Review: ALICE by MOMIX, Joyce Theater, New York City

How, just how, has it been nine years since I last reviewed an experimental production based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) for this blog? Well, the world’s second most translated novel is always inspiring new artistic treatments, and last week I was lucky enough to watch ALICE, the MOMIX dance company’s take on the classic tale, at the Joyce Theater in NYC.

Founded and directed by Moses Pendleton, MOMIX is known for innovative choreography and illusions using the human form, and the original Alice story is full of incidents and moments that lend themselves to this surrealist treatment. The show doesn’t really have a narrative. Instead, we move through a series of dances encapsulated different parts of Carroll’s book. Below I describe a few of my favorites…

A Summer Day: The set displays an idyllic English landscape. A girl in a white dress reads a book titled ALICE, after turning it upside down. She’s sitting on one end of a ladder on wires. The other is manipulated by a bowtied man. Sometimes she soars high; sometimes she comes gliding down. The book falls. Her feet graze the floor. Are the pair playing on a seesaw, dancing a duet, or bicycling together through midair? It’s a bright and playful start to the show, but by the time this first dance ends we already feel twisted around, like we’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole, headfirst.

The Tweedles: Four muscular bodies clothed only in nude underwear. The dancers’ faces? Hidden. The dancers wear giant cardboard cutouts of babies’ faces, which look bizarre and alien at this scale. The two pairs of “twins” gyrate, their movements synchronized. How can something so symmetrical feel so disturbing?

The Lobster Quadrille: Women in giant red and black hoop skirts prance around the stage, while a song plays. Carroll’s lyrics are repetitive and haunting (“will you, won’t you join the dance?”). The dancers’ boned skirts becomes their exoskeletons, which they manipulate into different shapes. The women aren’t women at all, but ballroom crustaceans. Soon their heads are swallowed by their costumes, leaving them looking like a series of huge, inhuman, and still dancing claws.

Cracked Mirrors: Another series of “duets” but now the performers are dancing with their own reflections, holding up large looking glasses as they move. At some angles the men in the mirrors appear to be totally different performers. At some moments, we lose sight of limbs. Bodies seem to be fractured here, just like any sense of self we had when we entered this strange world, where people don’t just grow or shrink, but multiply.

What show would you like to see the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Quiz: Name the fictional 19th-century pet!

The Secret Victorianist at the Grolier Club: Alice in a World of Wonderlands, The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece

Last weekend I went to an exhibition that is a testament to the far-reaching power of the human imagination and to the importance of collaborative scholarship.

The exhibition

Alice in a World of Wonderlands marks 150 years since the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by investigating the translations into 176 different languages that have emerged since the work’s publication and are the subject of a new book that shares the exhibition’s name.

Finnish translation (1952)

Finding and cataloguing these translations, and their editions, was a labour of love and involved a lot of detective work, with over 250 unpaid volunteers tracking down texts all over the world.

Christina Rossetti's signed copy of the first (German) translation of Alice (1869)

German was the first language other than English in which Alice first came to life (in 1869).  French, Swedish, Italian, Danish and Dutch soon followed in the nineteenth century, some with Carroll’s knowledge and consent, others without.

Catalan translation (1927)

But it is in the twentieth century that we see a proliferation of Alices (not that the central character always has this name). From Breton to Urdu, Esperanto to Pitjantjatjara, Hebrew to Malay, many readers have been taken down the rabbit hole. The question is – what do they find there?

Vladamir Nabokov's (Russian) translation (1923)

Alice in a World of Wonderlands, edited by Jon A. Lindseth and Alan Tannenbaum, for instance, contains 251 back translations into English to see how different translators approached the task of rendering one of Carroll’s poems:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you're at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea tray in the sky.

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you're at!

Romanian translation (1991)

Native English speakers recognise this as a parody of the children’s nursery rhyme ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, but translated literally into another tongue this context will be lost. This speaks directly to the translation debate of domestication vs. foreignisation. In other words, is it the role of the translator to educate the reader about the culture in which it was produced (here Victorian Britain) or to make the writer’s intention more immediately apparent by using shorthands with which he or she is familiar from their own culture.

