"People like Will Self who... described Dodgson as " indisputably a pedophile" and Waldemar Janudczak "the disgusting Lewis Carroll" happily pass on old ideas without the slightest idea of the pedigree of the stuff they're reciting." - Karoline Leach, 1999
(All images used in this essay are by Agathe Poupeney and/or Ballet du Rhin and are owned by Divergance-images and Ballet Du Rhin)
With thanks to @Curiouserarchive for proof reading this essay!
Amir Hosseinpour and Jonathan Lunn's ballet Alice (2022) was announced by Ballet de l'opera national du Rhin in 2021, amongst other projects for the ballet and opera house. It was broadcast online in early April this year. Press notes were keen to emphasize Lunn and Hosseinpour's connections with composer Phillip Glass, who had provided a score. Glass donated the music but was not involved in shaping the ballet nor its storyline. Despite this, the piece is near-constantly referred to in the press as “Phillip Glass’s Alice.”
Upon hearing the score, Hosseinpour and Lunn found: “right away, we said to ourselves that it's Alice in Wonderland.” Originally an adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the strategy of adaptation drastically shifted: the two choreographers became interested and mired in the “biography” of Charles Dodgson. It is currently unknown what books and source, if any, Hosseinpour and Lunn consulted. Interviews do not give this insight. We can guess that the choreographers did not consult any recent biographies or research as they describe:
"the story behind" the story... author Lewis Carroll, a relative of the children of the Liddell family, including... Alice with whom he had a troubled relationship.".
The piece as a whole flirts heavily with what Franziska Kholt has coined as “the dangers of biopic realism,” someone's perceptions and personal opinions of a historical figure presented as objective fact via the biopic genre.
This fixation on the idea of scandal, harm, and abuse is one that has followed writers of fiction about Dodgson for decades. As scholar Will Brooker contends,
"journalism thinks it knows [who Dodgson is] and assumes its readers agree".
Although Brooker was talking about journalism, it is clear from a pattern of biopics (from Dennis Potter's Alice and Dreamchild to this work) that writers have long been captivated, maybe near obsessed with seeing Dodgson through this highly inaccurate lens. Why is this theory, the now much-debunked falsehood of “Dodgson the abuser,” still being perpetuated in 2022?
It is a great wonder that Alice (2022) got made at all. Was it Glass's music composition that persuaded du Rhin that this was a worthwhile project? Reviews skirt around the subject matter. Much like the press photos that did not show Dodgson for a long while, reviews seem desperate to leave this key main character out.
"The ballet becomes a tableau vivant in a setting....References abound, deliciously British " "Nourished by many influences, the joyful and unbridled dance is imbued with a strong theatricality"
These reviews praise the dancing, the music, the scenery, and the staging, anything to avoid mentioning Dodgson as a character and the loose plot of this piece. The few reviews that do are teeming with falsehoods about the man, feeding into myths:
"this Alice does not evacuate the gray areas of a man that a Victorian education corseted down to a stutter that only disappeared when faced with children."
" [A] solitary and isolated artist. A stuttering teacher in front of a particularly laughing and agitated classroom"
The paradox of Alice (2022) is that it exists despite decades of research to disprove everything in it. The wafer-thin veil of biography that is here will give no one any insight.
Sunnyi Melles's Old Alice Hargreaves “remembers” events from the past, mixed in with scenes from Alice in Wonderland. Charles Dodgson (Marwik Schmitt) is introduced floating around in the pool of tears in a digital camera. He is later seen angrily screaming at some students in a classroom (who you might presume are meant to be Oxford undergraduates, but the scene never confirms itself as Christ Church). Throughout the whole piece, he frequently tries to harm and/or kidnap Young Alice (Susie Buisson). There’s a scene in the Duchess's kitchen where they dance around a giant Alice dress provocatively, Young Alice clad only in underclothes. There’s also a scene in a forest where Schmitt's Dodgson kidnaps Buisson's Alice through a door.
