‘Woolf Works’ Review: A Literary Ballet’s Missteps

At the start of “Woolf Works,” a three-act ballet by the British choreographer Wayne McGregor based on novels by Virginia Woolf, we hear part of what is reportedly the only extant recording of Woolf’s voice. It is a writer’s loving complaint about her materials: words. Used by everyone, they are full of echoes and associations, she says. A writer can invent new ones but can’t use them in an old language like English, because words hang together.

By beginning like this, is McGregor identifying with Woolf and admitting the difficulty inherent in his materials, steps in the old language called ballet? Or is this a smug assertion of difference — that he, as a choreographer, can invent?

“Woolf Works” is certainly ambitious. When the Royal Ballet debuted it in 2015, it was hailed as a breakthrough. But when American Ballet Theater gave the work its New York premiere on Tuesday as part of its season at the Metropolitan Opera House, “Woolf Works” turned out to be a big, flashy, dull disappointment.

When choreographers turn to writers, it is usually for character and story, as in several other works in Ballet Theater’s season: “Onegin,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Like Water for Chocolate,” which drowns in plot. But for Woolf’s novels, synopsis is trivial. A modernist, she discarded much of the genre’s furniture to get inside the minds of her characters and jump from one to the next, playing with form, memory and sudden illumination. The staid model of story ballets could certainly benefit from such formal play, and sudden illumination is something dance does especially well.

Not in “Woolf Works,” alas. Hobbled by Max Richter’s hackneyed score, it is notably unmemorable; apart from its scenic effects, the ballet slips right through the mind. Noting its divergences from Woolf’s works is necessary. But more important are the many ways it falls short as dance. (And for the record, dance already had a Virginia Woolf, long ago. Her name was Martha Graham.)

The first section, “I now, I then,” based on “Mrs. Dalloway,” borrows characters from the novel, with Clarissa (Mrs. Dalloway), doubling as Woolf. (The role was originated by Alessandra Ferri, who returned to it on Tuesday, at 61.) Monumental and mobile set pieces like giant bookends say “abstraction” and serve as screens for footage of Edwardian London. After dancing with her husband, the heroine watches and dances with her young self and past lovers, male and female.