by Leigh Witchel
It’s nice that someone is trying to keep ballet from becoming the #whome? art form. American Ballet Theatre has been both encouraging female choreographers and fostering minority dancers into principal positions. Cathy Marston’s “Jane Eyre,” with Misty Copeland in the title role, did both. Marston’s strength was that she could tell the complicated plot clearly. But while trying to cram all that plot in, the ballet got waterlogged. It was a telling lesson about the real ingredients of a story ballet.
Marston’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel was originally created in 2016 for Northern Ballet. Marston made the libretto with Patrick Kinmonth, who also designed the costumes and sets, a moody environment that didn’t rely on realism, created largely from minimal furniture, set pieces and moving flats painted with vivid curves. The music was assembled by Phillip Feeney, piano pieces of Fanny Mendelssohn that were orchestrated, combined with selections of her brother Felix and Franz Schubert.
The links between Brontë and Fanny Mendelssohn are ironic and tragic. Both created at a time when women couldn’t take authorship. Brontë published under a male pseudonym, Mendelssohn’s first songs to be published were included in collections by her brother under his name. Both women died young, Mendelssohn of a stroke the year “Jane Eyre” was published. The novel, written with the device of being an autobiography, represented a three-dimensional portrait of the growth and formation of an independent woman.
In the ballet, the first part of the story was told in flashback; Marston started the ballet’s action well into the novel. We heard nervous strings as Jane entered behind a scrim, tossed by storms. She was penniless and trapped by a storm. St. John Rivers, danced by Blaine Hoven, entered and discovered her, bringing Jane home to be nursed by his sisters.
The real gender flip of “Jane Eyre” was how Marston used the corps de ballet. She deployed a male corps de ballet, which she called “D-Men” (per an interview in the program, for death and demon). The men weren’t used as geometry, the way Petipa might; Marston’s vocabulary for them was ballet with contemporary flavoring: a weightier placement, and angular pushing arms. Still there was a link to the Romantic corps. They were part of the mechanics of the ballet, forming the storm that buffeted Jane, but also projections of the thoughts of the heroine: shades and memories. It made sense both for Brontë and the ballet.
The flashbacks plowed through the novel’s plot, but it was clear, even when Skylar Brandt was playing a young Misty Copeland. Copeland was on a platform above at the back; Brandt as her younger self took the main area and their actions echoed. That Brandt is white and Copeland is black wasn’t a big deal. This happened on a dimly-lit stage; differences in appearance weren’t heightened and it was easy enough to connect the dots.
Life for Jane went from bad as an unwelcome charge at her aunt’s home to worse at Lowood school. We met her friend Helen, she and Jane danced together, Helen coughed fitfully. The narrative moved by like “scenes from last week’s episode.” Still, Helen and Jane’s short dance was interesting for how Marston choreographed that rarity: a female friendship duet. Marston didn’t bother with partnering, but used weight-bearing as a physical language for support. Jane laid Helen down, and brought her another blanket, but she died in the night. Helen was borne away by the men; another time they were used evocatively. Without beating us over the head with The Patriarchy, Marston showed us the world Jane was cast adrift in: one ruled by men.
Still, Helen was a cipher who died quickly as a plot device – a ballet redshirt. This may have worked better in the UK staging; British dancers have more expertise in fleshing out secondary characters. Here, Jane was pushed around by evil cousins, Reverend Brocklehurst flew about like an offended bat, the housekeepers at Thornfield Hall tottered or shambled about.
As Jane grew up to become a teacher at a reformed Lowood, Copeland replaced Brandt and the atmosphere brightened. Still, it felt as if we were stuck in relentless exposition that should have lasted three minutes, not thirty. And we moved on to Thornfield Hall, where Jane became governess of Rochester’s ward (and possibly his illegitimate daughter) Adèle. Zimmi Coker showed what could be done with a small part if you’re a bète de scène. Playing an awkward adolescent, she managed to steal her scenes. With her fiery red hair and her energy, she was both gawky and enchanting.
As Jane settled into her new home at night, the men, all with a taper in each hand, became candelabras; everywhere but invisible, like murmurs evoking the living spirits of a house. It was one of “Jane Eyre’s” most effective touches. Like shades they felt both real and imagined. Daybreak brought Corey Stearns as Rochester, who had been riding, a convenient excuse for a long, glamorous coat, whips and saddles.
Jane and Rochester’s chemistry was hesitant, but Rochester is exactly the kind of role that Stearns does best – the man with a dark soul who wants to love and isn’t sure how. He sat in an oversized chair, sizing Jane up, sticking his long legs out as feelers and obstacles. After a moody solo, he impatiently pushed Jane out of the way to dance with Adèle. His first duet with Jane was to Schubert’s “Auf dem Wasser zu singen.” Jane was guarded and Rochester was brusque and odd.
