Choreographing the Haunted Soul — Behind the Movement of The Curious Life of Edgar Allan Poe

When I first began dreaming up The Curious Life of Edgar Allan Poe, I knew it couldn’t be a traditional narrative ballet. Poe’s work is rich with atmosphere and metaphysical questioning—his stories pulse with longing, madness, beauty, and spiritual ache. To do justice to that kind of interior world, the choreography needed to feel equally haunted and searching.

Rather than telling Poe’s life story in a linear fashion, the ballet journeys through his most iconic works—The Raven, Annabel Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart, and Ligeia—treating each piece as a window into a different facet of his soul. These aren't simply horror stories; they're laments. They ask unanswerable questions: What happens after death? Can beauty redeem suffering? Is there a God behind the veil?

In the studio, we’re using movement to embody these themes. Dancers explore states of collapse and tension, isolation and connection. There are no clean “heroes” or “villains”—only souls struggling to reconcile the spiritual and moral contradictions of their world. Just as Poe blurred the lines between reason and madness, our choreography blurs the lines between classical and contemporary technique, between text and abstraction.

We're also incorporating projections and sound design, allowing Poe’s language and tone to shape the rhythm of the body. It's a new kind of storytelling for us—one where the voice and the body echo one another to create a deeper resonance. The result is something poetic and raw, suspended between the 19th century and our own.

Ultimately, this ballet is not about horror. It's about hunger—for meaning, for beauty, for God. And in that way, Poe becomes a mirror: not just a man of the past, but a voice still asking the questions we’re afraid to name.