Queering the Ballet with James Baldwin: Ballet Ashani premieres Giovanni’s Room at Duke University

Giovanni’s Room
4 stars (out of 5)
Ballet Ashani
von der Heyden Studio Theater
Rubenstein Arts Center, Duke University
Sept. 9, 2023

When we hear of new adaptations nearing the stage, we sometimes wonder how (and, occasionally, why) a group of creators will attempt to translate a work of art into another genre. Iyun Ashani Harrison is a recent pandemic-era add to the Duke Dance faculty, an emerging choreographer in contemporary ballet, which remains a rarity in North Carolina. Still, when he announced that he would adapt the controversial classic, Giovanni’s Room, for his company’s North Carolina premiere, the news provoked curiosity – mixed with some skepticism – from the start.

James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel, which Dial Press released in 1956 after an editor at Baldwin’s publisher, Knopf, initially recommended that the manuscript be burned, remains a touchstone of queer literature. That’s not only for the work’s depictions of the louche life in the gay underground of Paris during the early 1950s, but also its nearly surgical dissections of the origins – and disastrous consequences – of gay alienation and shame that its narrator and central character, an American expatriate named David, has thoroughly internalized.

The novel has crossed into other genres before now. Long before stage adaptations emerged at Yale, on BBC Radio and (just last month) in Oslo, actor Marlon Brando signed on for a screenplay that Baldwin began with South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn in 1978. By now, no leap of faith is needed to conclude that Baldwin’s rich dialogue and cinematic writing would ably fund a theatrical work or an independent film.

But ballet? What would take an artist in that direction? 

 

Choreographer Iyun Ashani Harrison
photo: Duke Dance

Harrison addressed the question in a post-performance talkback at Rubenstein Arts Center on Sept. 9. “So much of what we do in ballet, and the elitism inherently inside the practice, is because of how its funding structure works,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be accountable to people.” That realization forced the choreographer to ask himself what he was prepared to do about it.

“If we want to move forward and be more inclusive in ballet,” Harrison continued, “one thing that’s important is the stories we tell. And if every story is about the White Swan and the prince, the princess and their fairies [from Swan Lake], then where do the black and brown people—that we know existed and were in Europe at the time—how are they represented? How can ballet function differently in the U.S., because it has to function differently here?”

When Harrison thought back to Baldwin’s novel, which he first read as an undergraduate student in New York, he realized that the contents of the book were “so similar to the typical ballet structure. The femmes fatales—Odette, Giselle—they have to die, right? And I thought, well, that’s Giovanni. Then we have the antagonist: Guillaume, the pig. You just start to look at that, and it actually has that kind of melodramatic thing that ballet wants to have.” 

So far, so ambitious. Still, how could a genre as visually driven as ballet convey the distinctive voices in the novel’s emotionally fraught interior monologues? How could an art form dominated by physical gesture convey not only the grit, but the granularity with which Baldwin’s first-person narrator nakedly articulates the sexual shame and alienation inculcated into mid-century American and European cultures, and the crippling impact it ultimately has on him?

James Baldwin
photo: Judaica Europeana

The issue of voice is artfully addressed, at least to a degree, when digital composer and audio designer Aaron Brown places the raspy, halting voice of Baldwin reading from the book’s first chapter into several of his sometimes taut, sometimes ambient soundscapes. Digitally manipulated, Baldwin’s voice reverberates as if a cavern, as the freighted boom of low frequencies underlines a lie about David’s attraction to men that the character can no longer make himself believe.

 

Harrison’s sense of drama and stagecraft – as well as the performativity of sex and gender roles that his work examines – are immediately visible as principal dancers Brandon Penn, JamNeil Delgado and Felecia Baker, dressed to kill in Harrison and designer Julia Piper’s immaculate and daring top-shelf nightclub wear, emerge from the shadows of Duke’s von der Heyden Studio Theatre to make their austere initial tableau. Everyone has a formidable front in the clubland world the choreographer plunges us into, a fact reinforced by the deeply disquieting, reflective full-head oval mirror masks, seemingly lifted from the realm of sci-fi, that are worn by some in the corps de ballet.

Brandon Penn (David) & Felecia Baker (Hella)
photo: Joseph Lambert

 

 

Penn is cool, aloof, in control—and almost as non-disclosive as the mirror-faced mavens, above—as a David who flawlessly manipulates both a sinuous, nimble Baker as his expatriate girlfriend, Hella, and earnest Delgado, who embodies the passionate Giovanni, an Italian barkeep that he ultimately becomes involved with. The troika, all gifted with superb balletic technique that capitalizes on striking physical lines, explores Harrison’s angular and carefully sculpted choreography in an opening movement that foreshadows the conflicts to come.

