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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

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