To Hell and Back

Beltane                                                              Emergence

Dancers. Kinesthetic wonders. The James Sewell ballet troupe are lithe, strong, fluid. Many of the things they did with their bodies revealed possibilities I had not kenned. Several a male dancer with take a female dancer on his back, then they would move, him bent over slightly, her resting on his back with no holds on either part, just weight and angle keeping her in place. Or, deadlifts of a prone woman on the floor to hip height. The Inferno was 70  minutes long and the number of calories expended by the troupe would keep me thin for a couple of months, maybe longer.

Then there was the audacity of it. The level of creative challenge in taking a solid, 800 year old literary masterpiece and interpreting it in an essentially silent, physical medium is immense. This was a brave work. The score and the dancers took on us on a journey through the Inferno, going lower and lower, down the New York Subway into the infernal regions. The Sewell inferno is set, loosely, in New York City.

This story of damnation and mid-life crisis is timeless and the Sewell Ballet has done it well. Worth seeing.