Below are a few recent pages out of the April 1st Project.
But first an excerpt of the description of Woolf Works — a ballet about Virginia Woolf that focuses on Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves — and the inspiration behind it.
For one thing, Woolf herself was fascinated by dance and absorbed aspects of its language into her own creative process to generate writing that was rooted in feeling and the body, as much as in the brain. She famously wrote parts of The Waves while listening to Beethoven on the gramophone and, writing to Vita Sackville-West in 1922, she argues that literary style is ‘all rhythm… Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far far deeper than words’.
Then, of course, there is the way that her fiction shifts the focus from the outer details of life to the rich inner narrative unfolding continuously within the mind; she plunges us into a world in which events are strung together thematically rather than chronologically, and the fabric of emotion and sensation appears denser than the brittle world of objects. All of this might be seen as the natural territory of dance. ‘The “book itself”’, Woolf argued, ‘is not form which you see, but emotion which you feel’ – and it is certainly true that no other writer’s work reads, sounds or feels like hers.Woolf’s modernism, moreover, was founded on a deep engagement with other art forms. Apart from dance, she drew on painting, photography, music, film, even astronomy – and it is partly this multi-dimensionality that lends her writing its apparently limitless virtuosity, and makes her world so heightened, vivid and all-encompassing.
Now for the pages:
