Adapting Shakespeare’s plays for ballet provokes a question from the outset: what becomes of the most verbal of dramas when words disappear? Othello in particular seems inseparable from language—from rhetoric, persuasion, and poisonous insinuations that slowly work their way into the mind. One wonders how such a play could survive the translation into a wordless art.
Lar Lubovitch’s Othello: A Dance in Three Acts, first staged by American Ballet Theatre in 1997, attempts just this translation. Set to an original score by Elliot Goldenthal, the ballet takes up the problem directly: how to render Shakespeare’s “words, words, words” into pure movement. If Othello dramatizes jealousy as a sort of linguistic and mental contagion, Lubovitch’s version imagines it as something spatial and physical, a disturbance in the equilibrium between the bodies onstage.
The production wastes no time in establishing its governing contrasts. Othello (Calvin Royal III) first emerges in Moorish dress, prostrated in Islamic prayer beneath looming shadows. Goldenthal’s overture breaks open with percussive force and harsh dissonance; moments later, a gleaming crucifix floods the stage with light as the music resolves itself into consonant sweetness. Here we have a schematic expression of the forces that drive Shakespeare’s play, with Othello poised at their volatile intersection: he is, after all, both an insider and an outsider, a Moorish general in Venetian service against the Ottomans and newly wed to the noblewoman Desdemona (here, his Christian conversion is depicted as equally recent). Bound to a patrician daughter of Venice, derided by his enemies as a savage, Othello is a man divided against himself.
Royal’s performance captures Othello’s precarious self-command. He moves with stiff, almost mechanical deliberation, every gesture measured and every step carefully placed. We feel the hero has constructed a fragile architecture of dignity around himself, one that even the slightest disturbance could send toppling. Royal often pauses mid-movement, as if his inner balance were perilously close to giving way, and at times he seems aware of being watched—a sense reinforced by the glasslike architecture of George Tsypin’s scenic design, which imposes an atmosphere of perpetual public scrutiny.
The first act sketches the drama’s opening tableau: Othello’s marriage ceremony to Desdemona (Fangqui Li), followed by scenes at the Venetian court and the arrival of Othello’s lieutenant, Cassio (Jake Roxander). Lubovitch’s choreography plays up Desdemona’s mildness and paper-doll passivity at the expense of the cleverness and charm with which Shakespeare endows her—qualities that may reside in her verbal intelligence more than anywhere else, to be sure. (Read more generously, her pliancy faintly recalls Kenneth MacMillan’s treatment of Juliet for the Royal Ballet.) Cassio’s entrance provides a welcome jolt of energy. Roxander’s dancing courts the eye: he is boyish and magnetically assured, weaving across the stage in a series of arabesques and sly sashays, appearing fully alive to the spell he casts. One understands instantly why the laboring, self-disciplined general might view him as a provocation.
A pas de deux between Othello and Desdemona introduces the love token—a handkerchief—that will set the gears of tragedy in motion. Their bodies coil around each other in a sequence of graceful lifts and arcs, enacting a flirtatious pattern of flight, pursuit, and embrace; they drift across the floor with an airy fluency suggestive of openness and possibility. But menace is close at hand. For an instant Othello carries Desdemona’s limp body in his arms, as if rehearsing her future death; for another, she absently loops the handkerchief about her throat as chromatic lines wind their way into the orchestra. The handkerchief will return again and again as a visual cue, its meaning so insistently underlined that it begins to lose a touch of its dramatic force: a symptom of ballet’s reliance on visual language in the absence of speech, as well as a nod to Othello’s demand for “ocular proof.”
The villain arrives only at the act’s close. Iago (James Whiteside) enters with a fit of jerking, grotesque spasms, as though his limbs might at any moment slip out of their joints. Goldenthal’s score erupts again into hyperbolic force at his entrance, with pounding drums and shrieking winds seeming to conjure a chorus of howling dogs. Iago draws nervous audience laughter as he poses and preens with theatrical relish. The ballet pointedly withholds from him psychological depth: he is presented less as a wronged subordinate than as a comically evil impresario delighting in destruction. In this the production embodies Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s charge of “motiveless malignity,” displacing our attention from Iago’s opaque purposes onto the effects he engineers—above all, onto Othello’s vulnerability to them.
Erotic jealousy is a kind of philosophical problem, a point made by Stanley Cavell in his writings on Shakespeare: how can one know another’s inner life, and what follows if one cannot? Who has Desdemona been with—what does she really feel?—and if she harbors thoughts and desires inaccessible to Othello, how can he bear them? Lubovitch’s telling dramatizes this problem of knowledge through projected hallucination. In the second act, Iago appears to implant scenes directly into Othello’s consciousness. Through Wendall K. Harrington’s superimposed video projections, we witness scenes that play out entirely in the theater of Othello’s mind, with Desdemona and Cassio entwined in compromising configurations. In merging the actual with the imagined, the production implicates us in the paranoid structure of Othello’s thought.
The fatal chain of events unfolds when Desdemona absently drops the handkerchief. Emilia (Madison Brown), Iago’s wife, comes upon it; Iago coerces her into handing over the token, then launches into a triumphant flurry of turns before slipping it into Cassio’s possession. The third act races toward the inevitable catastrophe—though admittedly the drama’s momentum buckles slightly under the weight of three acts and two intermissions. After further scenes of imagined betrayal, Cassio is apprehended, and Desdemona kneels in her bedchamber, pleading helplessly for forgiveness. The scene of her murder is often read as a perverse consummation, and so it is here: Othello strangles her with the fateful cloth in a passionate lovers’ embrace. The orchestra falls into a hushed and tastefully restrained silence. Goldenthal doesn’t overplay his hand.
Only afterward does the full weight of tragedy emerge. In Shakespeare’s play, it is the controlled poise of Othello’s language that gradually breaks down: “My wife, my wife! What wife? I have no wife.” Royal achieves a comparable breakdown physically. Balance falters, alignment teeters, and the body gives way: the man who once moved with such rigidity and majesty crumples into raw anguish. A beam of light isolates him as he turns a knife upon himself, for the first time a man undivided.