Marathi translation (1982)

The translator of a version in Marathi for example (one of 12 Indian languages included in the catalogue) was one of those who decided to play with a rhyme familiar to his readers. He writes:

‘When I transformed Alice into Jaai I taught her not only customs and traditions of this land, but also the popular songs of this soil known to all.’

Poster for a Japanese stage play (1998)

Seeing the exhibition in person, one of the most obvious things to be struck by is the incredible range of visual responses to the text and John Tenniel’s illustrations. Cover illustrations range from the saccharine to the surreal, with the influence of Disney’s 1951 animated feature film clear. Alice seems to hold particular visual appeal in Japan, as posters for Alice-inspired stage plays are also on display here – maybe not surprising given the natural co-option of Alice into Lolita fashion.

Alphagram translation (2012)

This interactive map allows you to explore the myriad wonderlands inspired by one story told in Oxford on a sunny day, but if you’re in New York City, I’d definitely recommend checking out the exhibition in person. I already reviewed the Morgan Library & Museum’s retrospective into the novel’s origins, but it is at the Grolier Club that the legend of Alice seems to be very much alive.

Hebrew translation (1923)

The exhibition Alice in a World of Wonderlands, The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece is running until November 21 at the Grolier Club. Entrance is free.

Bosnian translation (2008)

Do you know of any other nineteenth-century exhibitions in NYC you think the Secret Victorianist should visit? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Review: Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland, Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

Today the Secret Victorianist fell down the rabbit hole at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, visiting their special exhibition on the publication history of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), one of the most loved and enduringly popular novels in the English language.

One of Tenniel's illustrations

At the heart of the retrospective is a unique exhibit (on loan from the British Library) – the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground that Dodgson (Carroll) gave to Alice Liddell (the inspiration for Alice) in 1864. This manuscript does not include some incidents that were to become central to Wonderland as we know it (for instance, the duchess whose baby is transformed into a pig), so is especially valuable in demonstrating the evolution of the text from an extempore oral narrative composed on a sunny day in Oxford to a published novel. The manuscript also contains Carroll’s original illustrations, before he turned to the talents of Punch cartoonist John Tenniel for his now iconic renderings of Alice.

Alice's Adventures Under Ground manuscript

The exhibition does a good job of interesting visitors in questions of bibliography – no doubt largely because of the highly visual focus. The illustrations, in various levels of completion, and from several different hands, serve as a beautiful guide to the evolution of a book – they alone tell the story how a tale born from the imagination of one man or a woman will be transformed by the influencers it meets on its journey to publication and beyond.

One of Tenniel's illustrations

Along with illustrations, early print editions, and the Under Ground manuscript, the exhibition also puts on show: personal items belonging to Alice Liddell at the time of the story’s conception, Dodgson’s correspondence pertaining to the publication of the text, other children’s books originating from the period, and some pieces of contemporary Alice-themed ephemera (my favourite was a Wonderland-styled biscuit tin). They also displayed scenes from the novel’s first film adaptation, in 1903 (inserted here).

The exhibition title had led me to think there might have been a greater emphasis on the text’s reception history further into the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, but, while this is rich territory for discussion, (perhaps appropriately) it is not the focus at the Morgan. The early years of Wonderland give a fascinating glimpse into the publishing landscape of the mid-nineteenth century, appealing to any book-lover. So visit to discover how Carroll’s Alice was realised and became a milestone in children’s publishing, or for an accessible introduction to the study of bibliography.

First edition: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice: 150 Years of Wonderland is running until 11^th October 2015 at the Morgan Library and Museum. Entrance to the museum is $19 for adults.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Do you know of any other NYC exhibitions you think the Secret Victorianist should review? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Victorian Literature for Kids

Have you always loved nineteenth-century novels and want the same for your children? Or did you learn to like literature later in life and want your kids to embrace classic literature earlier? In this post I’ll be giving you my top tips for getting children interested in Victorian writing and also suggesting a few things to avoid.

'A Life Well Spent', Charles West Cope (1862)

Foster a love of reading generally:

Presenting a seven year old, who isn’t in the habit of reading regularly, with a copy of Bleak House, is a bit like giving a six month old a steak. It’s not going to end well, however bright they are. So incorporate reading into children’s lives from early on. Make bedtime stories part of your night-time routine, give your kids books as gifts, and encourage them to read for fun and tell you what they enjoy about what they’re reading. At this stage, the amount kids read and how much they enjoy it is so much more important than being prescriptive about what they read.

