• 1 Ethan is represented “drag[ging] himself across the brick pavement” (Wharton, 1911 3).
• 2 “I had had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little—except a vague botanical and (...)
• 3 In an interview presenting Snowblind for the San Francisco Ballet Unbound Festival of New Works, Ma (...)
• 4 Creating a choreographic piece from a literary work is more than a transposition from one medium to (...)

1What does reading Ethan Frome feel like? Hard, cold, painful, tortured—condensed pain; from the very first page, the readers, via the narrator, are confronted with Ethan’s pain, his labored movements1 and his physical entrapment, his “lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain” (Wharton, 1911 3). This “ruin of a man” (3) immediately evokes destruction and tragedy, a crumbling body, destroyed and scarred by the “smash-up” (4) whose circumstances the narrator seeks to uncover. The stone imagery Wharton uses repeatedly in her introduction and in the novella associates Ethan with a minerality that calls to mind stone crumbled to dust, but also hardness, resurgence, permanence, survival—something that endures, that remains, despite the passage of time and repeated elemental assaults. Ethan is the ruin, the agglomerate of damaged bricks held precariously together, but also the “outcropping granite” Wharton’s novella wishes to expose, as explained in her introduction to Ethan Frome (xvii).2 By making these “granite outcroppings” (xviii) one of the focal points of her novella, Wharton associates literature with physical sensation and affect. Granite is not sedimentary, it is magmatic rock, crystallized and solidified lava pushing its way out: it symbolizes burning material underground, eruption, and solidification into something cold, coarse and rough to the touch, and materializes conflict and trauma, like a keloid scar. Ethan, Mattie and Zeena, Wharton’s “granite outcroppings,” all embody the repression of a part of themselves buried underneath the ground and the elements (Ethan is described as the “incarnation” of the land’s “frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface” 14), but also what remains in spite of it all and survives to tell its tale of pain and sorrow. When choreographer Cathy Marston sought to translate Ethan Frome into dance, it was precisely the “elemental feel”3 of Wharton’s work that inspired her, more than the story of the three main characters. Marston used her own empathic reading of Ethan Frome and the sensations that emerged as the starting point for her choreographic creation: in that sense, it is a translation, from one language (verbal) to another (physical, non-verbal, which expands on all the non-verbal, bodily experiences recorded in Wharton’s text) that Marston is proposing with her ballet, more than an adaptation, the change of medium being less the central focus than the expression of affect.4 What Ethan cannot say in the novella, he will dance on stage, therefore making the trapped affect readable through somatic expression. The very title of her piece, “Snowblind,” recalls the anthropomorphic (or rather, animalized) vision of the “outcroppings of slate” “nuzzl[ing] up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe” (Wharton, 1911 19): a face of stone half-buried in snow, whose­ orifices—eyes, ears, mouth—are covered by the falling snow that muffles their expression and their senses. Less than the story of a love triangle, Ethan Frome and Snowblind are both about thwarted emotions, affect trapped in stone, a stream of magma whose burning passions can only be expressed in stony, impenetrable silence—beneath verbal language, through sensations. This article will therefore seek to bring to light this trapped affect and the ways in which its impossible expression is read and felt when reading and translating Ethan Frome into dance as well as seeing and dancing Snowblind.

• 5 “Air et pierre se rencontrent dans l’image parce que, dans beaucoup d’images fortes, se rencontrent (...)
• 6 “Affective practice, like other forms of practice, rests on a large unarticulated hinterland of pos (...)

2In Gestes d’air et de pierre, Georges Didi-Huberman examines the marble dance of the Donatello low-relief in Florence and associates these “gestures of air and stone” with a desire to give some form of permanence to transience and motion, to express what remains.5 Gestures of air and stone, like Keats’s Grecian urn, crystallize desire, grief, and mourning, but without resorting to verbal language. Interrogating what the experience of reading and choreographing Ethan Frome feels like necessarily entails an exploration of the way affect and sensations, like the “granite outcroppings,” find a way to emerge from beneath the physical restraint and the stony silence that thwarts their expression, in Wharton’s novella and in Marston’s piece. In Affect and Emotion, Margaret Wetherell explains how the “turn to affect is mainly a stimulus to expand the scope of the social investigation. It leads to a focus on embodiment, to attempt to understand how people are moved” (2). Considering what literature feels like, how literature can be organically linked to affect and emotion, means shifting the focus to the body and embodied practices—whether one understands affect as “includ[ing] every aspect of emotion” or referring to “physical disturbance and bodily activity (blushes, sobs, snarls, guffaws, levels of arousal and associated patterns of neural activity), as opposed to ‘feelings’ or more elaborated subjective experiences” (2). It is worth underlining that the examples Wetherell uses (“blushes, sobs, snarls, guffaws, levels of arousal and associated patterns of neural activity”) are all non-verbal expressions of an emotional state, which is particularly relevant when investigating a silent character like Ethan Frome—whose main characteristic is the inability to express his feelings in an articulate way—especially in his choreographic adaptation, since dance is non-verbal language. Indeed, dance explores what Wetherell calls the “affective hinterland” which “always escapes entire articulation.”6 All the non-verbal cues, the pre-movements, the moments when intention to move becomes perceptible between performers on stage, what dancers commonly refer to as someone’s “energy,” were crucial in the making of Marston’s Snowblind. This essay focuses therefore on the ways in which choreographer Cathy Marston picked up on the “feel” of Wharton’s novella and how all the non-verbal, embodied practices and situations contained in Wharton’s text might have given way organically to a dance translation of Ethan Frome.