These faux biographical interludes are interspersed with scenes from Alice in Wonderland with lurid twists: Young Alice smokes a cigar at the tea party, and a camera-like eye follows her around the hall of doors. The piece is punctuated with bizarre, off-putting recitations of Dodgson's poems which are almost slurred and often whispered to deliberately eerie effect (poems are from the Alice books and, painfully in one scene, Dodgson's personal poetry written to entertain his younger siblings).
There is no story, because none is afforded. Paradoxically for a piece about remembering, nothing biographically accurate IS remembered. It is instead a woozy mimic of several falsehoods which have been roundly debunked about Dodgson, an anti-memory piece. Research is not mandatory; indeed, if any was done, it would derail the Alice project significantly. The depth of the historical Liddell and Dodgson, lives lived, interests, friends, and loves are too much for the writers to bare. Dodgson's massive adult circle of friends, interest in art, and clandestine visits to seaside towns with adult ladies are all too inconvenient truths.
No realistic qualities can be seen in Dodgson or either of the Alices. They are simplistic. Dodgson is coded as bad because he harms and angers easily, resorting to abuse and then writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to “make up” for it. Appallingly, there is a scene of Schmitt's Dodgson writing the Alice tale JUST after he harms Buisson's Young Alice, two scenes so contrary to history that they never happened.
Likewise, the two Alices are portrayed as victims and nothing else. Buisson's Young Alice must run from Dodgson, and Melles's Old Alice must remain trapped as a victim, gasping out poetry in her drawing room. The piece claims to care about Mrs Hargreaves looking back on her life, but it does not care for the historical woman. Caryl, Reginald, and family are not featured. Nothing outside of wholly imagined interactions with Dodgson are shown. Mimicking the equally bad taste Alice in China (2014), Alice (2022) enacts a ritual of harming the character of Dodgson onstage at the end of the piece. Here, Schmitt's Dodgson dies under a blood red moon, Melles’s Alice recovering a piece of paper from his jacket before declaring "One day you will see a bright dawn." Like China, Alice (2022) enacts this death so the audience can go home with the satisfaction that they have seen “a bad man punished.”
This piece invites its audience to hate Charles Dodgson the character (and by proxy the man himself) quite unlike any piece before it. It has neither the authority nor the complexity to speak of the real man nor his era. It is not interested in that. Fortunately, a wealth of scholars very much are, and do not despise Charles Dodgson in the way this piece does. Lewis Carroll societies would not exist if the historical Dodgson did half of what this piece portrays him doing. The real shame is that Dodgson's descendants are powerless to stop pieces such as this. It is up to us, writers and scholars, to highlight and try to repair that damage.
Sources:
Books:
Leach, Karoline In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: The Myth and Reality of Lewis Carroll. London: Peter Owen Press. 2015
Brooker, Will. Alice's adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. London: Continuum: 2004
Newspapers:
Poizat, Helene, "The Ballet du Rhin in the land of Alice and Lewis, from Friday in Mulhouse" La Alsace, Published 8th of Feburary 2022.
Noisette, Phillipe ""Alice", a marvel of ballet" Les Echos, Published 14th of February 2022.
https://www.lesechos.fr/weekend/spectacles-musique/alice-une-merveille-de-ballet-1386890
Websites
Clairet, Jean-Luc "Alice by Philip Glass: The Rhine Opera Ballet in Wonderland" Resmusica.com Published 14th of February 2022.
Candoni, Christophe "Alice, multiple heroine of a delirious ballet" Sceneweb.fr. Published 23rd of February 2022.
https://sceneweb.fr/alice-choregraphie-de-amir-hosseinpour-et-jonathan-lunn-pour-le-ballet-de-lonr/
Photos:
Poupeney, Agathe "Divergence images: Alice/Phillip Glass/ Amir Hosseinpour/Jonathan Lunn" Divergence images, 2022.
Various images, press photos from Opera National du Rhin.
Papers
Kholt, Franziska "Peter and Alice: the dangers of biopic Realism" 2013, The Lewis Carroll Review. Issue 50.