Give them modern books which deal with Victorianism:

Nineteenth-century novels can be challenging because of the style in which they are written, more so than their content. Starting with contemporary novels and history books can introduce kids to some of the themes of Victorian writing and help them build up knowledge about the period, without dealing with difficult prose.

There are historical novels specifically written for children, like Jacqueline Wilson’s The Lottie Project (1997) and Hetty Feather (2010) and Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke (1985), and kids’ history books like Terry Deary’s Vile Victorians (1994) in the Horrible Histories series. Chat with them about differences they might have noticed between then and now. How was life different for boys and girls? What would life as a servant have been like? How did people travel and communicate with each other before cars and telephones? Appreciating lives very different from your own is a key reading skill and you’ll be encouraging critical engagement with texts as your children grow into more sophisticated readers.

'Teasing the Cat', William Henry Gore (c. 1900)

Read Victorian children’s literature:

Rather than diving straight in with Jane Eyre, when the time comes when you think your kids are ready to read nineteenth-century texts (or to have you read to them), turn to children’s literature. Books like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales (1835-1872), E. Nesbit’s The Treasure-Seekers (1899) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) have an enduring appeal for kids and, unlike many nineteenth-century texts, do not deal with themes (e.g. illegitimacy, murder, inheritance) which may be too adult for your children at this stage.

Nineteenth-century poetry written for kids, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), can also be a low commitment way to get your kids reading some older writing and increasing their familiarity with poetry.

Watch TV and film adaptations of famous novels:

There’s absolutely no rule that people should read famous texts before watching adaptations of them and, for kids, already having familiarity with a story can be invaluable when it comes to tackling harder texts. Watching together also gives you the opportunity to talk about what’s going on and pause whenever something isn’t clear. I recommend BBC mini-series, like North and South (2004), Pride and Prejudice (1994) and Bleak House (2005), for quality and digestibility.

'Storytime', Charles Haigh-Wood (1893)

And what not to do:

Don’t tell your kids there are books they ‘should’ read. Similarly, I’d avoid the term ‘classics’. Reading should be fun – not a chore – and pushing too hard can have the opposite effect. It’s already sadly very likely that kids will come to dislike set texts they’re made to study at school (see my post on secondary school English literature teaching here), so don’t let the same happen at home!

Don’t make a big deal about length and number of pages. Lots of Victorian novels are quite long and, for a while, the ability to boast about having read a 300-page book may be motivating. But it won’t last and focussing on length will make reading seem a drag.

I’d also avoid abridged versions of nineteenth-century novels which are often marketed for children. Truncated and butchered versions of great texts aren’t that great at all. If you don’t think your kids are ready for the full-length version, I’d simply read something else and come back to this one in a couple of years!

Are you a parent? Do you agree and do you have any other advice or book recommendations? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: Pollock's Toy Museum, London

To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded, graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my nightgown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise. 

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)

Pollock's Toy Museum

Childhood and the nineteenth century often seem to go hand in hand in the popular imagination. The Victorian period saw the growing popularity of fairytales, the plight of children as a central theme in the period’s novels and the golden age of children’s literature, with the publication of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1862) and many more. Here too is the emergence of the very idea of childhood as we know it, so it’s little surprise that visual reminders of the Victorian nursery still maintain popularity today – from the bonneted little girls on kitsch greetings cards, to the Victorian-style wooden rocking horses which serve as toys or ornaments in many houses around the country.

Before I left London, I spent an afternoon visiting Pollock’s Toy Museum – a small but maze-like museum filled with original toys from the period, and the twentieth century. Soldiers, dolls, teddy bears, and puppets stare out from glass cases – a little worn (like Jane’s doll), and maybe occasionally glass-eyed and creepy, but still very obviously objects of fun, elevated by the charm and novelty of age.

