Yesterday there were "No Kings" protests throughout the United States, and at the Joyce Theater in New York City the anti-monarchal ballet The Emperor Jones by the Limón Dance Company.
I went due to the connection of the dance piece with its source material, the play The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill. The play, with its extensive stage directions and overwhelming focus on a central character whose internal fears are made manifest around him, seemed already halfway to being ballet when José Limón first adapted it to dance in 1956.
O'Neill wrote the play in 1920, and the Provincetown Players premiered it at the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, starring Charles Sidney Gilpin. The show was a hit and had to be moved to a larger theatre to accommodate the large crowds who wanted to see it. It then toured the United States, providing many people in the U.S. with their first contact with Expressionism on stage.
When the play was revived on Broadway in 1925, it starred the previously unknown actor Paul Robeson, who went on to star in it in London and then on film in the 1933 movie version. The piece was thus already famous when Limón turned it into a showpiece for his own virtuosic dancing, taking on the role of Brutus Jones, who after rising to become emperor over a Caribbean island, disintegrates psychologically and is ultimately killed by a silver billet.
O'Neill's stage directions indicate that "Little Formless Fears creep out from the deeper blackness of the forest." The Little Formless Fears danced excellently in this production, though the forest was transformed into an urban jungle of skyscrapers. The company's revival kept Limón's original choreography, but adapted the costumes and sets to turn it into a parable about capitalism. They also allowed women to dance some of the roles, though Limón originally envisioned an all-male cast.
The piece was suitably creepy, though, which set the mood for the show I saw in the evening, Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, which he performed at Poe Cottage in the Bronx. Seeing Smith perform virtually every word of "The Black Cat" and "The Raven" in the house where Poe once lived was a real treat.
If you missed him, don't worry! He plans to be back with more Poe stories next October!
