Ballet is an Invitation to Wonder
When we began creating The Curious Life of Edgar Allan Poe, the most obvious approach was a chronological one. Childhood loss, West Point, the early successes, the devastating failures. It would have been neat, familiar, and predictable.
But the deeper I went into Poe’s writing, the more that framework unraveled. Poe didn’t experience life in clean chapters. His work moves more like a memory loop than a narrative arc—recursive, emotionally charged, and full of dissonance. He wasn’t offering explanations; he was inhabiting questions.
So instead of telling his story from beginning to end, we built the ballet in movements—each one a reflection on a central theme he returned to again and again: beauty, grief, death, memory, and the afterlife. These are not abstract motifs. For Poe, they were intimate, urgent, and often unresolved.
We pulled threads from The Raven, Annabel Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart, and Ligeia, not to illustrate them literally, but to listen more carefully. What is the emotional current beneath the words? What is the fear beneath the metaphor, the ache behind the rhyme?
“Movement helps us carry the weight of what can’t be explained in words.”
The final and most unexpected source was Eureka, a sprawling work of prose where Poe tries to map the cosmos. It reads like a physicist’s dream journal—part scientific theory, part spiritual yearning. That piece became our north star. Not because it tied things together neatly, but because it didn’t. Eureka gave us permission to explore Poe’s mind not as a closed book, but as a constellation of ideas still glowing at the edges.
Dance is especially well-suited to this kind of exploration. It resists the need for resolution. It allows an image to linger, a gesture to repeat, a silence to speak. Movement helps us carry the weight of what can’t be explained in words.
This ballet isn’t meant to be a biography or a lecture. It’s an invitation—to wonder, to grieve, to reach. Poe’s life was full of shadows, but also full of attempts to name the light. That tension is what drew me in, and what I hope will stay with you as you head out of the theater and into the city lights.