The elaborate dollhouses allow you to glimpse into middle class Victorian homes in miniature, while the toy theatres, for which Pollock’s is particularly famous, are grand and detailed, giving you an idea of the lavish sets for popular plays (including Cinderella, Aladdin and Black Beard the Pirate) and the experience of being in the theatre (the dress of the figures in the boxes, the attire of the conductor and orchestra). The more modern toys will make many feel nostalgic – or surprised at just how far back some games and toys date. There’s an action man from the 1920s, Meccano from 1907. Of socio-historical interest are then military toys linked to both World Wars and even the Falklands conflict. While the collection is mainly British, there are cases of American toys too and some of the nineteenth-century theatres are modelled after German and French playhouses.

The Secret Victorianist at Pollock's Toy Museum

For Victorianists, the magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes and stereoscopic viewers show how a preoccupation with early forays into photography and film trickled down to children’s toys – a pattern of reflecting adult concerns in child’s play which we see also in the ‘space’ toys which start to come to prominence from the 1940s.

If you’re in London and passing by Goodge Street, the museum is worth a visit. For £6 an adult you can indulge your inner child, and transport yourself back to a Victorian schoolroom.

Theatre Review: Alice in Wonderland, OUDS Summer Tour, Oxford

‘We’re all mad here.’

In Oxford – birthplace of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland – at a matinee on the hottest day of the year The Secret Victorianist and the rest of the small audience were clustered into a fenced-in arena in Christ Church Meadows to be transported into the weird and wonderful world of the first Alice novel (1865). Matt Parvin’s hour-long adaptation took some of the most famous moments from the children’s novel – Alice’s growth spurts and shrinking spells, the tea party, the crazed flamingo-wielding game of croquet – and interweaved these with scenes from Alice’s ‘real’ world of familial problems, and the difficulties of growing up. The ensemble, with the exception of Alice (played by watchable but perhaps at times overly infantile Phoebe Hames), took on a vast array of characters, relying on physical theatre with minimal props and costume changes to guide us through the story.

The Secret Victorianist goes to Alice in Wonderland

The effectiveness, of the script and production, was very uneven. There were some really lovely ideas and good moments – whether using the whole cast to play the Cheshire Cat, allowing him to ‘appear’ and ‘disappear’ and talk as if a ventriloquist’s dummy, or employing two additional actors to give the caterpillar (Richard Hill) extra hands – and the execution of these demonstrated the cohesion and hard work of a fully committed cast. The best scene of the play was undoubtedly the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, where the staging in the round really worked with the constant switching of places and Johnny Purkiss (as the Hatter) and Tom Lambert (the Hare) put in great performances.

Other ideas however were not as well thought-through. Director Josie Mitchell has spoken about her improvisational methods in the rehearsal room and I couldn't help but get the feeling throughout that I was watching Alice being workshopped, rather than performed. Alice obeyed a sign reading ‘eat me’ and became large, hoisted on the shoulders of the other actors, her arms elongated by theirs. We smiled and nodded but asked ‘then what?’ as we hurriedly skipped on to the next episode, the conceit abandoned. While Alice mentions later that she is only 3 inches tall, it is unclear when she was shrunk again and the playwright and director never bothered to return her to her proper size for the play’s conclusion.

Flyer for Alice in Wonderland

On a language level there were also disappointments. Parvin’s text was simply at its best when it quoted verbatim from Carroll and the innovative external narrative was confused and unclear as a plot, and clunky in its expression. There were just too many ideas in the melting pot – political speechifying, social commentary on the conditions faced by child factory workers, medical intrusion as Alice approached puberty, and bizarre relationships between the heroine and her uncle and father. One might have been interesting, but as it was the audience sighed with relief each time we returned to caucus races and the odd beheading.

While the play captured the mad-cap spirit of the novel, and the intimacy of the setting had some benefits (making us feel trapped in a strange world and allowing the cast to appear from all directions and play with surprising sound effects), what was lost was the sense of adventure and discovery which a more visually stimulating production might have provided. While the production is continuing its run in London and Edinburgh, much more could have been made of the Oxford connection and glorious outdoor setting and, when extra costume was donned on top of the ubiquitous white tops and leggings, this seemed to help the actors with characterisation no end.

All in all this was a production of a nineteenth-century classic which left the audience debating the desirability of modern theatrical conventions. Nice ideas and an enthusiastic cast, but ultimately it is the continued appeal of Carroll’s story, however mutilated, which saves the play. 

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Alice in Wonderland Production Website: Link