• 7 Dawson adds that “during the period when Ethan Frome was in its draft forms, Wharton read and annot (...)
• 8 Ruyter explains that “through Delsartean training, a considerable number of late-nineteenth-century (...)
• 9 Ted Shawn’s foreword to his book about Delsarte confirms the importance of the “Delsarte craze” whi (...)
• 10 In many respects, tableaux vivants are a form of performance that has strong ties with dance. Nover (...)

4The narrator in Wharton’s Ethan Frome is trying to uncover what lies beneath Ethan’s silences, which memories and affects have been “snowed under” (15), thus making reading Ethan Frome, the character, and Ethan Frome, the novella, a quest for buried feelings. This quest for affect presides more generally over the composition and reading of Wharton’s work. According to Melanie Dawson and Jennifer Travis, Wharton’s novella is to be read in the overarching context of growing public and scholarly interest in the quantifying, identification, and origins of pain, affect and emotion. For Dawson, Ethan Frome focuses on “emotion genesis” (125), which showcases Wharton’s knowledge of the ongoing contemporary debates about the origins of emotions: “by orienting the novel’s emotional work to issues of epistemology, Wharton drew on her familiarity with Darwin, Spencer, and a host of psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, all of whom can be imagined as influencing her interest in affective origins and adaptations” (129).7 In her chapter on “the science of affect,” Travis notes that when Wharton was writing Ethan Frome, “emotion was not only the stuff of university study or literary criticism, it also was the subject of extensive cross-disciplinary and often rigorously masculine debate at the turn of the century, from the trenches of labor activism to the benches of law courts” (158). Particular emphasis was placed on the relation between the body and emotions, as exemplified by William James’s essay “What is an Emotion?,” which Dawson references several times, or the Delsartean physical discipline and somatic practices which investigated how emotions were processed through the body. French artist and pedagogue François Delsarte’s main claim (famously echoed by Martha Graham) is that the body (and therefore movement) “never lies”: every little movement, even minute ones like instincts or pre-movements, are connected to and reveal an emotional state. Delsarte’s theories of movement were brought to the American public (and largely expanded on) by his disciple Steele Mackaye after Delsarte’s death in the early 1870s and led to a new awareness of the mind-body connection. This growing interest in the connection between the mind, emotions, affect, and their physical expression through the body can explain why Wharton was particularly invested in the question of the origins of emotions, how they arise, and how they can be expressed (or rather, how Ethan fails to express what he feels, how his emotions always remain below the surface and cannot take form through verbal language)—in short, how emotions, much like the “granite outcroppings” of the novella’s introduction / landscape, are formed and how they emerge. As Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter notes, while the influence of Delsartism on dance practices has been amply documented, “the relevance of American Delsartism to women’s social and cultural history has been almost totally ignored. In works on nineteenth-century American women’s lives, health, education, and so on, there seems to be little awareness that American Delsartism even existed, let alone any sense of its importance” (xvii). This explains the lack of scholarship on the influence of Delsartism and the ensuing growing awareness of the mind-body connection on non-dancers, and particularly women. However, Delsartism held a very significant place in nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century debates about the body, particularly women’s bodies: from performance techniques and new modes of performance (like statue-posing, for example) to advice given to young women on how to carry themselves and behave appropriately8 or to the dress reform movement, Delsartism is connected to all the major elements of the conversation about women’s bodies from the 1870s onwards.9 As a woman who had an active cultural and social life, Wharton could not possibly have been unaware of this, as the reference to tableaux vivants10 in her work shows, even though the role Delsartism and physical expression played in the author’s own understanding of bodies and emotions has not been explored in a significant way at this point.

• 11 See Katherine Joslin’s discussion on Ellen Olenska’s dresses in The Age of Innocence (Joslin 123-12 (...)
• 12 “The supreme excellence is simplicity. Moderation, fitness, relevance – these are the qualities tha (...)

5In her reading of “Tableaux Vivants and Still Lifes in The House of Mirth” (59), Emily Orlando highlights “the tradition of the drawing room convention” of performing scenes from famous paintings and particularly Pre-Raphaelite art (59), but never mentions the influence that the physical performances of Delsartean practitioners and dancers like Isadora Duncan would most certainly have had on Wharton. The House of Mirth was published in 1905, and her autobiography confirms that Wharton had heard of Duncan some seven years before that when she was invited to a garden party in Newport where Duncan was to perform (Wharton, 1933 320). While Wharton doesn’t mention a specific date, the 1898 program for Duncan’s Newport performance entitled “Done into Dance” allows us to infer that Wharton knew of Duncan before she left for Europe that same year and subsequently became famous. Scholarship on Wharton and fashion, for example, confirms that Wharton was familiar with the turn-of-the-century dress reformers’ ideas,11 and given the emphasis on simplicity in her 1897 piece on The Decoration of Houses,12 one could even argue that Delsartean principles and the spirit of simplicity of the age permeated her entire conception of the body and the body in space (in this case, the domestic space).

