HQ Review: The Queen and Her Ghosts, a new play
Bringing art to fruition while in process with other mediums of art is a careful line to walk. A counterbalance must be struck to ensure mediums complement and uplift the whole body of work rather than distract or disrupt. In The Queen and Her Ghosts, playwright and director Annalise McCann, choreographer Paige Van Nest, assistant director Caroline Pillow, dramaturg Grace Oliver, and musician Zach Tesch work to make this original play representative of balance and ensuring artists’ individual visions are cohesive and collaborative. Presented by Space Station Dance and the Chapel of the Arts, the debut run of The Queen and Her Ghosts focuses on the life and brief queenship of Lady Jane Grey, the ‘Nine Days Queen’.
As the lights come up we see a young Lady Jane Grey, played by Kathryn Pierce, lying center stage on the floor with a book. Over the speakers a violin strums with Zach Tesch’s original composition for the play. For every strum, Pierce moves with her book until she stands center stage. From both ends of the chapel various characters begin to enter walking towards Lady Grey. As they reach the center, they perform a unique movement phrase created by choreographer Van Nest to capture the essence and story of each character. Some slice their arms, others sweep their arms gently, and some are stiff and look coldly at the audience as they pass through the space. While this work is not driven by movement, it utilizes movement to accentuate meaning. Before much is said, this sequence introduces the audience to the players of The Queen non-verbally and allows us to make our own judgements, create ideas around the story we are about to witness, and start to establish a movement vocabulary the audience will pull from throughout the show.
Alone onstage, young Jane begins reading aloud and we are introduced to a precocious and sharp child. We meet her parents and see her interact with her dear friend and cousin King Edward. As these scenes fade, King Edward and his advisor Lord Dudley begin speaking about how sick Edward is and upon his passing Jane is to be crowned to ensure the crown is passed to a Protestant rather than his Catholic sister Anne. Here the king and lord exit as a young Jane enters. Behind her violin music kicks on and she performs a brief solo on the stairs of the chapel’s platform. She looks from side to side, presses the heel of her palm up, rolls her head, and performs gentle arabesques before walking onto the platform and to join Jade Cash who plays an older Jane. They stand on either side of a long rectangular table that sits in the center of the Chapel’s platform and mirror each other as they perform their character’s identifying movements. They slice their arms before pulling their hand across their neck, press their hands to the side, roll their head, and walk around the table before smoothly retrograding the previous movement phrase to signal the passage of time. As the phrase ends, young Jane steps off the platform and exits the space throwing a nervous glance back at her older self.
Throughout the play movement is used as a transition to elevate dialogue, showcase the inner turmoil of the characters, and emphasize plot points. In the rest of the first half, a simple wedding dance between Jane and her husband Guilford is performed which McCann drew from renaissance era dance. This half focuses on the crowning of Jane as queen after King Edward's death, the reform she seeks to make, and her and Guilford’s eventual arrest as Edward’s sister Mary overthrows Jane and has her arrested.
In the second half, much of the staging and movement is gestural and focuses on actor choices. Mirroring the first half of the show, the characters begin act two by entering the space and showing the path their character is on. Here, Van Nest assigned sets of movements and gestures to the actors which they interpreted and adjusted based on a character’s motivations.
Some indicate death, madness, or sorrow and as they each complete their solo, some of the characters' storylines are wrapped which allows a few of them to take on new character roles. During this sequence, a young Jane joins older Jane and they stand back to back. They drag their hands across their necks and press their hands side to side foreshadowing the fate of Jane.
This second half focuses on Jane’s imprisonment and the conversations she has with former queen Anne Boleyn and Anne Askew who were once kept in Jane’s cell. They tell her their stories, encourage her, and soothe her through her distress. At the end of the act, Jane’s death is simulated and darkness enfolds the chapel. The characters all come on stage to perform one last dance signalling the end of the play. Everyone crouches and in their own timing they stand and sway side to side. They reach up and grasp forward before pulling their hands back, they pivot and reach their arms up and into a handclasp of prayer before leaving the space. Soon Jane and her husband Guilford–who was executed with Jane– remain on stage. They begin to sway and step through their wedding dance from act one before clasping hands and walking out of the space into a bright light which beams through the Chapel’s doors.
Closing our time together, the cast and crew held a talk back where we got to learn more about the processes of the work. Van Nest spoke about how she created movement based on McCann’s script and worked to embody the text by picking emotions, words, or phrases to create movement and then assign to characters. Additionally, I had the pleasure to speak to McCann afterwards on the usage of dance and movement in The Queen. McCann spoke of incorporating dance to “give [the] opportunity to bring an ethereal energy into the rest of the world” they created. Movement in this play established exactly that– there was an ability for the audience to sink deeper into the story, follow the journey of the characters, and have an outlet for the various interpretations of the story.