If the intricate poetry and grimly whimsical imagery of Arlington’s first and last scene weren’t enough to highlight its progressive theatrical form, Enda Walsh includes a mid-show scene without dialogue. For twenty minutes jammed in between the love story of Isla and Young Man, “Scene Two” allows the audience to observe a young woman’s last minutes, dancing them away in her tower cell. As she dances, she is able to shed the confines of captivity for a brief moment, before she ultimately escapes the tower in her death.
In a 2017 New York Times article, Brian Seibert explores the original production of the dance in Arlington’s run at St. Anne’s Playhouse. Preceding an interview with Walsh, Seibert describes choreographer Emma Martin’s crafting of the scene and its vivid imagery. “A woman, alone, stomps in place and slaps her chest and thighs. She runs in circles and spins. She weeps and crumples and slams into walls” (Seibert). With this violent imagery, Martin explains how she did not approach the scene as a dance or opportunity for choreography, but rather as a physical manifestation of this character’s deteriorating psyche. Seibert emphasizes this by describing how Walsh’s characters can sometimes “exhaust themselves into truth” (Seibert). By stripping Young Woman of language, Walsh is suggesting that this dance is the character’s ultimate truth, and what we come to know as her final truth.
In our production of Arlington, Kenny Giles and Alix Curnow combined to conceptualize and direct both the technical elements of the entire production, but also the second scene in its entirety. Giles chose to focus on the dance’s role as preparation for death by approaching the choreography as a physicalization of the five stages of grief.
“My approach to choreography was kind of how we approached producing the show. After all of the study we did on leadership styles in the first half of the internship, we wanted a very collaborative process for our show. So when I was working with Analisa, I gave her specific things to do at certain parts but also asked for her input on many things. Portions of the final piece actually ended up being improvisation from her based on the discussion we had about whatever stage of grief that we were working on.” – Kenny Giles, choreographer of Arlington
Dealing with the sparse direction provided by the script, Giles decided to consider the character’s thought process in the last twenty minutes of her life and landed on framing the dance as the character’s journey through the stages of grief. In describing his approach, he says, “I figured that if I was locked in a room in a tower, there would definitely be a grieving process for my life as I had previously known it. Splitting it into the five stages of grief meant that I could work on each stage individually and really be able to show the emotional journey that she goes through.”
Giles worked with dancer Analisa Sabo on the choreo, collaborating on the movements of each stage of grief. The two also worked together to map out the exact moment the character decides to end her life.
Below is the choreographer’s detailing of the dance:
“It starts with denial, anger, and bargaining. At the end of bargaining you see the young woman tear up her ticket signaling the loss of hope that she will ever leave the room. This is also the first time that she looks to the window as an escape. As she works through her depression–the fourth stage of grief–the window as a means of escape is revisited a few times. Each time, the curtain is opened more and more until she finally makes up her mind that this is how she will escape and completely pushes the curtains to the side. This is where she moves into the last stage of grief, acceptance. For this last section, we wanted to portray her acceptance of her fate: that she is going to die in this tower if she doesn’t leave. So it ended up being more acceptance mixed with despair. She struggles with the idea of the window as an escape one last time before she jumps. As she is sitting in the window she looks back twice, checking to see if anyone is going to stop her. She knows it’s not a good option, but it’s the only one she has. When no one comes, she jumps.”