The first discord emerges in “The Proposal,” the work’s second movement, as the playfulness Penn and Baker evince in David and Hella’s young relationship gradually morphs into something darker, against the spiky, pizzicato strings of Ravel’s String Quartet. As the pair play with a long, sheer white scarf which David has worn since the opening, he fashions that connecting line between the two into a tether and then a pair of reins to increasingly circumscribe Hella’s movement. Amid this, his marriage proposal is rendered a performative display, seemingly addressed as much to his audience as to his supposed fiancé. Hella’s justifiable dance of indecision is performed en pointe, by a character literally uncertain where she stands; it presages her departure, as she rejects the scarf David flings one last time about her shoulders from a distance.

Penn embodies the agonies of that rejection in a memorable moment in the next section, “David’s Lamentation,” where his hands crawl, spider-like, up from his chest and down from the top of his skull. When they reach David’s mouth, they pull his jaws apart, piercing his dark night of the soul with an eerily choreographed—and totally silent—scream.

In search of succor, David seeks out the company of Jacques, a rich habitué of Paris’s gay subculture. Harrison places bare-chested dancer Anthony Otto Nelson Jr. in a full-head mouse mask, black feathered collar piece and silky gray shorts, choreographing Jacques as a coquettish figure interested in offering David more than tea and sympathy.

Guillaume (Martin Skocelas) & Jacques 
(Anthony Otto Nelson Jr.) / photo: Joseph Lambert

(As such, he’s not the only gay character to be animalized onstage. Martin Skocelas performs Guillaume, the boorish owner of an underground gay bar, in a sinister full-head boar’s head mask – with a telltale reddened rim at the base – atop a brown trenchcoat costume punctuated by lacy Victorian wrist cuffs and a matching white jabot.)

After Guillaume roughly auditions—and then propositions—new bartender Giovanni, the mischievous Jacques escorts David into the underworld of Guillaume’s Bar. To Brown’s electro drum and bass-influenced club score, dancer Leah Esemuede fires up the dance floor with the corps de ballet before a predatory Guillaume attempts to establish primacy over the stage and his new employee. Giovanni has other ideas though, as Harrison’s sensuous choreography explores his initial attraction and approach to David.

Firing up the dance floor: Leah Esemuede & Les Milieu
photo: Joseph Lambert

While the sound of human breaths punctuate Brown’s soundscape, Delgado’s Giovanni swoops in, arcing upward repeatedly as if to inhale the sweat on Penn’s chest. As the rejected Guillaume and Jacques look on from the corners, Giovanni embraces and supports David from behind, in a sensuous moment that recalls daVinci’s Vitruvian Man.

The heat intensifies as the tables turn. Giovanni stands with his eyes closed as David seizes him from behind, placing his hands on the sides of Giovanni’s head. As a sudden gasp pierces the dance floor soundscape, Giovanni’s eyes fly open, in an undeniable, climactic coup de théâtre.

Giovanni, Guillaume & David 
(JamNeil Delgado, Skocelas & Penn)
photo: Joseph Lambert

When the two leave the pulsing dance floor, Guillaume follows, scrutinizing the increasing intensity of their interactions before threatening the pair, banishing them both from the club.

David’s deep-seated ambivalence about his sexuality plays out across the movements that follow. The tentativity and tenderness with which he approaches Giovanni in their first encounter’s pas de deux contrasts with his deeply closeted disregard for him in a public courtyard.

In Harrison’s “Witnessed/Exposed” section, the shame that David feels veers into the realm of paranoia. As lurid images are projected onto a suspended bedsheet, company members slowly twist the fabric, distorting the pictures. David crumples as company members zoom in with flashlights to claustrophobically illuminate the pair as they sit together. In a later nightmare, a fanged Hella stilettos the floor of Giovanni’s room en pointe before dramatically unsheeting their bed, dragging David across the floor for a fight.

The sturm und drang of that imagined encounter is only surpassed by David and Giovanni’s breakup scene that follows, as Delgado, in Harrison’s choreography, delineates the depths of David’s betrayal and abandonment. Giovanni’s ensuing decline and debasement at the hands of a vindictive Guillaume presage the violent ends for both, before an ending, different from the novel, in which David holds Giovanni’s body in a moment that echoes Michelangelo’s Pietà.

