7

Thursday, May 14, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

It’s said that every theater is inhab-
ited by at least one ghost and contrary 
to legends propagated by Hallow-
een, these ghosts do not like the dark. 
Thus, when the curtain falls and a 
theater’s house empties, an employee 
will leave a light — a ghost light — to 
burn onstage until the performers 
return. Across the world, ghost lights 
have remained on and untouched for 
months. But the lives of performers 
continue offstage, each day adding 
pressure to find performance spaces 
on digital platforms. What happens 
when the ghost lights keep burning 
and we’re left with a stage wholly 
mediated by posts, shares, comments 
and likes? 
I recently opened a message from 
my best friend that was a response 
to a picture I’d sent her of the Ann 
Arbor sunset. She’d quickly typed a 
heart eyes emoji, meant to encapsu-
late her reaction to the beams of soft 
light that glinted through the fresh 
spring leaves of a tree on Geddes 
Avenue. In the chat, we continued a 
small conversation. “I’ve really got-
ten into light lately,” she said, tell-
ing me about the strings of morning 
sun that burst through a window in 
her Massachusetts home. I thought 
about my own morning when I had 
lay in bed, half awake, luxuriating in 
the warmth of sunlight that pierced 
through my apartment’s window 
and onto the lower half of my legs. 
“Me too,” I told her. 
As Michigan wakes up from a 
notoriously cloudy winter, the new 
rays of light appear as unbelievable 
beings between timid blooms of 

flowers and trees. Our state and our 
world remain cloistered under the 
dark wrath of an ongoing pandemic, 
but the sun and its growing days are 
blissfully unaware — springtime 
happens even in war. 
In 2008, Christopher Wheeldon 
made a ballet that chased after this 
thought: “Within the Golden Hour” 
weaves together 14 dancers in an 
architecture that wavers between 
fast and slow, large and small, ani-
mal and human. Initially inspired 
by artwork from Gustav Klimt, 
Wheeldon based his choreography 
in Klimt’s use of golden light. The 
dancer’s movements are airy and 
sometimes intangible, creating a 
sense of the sublime — a concept that 
inspired many of Klimt’s contempo-
raries. When the work was restaged 
for the Royal Ballet in 2016, Jasper 
Conran added costumes of diapha-
nous netting with reflective rect-
angles sewn into a middle layer. The 
result is a shimmery construction of 
fabric that reflects each movement 
onstage. In essence, the dancers 
become beams of light themselves. 
In the piece, three lead couples 
complete central sections of vary-
ing energies and four background 
groups braid themselves into undu-
lating structures behind them. The 
seven couples weave in and out of 
each other’s shapes, never stopping 
and never static. They move both 
simultaneously 
and 
individually, 
calmly switching between the two 
to create a spectacle of subtle bril-
liance. Ezio Bosso’s music matches 
the movement in a dynamic sense of 
exploration. By the end of the clips 
found online, it quite fittingly feels 
as if my screen could erupt in shining 
golden light. All told, the work feels 

like a spring bloom that buds new 
connections and sends life through 
newly constructed architectures of 
life. 
“Within the Golden Hour” hasn’t 
gotten much attention lately. Among 
the growing list of ballets being 
uploaded and live streamed by com-
panies desperate to share their art 
and gain much-needed attention, 
this piece hasn’t been one of them. 
This statement is born less from 
frustration and more from oppor-
tunity. It may seem like the work 
is less accessible than those pieces 
found on YouTube or Instagram, but 
the memory of “Within the Golden 
Hour” manages to still feel quite 
relevant. Its message of explora-
tion, growth and light feels eternally 
responsive to the human condition. 
Even when limited to a few archi-
val clips and new technological 
divisions between the artist and 
the observer, “Within the Golden 
Hour”’s themes remind me that a 
piece of dance can remain relevant 
even as its visual presence tempo-
rarily fades. 
Lives are stripped bare right now. 
We’re existing in a polarity of fear 
and hope, left with little to distract 
us from our position between the 
two. We will need a lot of newness to 
move on — new medicine, new jobs 
and new normals. But some things 
will stay the same. Springtime will 
bloom and sunshine will weave its 
way through new leaves. Flowers 
will move in the newfound warmth 
of the sun just as humans will dance 
as we begin to rebuild. From afar, 
“Within the Golden Hour” con-
tinually teaches us of our own con-
nection to such light and celebrates 
what it means to be alive.

