We filed into the Globe Theatre on a Saturday evening, twenty-two of my Shakespeare students from Emory’s Oxford College and me, prepared for a lecture about Shakespeare and dance. The event was called “Making Text Move,” and I had my expectations arranged like silverware: Ben Duke, the renowned choreographer, would explain his process, how one takes Shakespeare’s language and translates it into the body’s vocabulary. We would take notes. We would nod. We would understand something we hadn’t understood before, but in the way we generally understand things, which is to say, predictably.
This is not what happened.
What happened is that Ben Duke stood before us and said the title of his own talk—”Making Text Move”—made text sound like a lion, and him a lion tamer, threatening and cajoling with a chair and whip until the beast performs. “That’s not my process,” he said.
He began with a phrase from the evening’s description: “Ben Duke’s work is groundbreaking.” He’d printed these words on green paper, bright as spring grass, and in his hand he held a few copies that he distributed. The words were also written on a chalkboard, indisputable as mathematics. “These are solid words,” he said. Rational. External. Fixed. Independent. They exist whether we do or not. They weight the page like stones.
And he liked the word “groundbreaking” for his craft, he said, because the ground is solid, and what he seeks is to break through—through the solid, through the rational, through all that is fixed and external. We are programmed to need the solid ground. We build our houses on it, our arguments, sometimes our identities. But Shakespeare, Duke told us, wasn’t bothered by solidity at all: he made absolutely no effort to preserve his plays in text.
Duke described his own trajectory: he did a degree in English literature first, where he lived among texts. Then a drama degree, where text became embodied but still tethered to language. And finally dance, where he found the body itself, unmediated. He’d come home to his own way of being in the world, which is to say, he’d traveled backward through certainty into mystery. He quoted Martha Graham: “Movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather to all who can read it.”
Then he showed us.
The front of the stage, he said, represents rational text, external, solid, and self-conscious. He stood there facing us, fully visible, fully aware of being seen. Then he began moving backward toward the Globe’s beautifully ornate back wall, that carved and painted architecture that rises like a cathedral behind the stage. As he moved away from us, he moved away from rationality, from language, from the external. He became invisible to himself. He moved and breathed in strange, unselfconscious ways, as though he were completely alone, as though we had ceased to exist. Something loosened in his shoulders, his spine. He was no longer performing movement; he was movement, untranslated.
Then he walked forward again. With each step toward us, consciousness returned—self-awareness, self-consciousness, the knowledge of being watched. By the time he reached the stage’s edge, he was fully returned to language, to solidity, to the rational front. And there, looking at us, he spoke Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an Angel, in apprehension how like a god.”
One of my favorite emotions is when I encounter something that contradicts how I always felt the world was structured. That’s what happened.
(Ben Duke in Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me).
© Zoe Manders)
Because I’m a text girl. I’m not an actor, not a musician, not a dancer. When I was a child, my emotions were weather systems I couldn’t predict or control—sudden storms, inexplicable calms, a chaos that frightened me with its intensity. Then I found, somewhere in my early years, that poetry gave that chaos a shape. Text became a container I could carry, the way you might carry water in cupped hands. The words held what was too large and formless to hold otherwise and that helped the world make more sense. I have lived my whole life in this faith: that language is the vessel for experience, the frame that makes meaning possible. I write in order to understand what I think and feel.
And here was Ben Duke telling me that the frame is what constrains him. That he seeks the pure thing—the emotion, the gesture, the breath—and the text is merely how he carries it to us. For him, text is the frame and movement is the content. He doesn’t turn to Hamlet’s words and puzzle out how to express them in the body. He finds something true in the body first, something that doesn’t have language yet, and then—only then—he gives it a frame in text so we can see it.
He demonstrated with two dancers, Hannah Shepherd-Hulford and Miguel Altunaga. They performed a duet—angular, strange, full of tension and something that might have been longing or might have been repulsion. We watched. Then Duke said: “Now, I’m Hamlet. I used to be close to my uncle. People said we looked alike. Then once, when I was eighteen, I saw him dancing with my mom at a school dance…”
They performed the same choreography again but it was utterly different. Or maybe we were different? The movement hadn’t changed, but the frame had, and suddenly we could see what had been there all along—a betrayal told in the body before the mind knew how to speak it.
Hannah, one of the dancers, said she loves dance projects that “aren’t beautiful.” Duke said he “likes impossible tasks because you can only fail at them.” This is why he directed Paradise Lost as a dance—Milton’s ten-thousand-line poem about the creation of the world, about his first two children, about what went wrong and how God set it right. An impossible task. A groundbreaking one.
He said he works best with dancers who are “up for being lost.”
I want my students to know that Tuesday evening was what college should be. It was material not limited to an acquisition of facts or dates, not even a list of transferrable skills, though these have their place the way solid ground has its place. College should be the thing that breaks the ground you’re standing on. It should introduce you to brilliant people who think and act in the world in ways that make no sense according to your current architecture of meaning—the way interlocking toes made no sense to Ben Duke in drama school, the way sometimes he made no sense to us that evening.
I know some of us were baffled by the evening. We walked out of the Globe uncertain what we’d witnessed or whether we’d understood correctly. I want to say: Yes. That bafflement is the point. You came to London to study Shakespeare—to study the most solid, most canonical, most famous pillar of English literature. And instead you spent an evening watching a man argue, without arguing, that Shakespeare knew something about breaking through solidity that we’ve forgotten in our reverence for the text.
The bafflement means you’re encountering something your current framework can’t metabolize. It means you’re at the edge of yourself. This is growth. This is why you’re here.
We are not here to become lion tamers, threatening beauty into performing for us. Sometimes we’re here to move backward, away from the solid front of the stage, into the place where we become invisible to ourselves, where something true moves through us that doesn’t have language yet. And then—only then—we walk back toward the rational, carrying what we found, and we try to build a frame that can hold it without crushing it.
Some of you may leave London more comfortable with text, more grateful for its containing power. Some of you may leave more skeptical of rationality and lean into the mystery. Both are true. Both are good. What matters is that you sat in the Globe on a Saturday evening and let a choreographer break your ground, and you stayed standing in the broken place long enough to feel what it’s like when the solid cracks and something else breathes through.