That may be emotionally accurate; the problem was that it doesn’t make much of a duet when two people don’t want to dance together. There wasn’t a strong pretext for a love pas de deux. Jane kept Rochester at a distance, and finally humorously kicked him in the ass. He kissed her hand but still neither of them knew how to relate to one another.
And shortly after, in skulked Cassandra Trenary as Rochester’s mad wife Bertha and . . . FIRE! There was so much narrative and Marston was burning through the plot – literally – that it was hard to concentrate on the dancing.
Jane rescued Rochester from his burning bedroom, both of them in their nightclothes. He held her, she tried to move away, but the ballet was finally where it needed to be for a pretext for a pas de deux. As they started to dance, Stearns’ touch changed; he rolled and grabbed Copeland to lift her. Copeland’s part was trickier emotionally than Stearns’; Brontë and Marston both saw Jane as a moral center. That’s not an easy thing to dance, and the experience was distant. By the close of Act 1 there still wasn’t any sort of communion.
Act 2 opened with a house party, with Copeland twitching in front of the action. Rochester was dancing with Blanche Ingram (Christine Shevchenko), whom Jane thought he loved. Blanche got a bitchy solo, but what happened was again so densely staged that you couldn’t feel it. And soon enough Bertha was skulking about again.
Rochester dismissed all his guests, including Blanche, so that he and Jane could dance another loves-me-loves-me-not duet. Again, Marston’s staging was naturalistic and clear: Jane gestured angrily offstage to Rochester, indicating the departing Blanche, “What about her?!” And whenever she fell to the ground, he immediately went down to meet her.
Rochester attempted a wedding ceremony only to have it interrupted by Bertha raging like an animal, and Rochester’s painful admission that he could not legitimately marry Jane. Marston never tried for a neat duality of feminism and patriarchy; Bertha made that impossible. She didn’t have much presence in the ballet, acting largely as a spoiler, but she was almost a Lilith figure: the pre-historical, disappeared first wife. If the male corps were Jane’s inchoate inner demons, was Bertha Rochester’s made flesh?
By that point, the ballet hit a delicate balance of desire and obstacle, and we were rooting for Jane and Rochester. A great ballet convention was briefly dealt with – Rochester found a pretense to remove his coat and cravat so that he could dance more effectively. At least it wasn’t his pants.
Jane was devastated but smitten. She pushed Rochester offstage and fled into the storm, and two-thirds of the way through the ballet, we were finally back at its starting point where she was found by St. John Rivers. His sisters tried to help Jane heal; he was already in love. Rivers was poorly served by the ballet’s narrative express train of exposition in favor of character development; all Hoven’s stage time was spent pacing with nervous concern.
The express train sped up. Rivers proposed marriage, Jane refused him, first pushing and finally throwing him from her. More darkness, another fire at Thornfield Hall. Rochester attempted to carry Bertha from the flames; but she attacked him and ran into the fire. His housekeeper found Rochester and led him to his chair, which was now nothing but a frame. Jane encountered him, blind and broken.
In a subtle final duet, Jane supported Rochester. Realistically, Stearns couldn’t do much as the character couldn’t see. Overjoyed, he finally recognized Copeland. They weren’t sure what they wanted from one other and he turned away. Yet she proposed marriage; he picked her up, she cradled him. He hugged her, but at the end, she walked forward into her own light. Marston said that moment was her interpretation of Jane’s last line of the novel, “Reader, I married him.” But the effect was totally different, as if Jane were announcing her independence from Rochester rather than any sort of union.
There are few things worse than a story ballet that doesn’t make sense, and Marston made sure tell the story clearly. Yet a similar trap awaited her as befell Christopher Wheeldon in “The Winter’s Tale.” She plowed through the plot of “Jane Eyre” so diligently and briskly it felt like a checklist. A dance adaptation of a novel can’t just spool out the story; ballet isn’t a made-for-TV movie. Smaller details need to be removed to streamline the narrative, the relationship between the main characters needs to be developed. But some of that might simply happen by the dancers doing “Jane Eyre” more. Much of the subtext comes from their discoveries in performance.
But true to the plot or not, a ballet being sold as a love story needs phenomenal duets to hold a place in repertory. Think of “Romeo and Juliet,” even of “Onegin” to see how complicated emotional situations became transposed. No matter what the characters were feeling, the glue underneath was their connection. That’s the 11 o’clock number, the money shot. Sooner or later in “Jane Eyre,” Jane and Rochester need to dance together as if they wanted to. You can’t only stage the opposite of abandon.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“Jane Eyre” – American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
June 7, 2019
Cover: Skylar Brandt in “Jane Eyre.” Photo © Gene Schiavone.
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