Ambitious Attempt to Present Wharton as Ballet

Mathilde Froustey, Ulrik Birkkjaer, and Sarah Van Patten (photograph by Erik Tomasson, courtesy of the San Francisco Ballet)

For the remainder of this week, San Francisco Ballet is presenting a video of a performance it presented as part of a program at the War Memorial Auditorium on April 25, 2018. The ballet being performed was British choreographer Cathy Marston’s “Snowblind,” which piqued my curiosity after having seen her “The Cellist,” performed by The Royal Ballet this past weekend. While that latter work amounted to a reflection on the life of cellist Jacqueline de Pré, “Snowblind” was inspired by the core of a major literary achievement, Edith Wharton’s 1911 novel Ethan Frome. The YouTube Web site for the video includes a hyperlink to program notes by Cheryl A. Ossola, which describes the scenario of “Snowblind” as “a story of repression, love, desperation, and dependence—the forces underlying Wharton’s tale, a love triangle.”

Wharton introduces Frome as “the ruin of a man.” These are the words of the novel’s narrator, who will then explain the circumstances behind that state of ruin. The reader learns that Frome has had to care for his sickly wife Zeena, and he is assisted in this task by his wife’s cousin Mattie. These are the three “points” of Ossola’s “love triangle;” and Marston elides over much for Wharton’s narrative, exercising a generous amount of good judgement over what can and cannot be expressed through choreography.

Ossola’s notes illustrate how Marston homed in on the scenario of her choreographic perspective:

In Snowblind, she [Marston] draws us into the lives of Wharton’s three central characters—Ethan, a farmer trapped by poverty, loneliness, and a dried-up marriage; his somewhat older wife, Zeena, a hypochondriac; and Zeena’s helper, beautiful young Mattie. The snow that dominates the setting, embodied by 11 dancers, becomes a metaphor for Ethan and Mattie’s passion and torment.

Ossola also observes that Marston has taken an abstract approach, to which I would add that her approach thus differs significantly from Wharton’s text, which is prose narration by Frome himself.

Marston’s decision was definitely a good one. There is no way in which choreography could provide insight into the nature of Frome’s narrating voice as conceived by Wharton. That said, I have to confess that I did not read any of this background material until I had watched the ballet; and I have yet to figure out how snow was even established as part of the setting, let alone dominated it. Rather, I took the corps de ballet to represent the context of the community in which that love triangle unfolds. Basically, it captured the inertia of everyday life and the ethical context in which that life is embedded (and then violated by the love triangle).

What matters most is how the body language of each character “speaks” with its own “distinctive voice.” From that point of view, Ulrik Birkkjaer, Sarah Van Patten, and Mathilde Froustey, in their respective roles as Ethan, Zeena, and Mattie, conveyed a clear sense of how their movements advanced the general flow of the narrative. Presumably, this had as much to do with how Marston taught them their respective roles and how they learned to embody those roles in Marston’s abstraction of Wharton. If Marston’s handling of the corps did not always fit comfortably into the flow of her narrative, one could still appreciate the impact of how she had transformed Wharton’s narrative prose into a narrative ballet.