The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway, Ballet and Racism

Posted by on May 19, 2013 in News & Updates | Comments Off on The Sun Also Rises: Hemingway, Ballet and Racism

On my cultural to-do list this year is seeing a ballet.  I haven’t been to the ballet since I was about six, and that was the Nutcracker.  I’ve been really intrigued by some of the very innovative works that the Washington Ballet Company has been doing, so I finally decided to buy tickets to the next one that got my attention.  The work in question happened to be a premiere of a new ballet based on The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I hadn’t read the book since high school, and yes — I actually read it, so I bought a copy and got reading so I could be prepped for the ballet.  I figured I would get more out of it, if I had  refresher on what the story was all about.

Turns out the story line is mostly this: drink, complain, ennui, sex, sexual repression, fight — lather, rinse, repeat.  It starts in Paris and then moves to Spain, where you also get fishing and bull fighting!  That’s a rather dramatic over simplification, of course — but I was certainly wondering how you do a ballet about people talking and drinking.

Beyond that I was struck by the casual racism of the text.

Yes, yes, it’s a product of it’s time and all — but there are just certain word choices even then that are startling.  So pick the worst epithet you know about African Americans and imagine a page where that is just they use to describe a guy.  Instead of saying, “the black boxer” or, with apologies, “the negro boxer” — it just goes right for the big bad N WORD over and over and over and over and over again.  Every time I read that word, I bristled. It was really amazing to just see it there in print over and over and over and over. Another bit of ‘quaint’ casual racism that happens is about a main character who happens to be Jewish.  Wow, did Hemingway make a really big deal about this character being Jewish.  What was interesting, is that I found references that refer to him as a Jew more upsetting than the one time they hurl what is supposed to be the worst epithet about Jews.

Don’t worry — I’m not suggesting we edit out the offensive parts of classic texts.

So, on to the ballet!

First let me say, I was giddy from the moment the music started.  I spend a lot of time with words and spending two hours experiencing a story through music and movement was positively liberating. I loved the use of projections and the all black and white costumes in the first act gave it the feel of a silent movie. The addition of color in the second act, when the story moves to Spain had a Wizard of Oz — “you’re not in Kansas anymore” feel.  The fact that the Cohn character is Jewish, and therefore “other” but societally acceptable, is pretty core to the storyline, so it was retained in the ballet.  We’re told through a “super” text projected onto the stage about how Cohn took up boxing at Princeton because he was “the Jew” and mostly wanted to feel like he was tough. Needless to say, the character rocks dorky glasses — even if he is a bad ass boxer. Thankfully the utter pitifulness of Cohn in the book was toned down in the ballet, without losing much to the story.  It was pretty painful to read in the book.

Since it’s a ballet, there’s really not a chance to use triggering racial words.  I would also say that some other really smart choices to remove the racism of the time were made.  In particular, the fact that the bullfight “pas de deux” danced between two male dancers did not have a black dancer as the bull.  Actually, the matador character was danced by an African American and the bull was danced by a Caucasian.  This, to me, is not color-blind casting — but very culturally aware casting.  There were a couple of other bits of very color-blind casting which helped reinforced the fact that while the book is steeped in the culturally entrenched racism of its era — the ballet was not bringing that forward and accidentally reinforcing it as something acceptable.

This leads to my central question of how do we choose to engage with these great works of literature when part of what they do is promote a world where racism was just part of the culture.  How do we bring them forward as great works of art and leave this behind — without just creating a revisionist history?

I don’t really have any answers, but I think the Washington Ballet made the right choices is focusing on the meat of the story and leaving as much of the racism behind has possible.  It doesn’t help the story today, it just distracts.

All in all, I am very happy for the experience of having re-read this classic book and for having been to see this innovative ballet by Septime Webre.  I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to explore a classic piece of literature through these different lenses and see what I find.


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