‘The Dante Project’: A Balletic Take on One of the World’s Great Stories
A review of ‘The Dante Project’ at the Royal Opera House, London.
We all know the story. ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ — ‘midway upon the journey of our life’ — Dante’s pilgrim finds himself ‘within a forest dark, the straight way having been lost’. He is 35 years old, and thus at the point of his own life, but we, the human species, are also at the midpoint of our collective time on earth. The story is both universal and particular; and one that will require our interpretation. It is an allegory whose central character, Dante’s pilgrim, is not quite the author, and yet who shares the feelings of the author, who has fallen from grace from a position of power in Florence to ignominy and penury and exile, that he has lost his bearings. He does not know what to do any more. He is experiencing fragmentation — psychologically speaking, the feeling that there are too many options, from which anxiety and hopelessness springs.
The Commedia is an allegory of the human being’s journey towards that force that resolves all of our contradictions; binds us with ourselves, with others and with the world itself; and shows us the way forward. It is, to use the common religious language, an allegory of the soul’s journey towards God. In Inferno, Dante’s pilgrim comes face to face with the worst sins of the human being and the poetic punishments that are equal and fitting to the crime — what is called contrapasso. In Purgatorio, having become mindful of his sins, our pilgrim must ascend the seven-storey mountain (caused, in Dante’s mythology, by the impact of Lucifer striking the earth on his fall from Heaven) and shed his sin. In Paradiso, Dante’s pilgrim finally ascends to God, who manifests one of the author's central intellectual themes, the coexistence of unity and difference, the One and the Many. The story ends with one of the most beautiful and powerful phrases in all of literature as Dante’s pilgrim experiences the most powerful force in all of the world: ‘The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.’
In Purgatorio, having become mindful of his sins, our pilgrim must ascend the seven-storey mountain.
To take this story, in all of its complexity, and render it in dance alone, is a mammoth undertaking, and yet it is one that the Royal Ballet, in collaboration with the Paris Opera, decided in 2021 that it would attempt. In late 2023, their performance returned to London and to the Royal Opera House, and I had the absolute pleasure of going to see it. In this take, conceived by Wayne McGregor, each act corresponds to one of the canticles. Inferno takes place in a dark underworld of inverted and jagged chalk-drawn mountain peaks; Purgatorio is in a lighter setting, unfolding against a backdrop of a large and living tree; in Paradiso the music is dreamy and celestial and the dancers, clothed in white, spin and shine — angels and heavenly bodies encircling the pilgrim as he reaches towards the divine.
In this take, conceived by Wayne McGregor, each act corresponds to one of the canticles.
What the creators and cast of The Dante Project are able to render is breathtaking. In Inferno, the dancers who play the shades frozen in the river Cocytus are held down by other dancers; the torment of Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous couple who cannot leave one another though they know their relationship is wrong, express their torment with extraordinary beauty and passion through their dance. The whole performance culminates in a pas de deux between Dante’s pilgrim and Beatrice, Dante’s muse and the pilgrim’s guide through Heaven; and in the final moments bright white smoke swells and a dazzling light grows in strength so as to fill the entirety of the theatre, bringing the show to a close in a burst of light so brilliant that I find myself squinting to see the silhouettes fading on the stage.
Due to its detailed theology, Dante’s Commedia has been called, in reference to the foundational Catholic work by St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘the Summa in verse’; but the story of his pilgrim is our story. It deals with one who has erred and lost his certainties, who finds himself on his own, absent, perhaps for the first time, of a guiding horizon towards which to walk. He has an intimation of the right way to go, but finds that his journey will not be straightforward. He must first understand how he reached this point, and why the north star that has made itself known to him ought to be his guiding light. The road will be meandering and unforgiving, and will at every turn give him reason to turn around. But if he remains true to the path—if he has faith—then he will be rewarded. That the Royal Ballet and the Paris Opera had the boldness to take this story on, to try to bring it to a new audience and that, moreover, they pulled it off, is quite the achievement.
