Deborah Dunn's Four Quartets: weird and wonderful
Deborah Dunn's Four Quartets is a weird and wonderful interpretation of the cycle of the same name by T.S. Eliot. I think it's fair to say that that poetic interpretations in any genre are risky, especially those that try to reframe great works by long-dead, canonical figures. At worst the performance hangs off the coat-tails of and earlier master-work and offers nothing new in the way of interpretation. And sometimes even strong performances fail to use their source material as anything more than a garnish, adding a veneer of historical depth to their own work but failing to engage with the original in a meaningful way. In both cases I end up feeling that the artist who inspires the contemporary performance is being quoted at random for arbitrary reasons.
This was not the case with Deborah Dunn's Four Quartets. She offered viewers a detailed and original interpretation of Eliot's poem that took it into the realm of the physical but maintained the integrity of the source material. I was fascinated by the way that Dunn interacted with the language of Eliot's poem. She engaged with it at an imagistic level, responding to the words (played over the performance from a recording by Sir Alec Guinness) with noun-based physical images of her own. But she also engaged with the poetry at the level of rhythm, moving her body in time to the metre of the lines and punctuating performance in time with stresses, reacting to consonant and vowel sounds, to images and line-length. Put in plainer terms, she matched her body to the most subtle nuances of the poem. As someone who reads and enjoys poetry, I was impressed at the way Dunn interacted with language at a kinetic level: she offered a physically grounded response to the Four Quartets, and her performance occupied territory somewhere between dance, acting, and literary reading.
Dunn's body language was strangely cerebral. It was clear to me that Dunn had selected poses and refined them over time, so that like a sign language for the deaf, they had become highly legible and symbolic. Having come from other recent VIDF performances where a more standard dance vocabulary reigns, or where emotional expression was foremost, I found this slightly off-putting at first. Dunn's motions seemed superficially descriptive, arising from the mind and not the body. Yet as the work progressed, I was drawn in by her movements. I am not familiar with Dunn's other work, and cannot say whether her quirky style is unique to this piece, but I felt by the end of the performance that she had discovered a powerful and intelligent way for a dancer to connect with language.
By breaking down her movements into such elemental units, she kept pace with the text, and easily matched the wording and phrasing of the poems. Nor (after all) was this a mere mental exercise, for Dunn was fluid, graceful, and supremely confident in motion. At no time did her body struggle to do what she demanded. Whether it involved arching her body to balance on heels and torso, pivoting to instantly change direction, or executing a controlled collapse to the floor, Dunn was lithe and light in her body, and I think it is fair to say that her capacities as a dancer were unimpeachable.
T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets consists of four shorter works: “Burnt Norton”; “East Coker”; “The Dry Salvages”; and “Little Gidding.” As a whole, the poem wrestles with human nature in the context of passing time (birth and death , cosmic time, the movements of stars and solar systems), idyllic nature versus urban sprawl (images of rose gardens versus crowded London tube stations), and questions of life after death, prayer, and transformation. Dunn managed to bring these ideas to life not by acting out a narrative but by physically embodying the moods, images, and concepts of T.S. Eliot's poems.
The work opened with Dunn in a brown suit describing small pirouettes into the silence. Throughout the performance I was impressed by both the links and disjunctions between the poetry and the dance. Here with the opening she established a space for dance, before the poetry entered. She created anticipation (what will happen in this silence?) and anchored our eyes to her physical presence.
Dunn's interpretation of poetic images was subtle but eminently legible. When the reader begins to speak, saying “time past and time past” her arms moved in all directions like a compass or a clock, establishing an imagery connected to space and time. When he described the lushness of a rose garden and the songbirds within, Dunn's hands jumped on the word “thrush” -- her movement indicated surprise (as when we throw up our hands in startlement) but also mimicked the fluttering wings of a bird. When Guinness described dahlias in the garden, Dunn drew her hands into a circle around her eye and stared at the “sky” above. Her action suggested the round shape, but also and heliotropic nature of the flower, its living energy: she framed her own eye, the organ that looks, and implied that it is like the flower that seeks the sun. These were the moments of Dunn's performance that excited me: her body language resonated with Eliot's poem not only at a descriptive level, but also metaphorically. Eliot uses images to explore a larger themes around the texture of experience and the intermingling of life and death. Dunn was able to find physical images that could equally express these ideas.
Oftentimes Dunn's movements were not directly connected to the text, but to the phrasing, the length and rhythms of the lines: she would move in an arc as the reader spoke, ending her movement as the line ended, or she would jump or move her hands sharply as he began to intone. At the words “dark in the afternoon” she cocked her hip and covered her face – darkening her perception, maybe, but also playing with the sound of the words in relation to her body.
Dunn's interaction with the poem had great depth, but she was also careful not to become to ponderous in her interpretation: during a particularity long-winded and passage about the human soul, she turned her back and flashed her red underwear at the audience. During a passage about the brooding wildness of the English shore, she turned her body into a landscape, and made the space between her legs into a reflective pool, staring down at her own lap in surprise. These flashes of coy, sexy humour lightened the mood and nicely matched the ironic tone that lies beneath Eliot's own intellectual severity.
Dunn demonstrated her strength as a performer in a number of ways. In “The Dry Salvages,” the third act of the performance, a point where a performance should (arguably) be reaching towards a climax, she began to recite the text herself, replacing Guinness' voice with her own. This changed the relationship of her body to the poem, bringing her closer to the text and placing her in the centre of the action. Where earlier she was an interpreter reacting to the poem, here she became an actor whose dramatic recital was underscored by subtle physical support. This was an important shift: she quietly changed the parameters of the game, engaging the poem directly and taking the audience deeper into the work.
Dunn's interpretation of fourth and last poem in the quartet, “Little Gidding,” offered a euphoric, regal culmination to the performance. Dunn changed character, transforming herself from a tweedy English writer into an Elizabethan Queen of Roses. Dressed in shimmering crimson, she scattered petals and folded her own body into the shape of a huge, lurid rose. The imagery nicely tied together Eliot's questions about English identity and his more emotionally wrought language around love and ecstasy. It was a very strong ending to the work, and it pulled the audience out of the thoughtful, contemplative mood of the first three acts and wrapping them in the sweet, heady aura of this stately but romantic closing act.
As an interpretation of Eliot, Dunn's choreography nicely evokes the many facets of his work – the satirical, the intellectual, and the transcendental. She is also able to bring her own character into the performance, offering viewers an experience that is uniquely coloured by her own artist's vocabulary. Deborah Dunn's Four Quartets is intelligent, witty and in my mind an honest creative success.