Dancing with the headless horseman

By E.L.W. | WASHINGTON, DC

“THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW”, Washington Irving’s 19th-century gothic classic, centres on a peculiar little American town on the banks of the Hudson river. Irving describes it thus:

Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie.

The Washington Ballet invited viewers to enter just such a reverie during a production of “Sleepy Hollow” that had its world premiere—and a run of only seven performances—at the Kennedy Centre last week. Billed as an “atmospheric thriller”, the work adapts Irving’s short story to the language of ballet. With its crude passions and supernatural imaginings, the tale is ripe for reinterpretation in other art forms. This particular reinterpretation offers an answer to an intriguing question: what happens when you translate narrative prose into dance?

This is the third ballet that the company’s artistic director, Septime Webre, has adapted from a work of American literature. The Washington Ballet presented “The Great Gatsby” in 2011 and “Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises” two years later. “Sleepy Hollow” continues Mr Webre’s “American experiences” series, which aims to revive interest in ballet—for many, an increasingly tired and outdated art form—and to cultivate a distinctly American ballet experience for audiences in the capital. "Our American narrative has not been told in ballet form," Mr Webre says. "Most of our stories are European stories, fairy tales about princes and swans."

To create such an experience, the performance draws out the colonial setting and backstory. The opening scene, for instance, features the burning of three Salem witches by the real-life Reverend Cotton Mather, highlighting the superstition, fear and hysteria that plagued early American communities. Years later, Mather’s book, “The Wonders of the Invisible World”, an account of the “Tryals of Several Witches”, falls into the hands of the impressionable Ichabod Crane, Irving’s hero. His imagination is lit up, nightmarishly, with the possibilities of the supernatural world. At the same time, Crane is haunted by visions of bloodshed and death closer to home thanks to memories of the American War of Independence. All this plays against his arrival in the hermetic town of Sleepy Hollow, his desire for the farmer’s daughter, Katrina, and his rivalry with another suitor.

The macabre atmosphere is great fun on the stage: skeletal trees, an ominous, orange moon, whirring wind, hair-raising music and, of course, the headless horseman riding in dreamlike slow-motion through the dark. So what is lost and what is gained in the move from text to dance? In the Fitzgerald and Hemingway productions, it was hard not to feel the loss of language, so distinctive and so integral is it to the experience of both those stories. In "Sleepy Hollow", the loss is less acute. Perhaps this is because the performance takes its cues from a 19th-century short story, rather than a modernist novel. There is something elemental about Irving’s tale; it has the quality of allegory or, indeed, of myth. The essences of the structure—fear, desire, jealousy, dread—lend themselves well to the archetypal expressions of ballet.

In this vein, the performance can actually do something that the text does not. It enacts Crane's nightmares, representing the unconscious in bodily form. These are the ballet’s most powerful and haunting scenes: spirits and resurrected militiamen besieging Crane in his bed; armies of ghosts twirling in a moonlit graveyard; the headless horseman’s solo dance, evoking his solitary roaming of the countryside.

Irving’s text suggests these images, but language has a taming effect. (“How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path!”) In dance, the dreams and terrors gallop forth, a kind of imagination incarnate, unencumbered by the rational quality of words.