The Role of the Dead in the Lives of the Living

The other night, I attended a performance of "Cinderella" by the Pacific Northwest Ballet.  This was not a conventional "Cinderella," such as that choreographed by Fredrick Ashton and performed by the American Ballet Theater, but rather a reinterpretation of the story by Jean-Christophe Maillot, of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.

The main difference: Cinderella's father is obsessed with his deceased former wife (Cinderella's mother), and dance connected with that relationship both opens and closes Maillot's ballet, leaving viewers as thinking as much about that as about Cinderella's successful conquest of the famous prince, which is of course pre-ordained and thus perhaps not as interesting.

According to the PNB program notes (taken from Les Ballet de Monte-Carlo), Maillot has stripped the conventional sugar-coating (and much of the overt humor) from "Cinderella" and instead "delivers a poignant meditation on the way in which people who disappear shape the future of those left behind."

The notion that there is what might be called a dotted line between the living and those who have gone is, of course, the central epiphany of James Joyce's longest and most well known short story, "The Dead." It can be found at the end of "Dubliners," Joyce's book of short stories, or it can be viewed in an excellent film of the same name by John Huston.

But a big reason I decided to write this post is that the subject ties in with my previous post where in Daphne du Maurier's classic novel "Rebecca," a man's obsession with his deceased wife ruins his subsequent marriage, just as it apparently does in Maillot's version of "Cinderella."

In both Maillot's "Cinderella" and du Maurier's "Rebecca" a dead woman forms part of something one could view as a macabre ménage à trois.