Seeing Poe Anew – Why This Ballet Had to Be Made
When people hear the name Edgar Allan Poe, they usually think of shadows, ravens, and creaky floorboards. He’s been relegated to that sliver of American literature that comes out in October—spooky, mysterious, vaguely morbid. But the more I studied his writing, the less I saw a master of horror and the more I saw a man grasping for something beyond what he could explain. His work reads less like spectacle and more like a spiritual autopsy—honest, uneasy, and unresolved.
What ultimately shifted my perspective was reading Evermore by Dr. Harry Lee Poe, a direct descendant and one of the few scholars willing to take Poe’s spiritual questions seriously. Evermore reframes Poe not as a nihilist or a literary oddity, but as a deeply unsettled thinker caught between the expanding world of science and the shrinking public appetite for religious imagination. He was writing during the decades before the Civil War, in an America unraveling under the weight of slavery, violence, and philosophical uncertainty. And in that landscape, Poe was asking: Is there something more? Can we know it? Can we long for it even if we can’t prove it?
These questions are theological in the broadest sense, and they feel incredibly relevant right now. Our cultural moment is marked by polarization and loss, not unlike Poe’s. We’re still navigating moral fatigue, spiritual disconnection, and the ache of living in a world that seems to be forgetting how to listen. That’s what drew me to this project—not the tropes, but the tension. Not the legacy, but the longing.
“Poe was asking: Is there something more? Can we know it? Can we long for it even if we can’t prove it?”
I didn’t want to make a ballet that charts his life chronologically or ticks off literary references like a museum tour. Instead, we’re crafting a series of emotional vignettes, anchored in key texts like The Raven, Annabel Lee, The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia, and most centrally, Eureka. That last one is especially rich—it’s Poe’s attempt at cosmology, and it reads like a scientist trying to write a hymn. That dissonance became our doorway.
Dance has this unique ability to hold contradiction without collapsing it. Movement gives shape to what resists articulation. And that’s the space I wanted to work in—a space where longing and doubt coexist, where beauty doesn’t require certainty to be meaningful.
This ballet isn’t an answer. It’s a response. One that says: yes, grief is disorienting. Yes, the soul wants more than logic can offer. Yes, imagination matters—especially when the world is breaking.
In making this work, I’m reminded again why I choreograph. Not to provide escape, but to build a room where questions can breathe. Where stories—ours and Poe’s—can meet in the quiet space between music and motion.