When Loy writes that “all reading is the evocation of speech”, she implies that when a reader is confronted with a printed ballet, reading becomes the evocation of movement. The other senses are not dismissed: piecing together the kinetic energy of prose also involves all of the other embedded cues of sound and light, images, and place, etc. What happens when we actually see and hear this ballet? The opening image of Loy’s text features the movement of a homunculus, which in the Poetry Project’s production is represented on film by a flapping paper apparatus. Seeing the object on film establishes a precedent important to unravelling the reading of the two versions: the Poetry Project’s work will inevitably transpose Loy’s abstract narrative into concrete—however still abstract —means and materials.302 The sound of the film projector infiltrates the textual silence, as it projects images of lace ribbon, still-life scenes of rocks, candles, and machine parts, et cetera, even before the text begins. When the text begins and the homunculus is referenced with “this homunculus must be artificial”, the filmic presentation combined with the homunculus’s paper body works well to communicate Loy’s instructions.
The use of film continues throughout the production, providing lengthy rests in Loy’s “script”. Apart from the entrance and exit of a pair of women who are identifiable as the maiden’s mother and grandmother, however, the Poetry Project does not attempt to couple Loy’s text with movement, or to express the text through movement. Instead, dance is superimposed in elected spaces, or presented as a parallel but independent “track”. For example, at one point a nude woman walks through the audience to the stage brandishing 302 Production footage can be viewed online at http://vimeo.com/18852108 [last accessed 5 May 2013].
large feathered fans to conceal her body. She proceeds to perform a burlesque routine to contemporary music. There is no invitation to such a dance in the text. Similarly, a female on rollerblades wielding Loïe Fuller-esque sleeves performs a solo. The Poetry Project even adds a portion of spoken text absent from the authorial manuscript.303 The production on the whole feels as though it is trying to supplement Loy’s text with a variety of media suggesting that it cannot stand alone. Without an emphasis on the text’s dance, the company uses harmonised voices to sculpt the narrative; again, this is not directed. Should the text be spoken at all?
Watching the Poetry Project’s production after reading the text reveals the series of rhetorical motifs I have outlined in this chapter in a new way, while highlighting some others. One that the staging reveals is the awkwardness of stagecraft off the page: for example, when the Poetry project speakers announce, “the scenes change”, they do not. Their performative language renders the stage itself unnecessary. This tension is manifested throughout the production, perhaps most starkly in the final scene, where:
The maiden and the youth are seated on a white china horse which gallops but never moves—[…] The crystal becomes clouded, only to light up again partially for a moment, to reveal a crystalline baby tumbling over and over itself swiftly out of the sky, while the blue ribbon, in momentous curves, with, as in the old story books, “The End” written upon it, rises up to receive the baby as it falls.304
In this moment, where Loy’s text inserts physical text in the form of the ribbon, the narrators’ delivery does not change. The purpose of the performance is galvanised here: the audience is meant to hear and appreciate Loy’s prose while they watch a series of multimedia accents. The text and its physical interpretation are not integrated, but rather complementary in service of the company’s vision.
Although Loy’s inscribed stage and its flexibility constitutes the essential world of the ballet, for the production a stage exists nonetheless: the company incorporate materials 303 The passage appears to have been added by the company: “Wait! Text. I accept your invitation to read me. The mermaid appears throughout in many forms. That one time she cut off her tail to walk amongst men. Wait! That one time—the knife—a wound—opening. I just (?) read in The New York Post—image spilling pouring on the text fresh ink smudged on the bowery—cut so that the mermaid could walk amongst men. Wait!” The passage is inserted between Loy’s lines “The wooing of the beautiful mermaid is getting on finely” and “She coquettishly takes out her comb….” 304 SEML, pp. 160-161.
that echo the two-dimensional figures in the film, although they too are not native to the text. The set is minimal, comprised of angular, modular pieces that are moved to accommodate solo dances and otherwise vaguely suggest the setting of a carnival. A female uses a length of fabric of colourfully painted fabric to move through a series of simple poses and movements to accompany the speakers. Throughout the performance, it is clear that the stagecraft and movement are meant to simply illustrate Loy’s text, but it all feels superfluous.
As previously discussed, part of the magic of Loy’s ballet lies in its physical impossibility, which the Poetry Project’s interpretation seems not to attempt, but rather to evade. Is this due to the limits imposed by the performance’s reliance upon two- dimensional representation (i.e. the diegetic screens and its being filmed)? In her essay “The Metaphysical Pattern in Aesthetics” Loy names as “the essential factor in a work of art” a “pattern” that she likens to a “screen”. The screen is a record of original artistic vision, “interposed between the artist’s creation and the observer”.305 In the event of performance, the interpreter adds a series of new screens that further obscure authorial vision.
When dancing happens—and in this case, I mean in an imagined sense and in a mental sense—attention turns away from text and any goals of documentation, and towards movement itself. The text is consumed through movement, but it does not call attention to itself. The body takes over; otherwise, the dance remains in its printed state and text reigns supreme. The modernist ballet text has shown us already that the division between text and performance is not clear-cut. In “Crystal Pantomime” (and, as we will next see, in Tom: A Ballet) there are two opposing possibilities: one in which the ballet remains mere print on paper and one in which the ballet is physically executed. In either scenario, the text necessarily sheds either its performative potential or its textual being. What Loy’s text demonstrates is the range of possibilities between these ends of the spectrum.
305 SEML, p. 263.