On light and livestreaming

ZOE PHILLIPS 
Daily Arts Writer

SUMMER SERIES
SUMMER SERIES

Netflix

I’ve 
been 
having 
a 
hard 
time keeping track of time, but 
Goodreads indicates that it took 
me just under two weeks to read 
“Pride and Prejudice.” For some 
reason it feels like longer. Or 
maybe not? Time is passing in 
strange ways now. Maybe it’s that 
everything I do now has a greater 
tendency to completely fill my 
field of vision. When I decided 
to read Austen’s classic, it was all 
I really wanted to do. Her long, 
intricate sentences seemed to take 
up my entire brain. 
My housemate, who is the kind 
of person who read these novels in 
her adolescence, lent me her copy. 
It’s one of those ugly-but-useful 
Dover Critical Editions that has a 
bunch of essays and an eye-water-
ingly extensive bibliography in 
the back. She told me she’s read it 
six or seven times and you can tell. 
Her marginalia is that of some-
one with a real affinity for the 
material, as well as someone who 
knows what’s going to happen 
almost by heart. When Wickham 
tells Elizabeth his (misrepre-
sented) life story, my housemate 
filled the margins with skepti-
cism. “Consider how unusual at 
the time it would be to just say all 
of this directly to someone you 
just met,” she wrote. Elizabeth 
says something similar later on: 
“She was now struck with the 
impropriety of such communica-
tion to a stranger, and wondered 
it had escaped her before.” My 
housemate’s experience of this 
book reminds me of Zadie Smith’s 
analogy for rereading: like walk-
ing into a house whose rooms 
you know very well, and you can 
see clearly the placement of the 
objects and their relationships to 
each other. 
Elsewhere, 
my 
housemate’s 
annotations 
are 
enthusiastic. 
“OMG he is so bad at this,” she 
writes next to Darcy’s awkward 
attempts to converse with Lizzy 
Bennet. “Awful,” she writes next 
to one of Mr. Collins’s ponder-
ously 
misogynistic 
speeches. 
Austen is a writer who inspires 
this kind of immediate affinity, 

fandom even, in a way that a lot 
of other literary writers don’t. I 
wanted to share this affinity, but I 
couldn’t. Even though I felt a sort 
of affinity for her style and meth-
ods, I never felt fully absorbed by 
it. This is, of course, my fault and 
I immediately felt bad about it. I 
don’t really care about the canon, 
not exactly, but it does bother me 
a little bit that when someone 
asks me what my favorite novel 
is, I will answer with something 
published in the last 5-10 years. 
Uh, “My Year of Rest and Relax-
ation”? Maybe “Conversations 
With Friends”? I could lie and say 
“The Last Samurai.” That’s a book 
that people who want to be writ-
ers are allowed to have as their 
favorite, I think. It’s not that these 
are not good books, but it’s that I 
feel a little bit of shame at their 
topicality. They feel like news 
items and therefore whatever the 
opposite of edifying is. Of course, 
it’s not that I haven’t read “Jane 
Eyre” or anything, it’s just that 
I am not the kind of person who 
loves that kind of thing. 
What is “that kind of thing,” 
anyway? Maybe it’s the ethos 
Austen depicts. Her characters—
mostly the lower end of the gen-
try who are, in their own way, 
precariously situated—spend a lot 
of their time visiting each other. 
They are constantly coming in 
and out of each other’s houses, 
being entertained in rooms spe-
cifically designed for the purpose, 
having conversations and judging 
each other’s conversational abili-
ties. Conversation is like a game 
for these people: they are always 
trying to impress other people 
and (sometimes) trying to be fair 
and judicious in their own assess-
ments. Darcy, who pretty early on 
refuses to dance with anyone at a 
ball and barely speaks to anyone, 
is met with such universal disdain 
by the Hertfordshire set because 
he basically confronts the con-
cerns that animate these people’s 
lives and says “no, thank you.” No 
one seemingly dislikes him more 
than Elizabeth Bennet, who, as 
we know, ends up with Darcy in 
the end. 

A second reading 
of Jane Austen

EMILY YANG
Managing Arts Editor

BOOKS NOTEBOOK

Read more at michigandaily.com

THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE

