Performance historian and scholar Christopher Grobe shares his thoughts on Orange Grove Dance's upcoming production of NEVERMORE.
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Coming up next at the Voxel is a wordless (and very wet!) adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and poems, a new work of dance theater called Nevermore. How is it possible to adapt literature without its words? Subtract them, and what’s left? And why dance Poe on a stage so filled with water? The words and links below are meant to help you find your own answers as you watch Nevermore.
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As any Baltimorean can tell you, water finds a way. It seeps through cracks, it carves through rock, it flows through hidden channels then overflows them, surging up through the ground. Living in Baltimore means being surrounded not only by water you see – formerly, the lifeblood of its mills; still, its gateway to the world – but also by news of damaging floods and watery deaths, rumors of ghost rivers beneath your feet, and threats that sinkholes will swallow you up before filling with water.
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Sometimes, it can feel as though you’re living in a tale by Baltimore’s own Edgar Allan Poe. A pioneer of literary horror, Poe’s tales feature explorers lost upon “a chaos of foamless water,” sailors devoured by terrible whirlpools, torture victims forced to the brink of fathomless wells, and families swallowed (along with their ancestral homes) into the inky waters of a “deep and dank tarn.” No wonder then that, after Poe’s death, Walt Whitman dreamt of him as a man whipped by rain, rocked by waves, on the verge of drowning, and yet “apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, the weirdness and the dislocation of which he was the center and the victim.”
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That last quotation was brought to my attention by Colette Krogol and Matt Reeves, co-artistic directors of Orange Grove Dance and choreographers of Nevermore. In keeping with Whitman’s vision of Poe, and with help from The Voxel’s technical director Alec Sparks, Krogol and Reeves plan to fill the theater with water: a shin-deep pool spanning the stage, a downpour raining from the rafters, and droplets spraying from every movement, extending every gesture.
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They also promise to do something remarkable: “dissolve” Poe’s words and focus instead on whatever remains. “Take everything you know about Poe and sink it to the bottom of the ocean,” Matt explains, “Nevermore is the unmarked grave of this work that has come back to the surface.” Poe was such an extravagant writer – his prose as purple as the sheen of a raven’s feathers – that it’s hard to imagine adapting his tales and poems into wordless dance theater. That is the challenge and thrill of Nevermore.
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As you watch, consider what remains of Poe after his famous words have resolved themselves into a dew. And, when you leave the theater, I hope you can escape the shuddering thought that Baltimore itself might be adapted from Poe.
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Christopher Grobe is a scholar and historian of performance and an English professor at Johns Hopkins University. A former actor, dramaturg, and theater critic, he is the author of The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV and is currently writing a new book on performance and American politics, So Performative!
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The Voxel is a theater laboratory in the heart of Baltimore City. We are an incubator, research lab, teaching center, and resource for local and national performing artists. We also publish https://charmcity.theater/.
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