiar to today’s Bitcoin investors. (Marianna Hunt)

A contributor to Book Riot lists the reasons why she's 'no longer reading books by white men'.

It also occurred to me that the majority of books that I was exposed to in school as the real “literary” works were by white men. Think about it. What are the major names that everyone is supposed to know by the time they graduate high school? Dickens, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Twain, Carver, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Thoreau (need I go on?) very few women make the list. Sure, there’s Mary Shelley, remarkable for her one major contribution, and mentioned in the context of her husband. And yes, we can argue that these authors mostly come from a different time when fewer women or people of color were allowed to publish. But even the ones who did, like Austen and the Brontë sisters, while acknowledged as important, didn’t make the curriculum. They were dismissed as more “feminine” works and not worthy of attention. (Katherine Packer)

Lanterna (Italy) interviews (white male) writer Luigi Marcus Greco.

Quanto hanno influito i tuoi studi nelle tue scelte narrative? Io divoro libri da quando avevo sette anni. La pagina scritta è sempre stata un mondo affascinante per me ed è  anche per questo che ho deciso di studiare filologia: ho iniziato a “studiare” i testi che prima mi limitavo soltanto a leggere, per carpirne i segreti più profondi. Immagina la mia sorpresa nello scoprire che un mio antenato, un monaco vissuto nel Trecento, era un monaco cistercense che copiava manoscritti nel chiuso della sua cella… è chiaro che, nel raccontare questa storia, ad esempio, le mie conoscenze e i miei studi sono stati determinanti. Questo è  quanto concerne la mia formazione. Se parliamo, invece, di scelte narrative, allora devo dire che, con la mia umile anfora di terracotta, ho attinto a diverse fonti: da Flaubert a Brontë, da Dickens a Austen, da Verga a Manzoni alla Fallaci, tutti hanno partecipato al concepimento e alla formazione di questo romanzo. (Chiara Pinci) (Translation)

Mid-Day (India) reports the visit of Shabana Azmi, daughter of poet Kaifi Azmi, to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

This weekend following the Bradford Lit Fest where her father, legendary poet Kaifi Azmi was celebrated in an event, Shabana Azmi dropped by West Yorkshire's Brontë Parsonage Museum where the Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — lived. Drawing from her literary roots, Azmi wrote on Twitter, "It was so overwhelming to be in the house of the Brontë sisters and see the table on which Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre was written!"

Beware of spoilers in this recap of the first episode of season 3 of The Handmaid's Tale on Vulture.

But would the Gilead authorities really believe that yet another kidnapping just so happened to strike the Waterford house? Would they return June to the Waterfords AGAIN instead of driving her straight to the Wall? Would the house really crumble as artfully as Thornfield Hall at the end of Jane Eyre? (Hillary Kelly)

The obituary of novelist, speechwriter and film director Andrew Sinclair in The Times describes Ted Hughes as someone who 'behaved like Heathcliff'.