 

Giovanni (Delgado) & David (Penn)
photo: Joseph Lambert

Aside from Aaron Brown’s prismatic score, some of the evening’s most poignant and emotionally resonant moments – in seven of the work’s 15 sections – are set to striking prerecorded works by Ravel. Though the composer is more famous for full orchestral works like Bolero and Pavane for a Dead Princess, musical advisor Natalie Gilbert correctly advocated here for the intimacy – and, at times, the starkness of exposed individual musicians – in small ensemble arrangements of his work instead. After his spiky String Quartet animates David and Hella’s early play together in “The Proposal,” a piano trio performing Ravel’s Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty and The Fairy Garden conveys at first the pensive delicacy and then the subsequent delights of David and Giovanni’s first night together.

Unfortunately, the setting and scenery aren’t as equally developed as the music and costuming for Giovanni’s Room. When we see only fragments of William Paul Thomas’s atmospheric locational paintings, projected on separated panels at the back of the stage, they can’t fully plunge us into the chaos of Parisian club life or a courtyard where relationships are uncomfortably revealed. As for the fateful apartment in the title of Baldwin’s novel, a mattress placed in a corner upstage right conveys little of the atmosphere in the unlikely love nest in Baldwin’s novel, whose size and squalor David first finds intimate and then constrictive.

Delgado & the corps de ballet
photo: Joseph Lambert

For the striking new direction it takes us, it’s appropriate to affirm the artistic license Harrison uses to reimagine and restage Giovanni’s death, away from the French government’s actual form of capital punishment at the time: the guillotine, which wasn’t banned until 1981.

Still, this staging of Giovanni’s Room seems short-changed when it excises the pivotal scene at the end of the novel’s first part: a petit déjeuner at dawn in a dive in Les Halles, at the end of a night at Guillaume’s bar, where David first falls into a compelling but conflicted relationship with the titled character.

In Baldwin’s novel, Jacques—whose difference in age from the younger generation of characters is entirely erased in this production—brings the unmistakable voice of a gay emotional and ethical compass to that room. Harrison’s adaptation is lessened, and the conflicts it probes are foreshortened, when that voice remains unheard and unacknowledged here.

 

Queer lives have long been fundamental in the works of a host of major modern dance choreographers including Kyle Abraham, Sean Dorsey, Lar Lubovitch, and Bill T. Jones. Given the long-term influence of the American Dance Festival, modern dance has long been the Triangle’s most prevalent choreographic art form. It’s not surprising then that regional audiences would be far more familiar with their works than with those who’ve approached these relationships in ballet, including Lauren Lovett, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Justin Peck and Adriana Pierce (whose work has been commissioned by Carolina Ballet).

David (Penn) & Giovanni (Delgado)
photo: Joseph Lambert

By comparison, however, ballet choreographers have had a fundamentally harder time incorporating queer lives into their art form. The rigid hierarchies in ballet are still deeply rooted in heterosexual gender roles, expressed in gender-segregated movement vocabularies that were largely codified in the early parts of its 600-year history.

Decades after the advent of gay 20^th-century choreographers like Rudi van Dantzig and Matthew Bourne, queer relationships remain rarely seen and danced in ballet. It was a telling moment in the Duke post-performance talkback when seasoned principal dancers Penn and Delgado both admitted that, in the entirety of their careers, neither of them had ever danced a pas de deux with another man before this production.

What does a pas de deux look like when one partner isn’t largely relegated to providing structural scaffolding and support for another?

From my seat, it looks like equity, or something closer to it than most of what we’ve seen in ballet up to now.

Harrison’s choreography articulates the slow unfolding of intimacy and sensual healing after David re-enacts Hella’s rejection, in Giovanni’s embrace, the tension and release in David’s resistance and reciprocation to his concern, their helical communion and Giovanni’s tender descent as he conveys David’s form to the floor.

 

Giovanni (Delgado) & David (Penn)
photo: Joseph Lambert

In Ballet Ashani’s impressive first regional production, Harrison makes space for gay lives in an art form that has rarely been experienced here. Sumptuous costuming, sensitive and compelling music, and nuanced choreography that probes the internal conflicts of his characters all convey significant promise for the future.

Harrison’s audacious, vivid and sometimes poignant adaptation of Giovanni’s Room ably confronts us with the disastrous facts of internalized gay alienation and shame. But when it leaves off-stage most of the specifics and sources of these psychological scourges that are articulated in the novel, along with the means of ethical resistance to them, a significant part of Baldwin’s cautionary classic remains unseen.