Woolf Works
Choreographer Wayne McGregor’s contemporary three-act ballet Woolf Works at the Vienna State Opera draws on Virginia Woolf’s literary world, in a dance performance inspired by three novels penned by the English author. Each section of the ballet is set to specially commissioned music by Max Richter, the acclaimed British-German post-minimalist composer and pianist. Like Woolf's novels, the ballet focuses on profound themes, including memory, consciousness, identity and human connection, among others.
Woolf Works premiered on 11 May 2015 at the Royal Opera House, performed by The Royal Ballet. It has been staged successfully in many venues around the world since then, notably including Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 2019 and the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in 2024, where it was presented by the American Ballet Theatre. Taken as a whole, the visualisation techniques and collage-like structure of Woolf Works mean that the choreography is not a conventional adaptation of Woolf's writing. Instead, it takes specific themes and ideas from certain novels to give audiences an experience of the writer's inner world, one that she explored throughout her career.
Woolf Works opens with I now, I then, a vision of Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway. The book's stream of consciousness style is reproduced in dance. McGregor's choreography imaginatively weaves narrative fragments from the novel with aspects of Woolf’s autobiography in which she describes her experiences with mental illness. The programme continues with Becomings, McGregor's interpretation of Orlando, Woolf's 1928 novel about identity. The second section of the ballet depicts the novel's vision of an ever-changing universe in which life is a passing form of energy. The final part of the ballet is Tuesday, an interpretation of The Waves of 1931, often considered to be Woolf’s most experimental novel. In McGregor's choreography, audiences see how he has responded to Woolf’s fascination with underwater imagery, a feature in much of her prose. In Tuesday, the dancing merges themes drawn from the novel with a portrayal of Woolf’s eventual suicide in 1941.
Max Richter had previously worked with McGregor for The Royal Ballet's Infra in 2008. For Woolf Works, the composer created an intense and multi-layered score. In it, he combines electronic sounds with orchestral music, translating the unique atmosphere found in Woolf’s writing into a densely emotional soundscape. This production of Woolf Works at the Wiener Staatsoper will delight audiences with its emotional intensity and sensitive portrayal of a writer's often brilliant but restless mind.