• 13 “Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve (...)
• 14 Her 1893 Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics established “dynamic breathing” as the core elem (...)

6The leading figure of American Delsartism in Wharton’s time was Genevieve Stebbins, a performer, teacher, and writer who popularized and expanded on Delsarte’s principles with her statue-posing and tableaux vivants that were all the rage in the 1880s and 1890s. The tableaux vivants scene in the twelfth chapter of Wharton’s House of Mirth reveals the author’s familiarity with that art form, as well as the Delsartean principles taught by Stebbins and Steele Mackaye: the succession of the tableaux, from Botticelli’s “Spring” to Lily Bart’s performance as Reynolds’s “Mrs Lloyd” is compared to “some splendid frieze,” “in which the fugitive curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young eyes have been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the charm of life” (Wharton, 1905 105). In her chapter devoted to “Genevieve Stebbins on Stage,” Ruyter writes that this dynamic, frieze-like quality was precisely Stebbins’ signature: “Genevieve Stebbins presented statue poses not as separated scenes (as was common in much of posing throughout its history), but in a series of images in which the transitions figured at least as prominently as the poses themselves. Whether or not she invented this format, it was her hallmark” (117). Lily Bart’s body positioning,13 the very statuesque texture of her “draperies” against the “foliage” background, as well as the dynamism of the “noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace” (Wharton, 1905 106), recall Stebbins’s “harmonic poise,” which, through “tranquil poses—with the weight predominantly resting on one leg (the foundation of ‘harmonic poise’) and one or both arms in some kind of gesture” (Ruyter 119), is meant to embody the “moral poise” and spiritual qualities of the subject portrayed. Stebbins’s Delsartean practice emphasized “dynamic breathing”14 and, like her contemporaries and disciples, she was fascinated by Greek statuary (Ruyter 91-93). Lily Bart’s performance therefore echoes Stebbins’s still reenactments of statues or paintings, the epitome of a “gesture of air and stone,” since the body is immobile and yet living and breathing, like a statue brought to life: the folds and creases of the “draperies” (Wharton 1905, 106), as still as a marble statue’s, contributed to blurring the line between stone and flesh in Stebbins’s performances, and created the impression of a breathing marble figure.

• 15 Carrie J. Preston briefly discusses Wharton’s engagement with Delsartism in The House of Mirth in h (...)

7While The House of Mirth is certainly legible through the principles of American Delsartism and the teachings of Stebbins,15 another, perhaps less obvious, example of this influence can be found in Ethan Frome, which may be read as a study in pain in tones of white, grey, and darker hues, peppered with splashes of red (Mattie’s scarf, the blood on the snow in the “smash-up”), a tableau vivant representing suffering. References to painting abound in the novella, and the connection between art and affect is constant. In the first chapter, the reference to painting is the vehicle used to express Ethan and Mattie’s communion of “silent joy” and wonder:

• 16 She adds that “judging and quantifying pain became fundamental to the development of an industrial (...)

9For Travis, “this form of mediation permeates several other moments in the narrative as well” (150). According to her, Mattie’s scarf in the barn scene is as significant to Ethan emotionally as the “strip of stuff” they both hold, since it “absorbs his emotions” (Travis 150). The broken “pickle-dish” (Wharton, 1911 85) represents “the climax of this form of mediation”: “its use is a confirmation of Mattie’s love for Ethan, the unspoken object that locates their passions” (Travis 150-151). The snow that envelops the pair after the sled crash in chapter IX (Wharton, 1911 171) and reflects their emotions and states of mind throughout the novella, as well as the other “emotive fabrics,” are all ways of expressing feelings that cannot be uttered by the characters. Travis positions Wharton’s aesthetics within turn-of-the-century material culture, especially in relation to the quantification and categorization of pain: “the displacement of feeling in Ethan Frome, the manner by which sentience resurfaces in the stuff of the everyday, is not only a literary device; it is also a critique and exploration of the extent to which suffering in a secular idiom could be and, indeed, was taken to be primarily cognizable in material terms” (151).16 In that sense, Wharton’s evocation of her characters as “granite outcroppings” in the introduction can be read as referring to their organic bond with their native land, as stone cropping up from the soil and being one with it, and as a way to materialize the stifled emotions, the “frozen woes” and stony suffering of Mattie, Ethan and Zeena—not only as emotion trapped in stone, but as stone, magmatic rock (as mentioned in the introduction) being itself the outward manifestation of traumatic outburst.

• 17 Gilbert and Gubar also refer to Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s reading of Lily Bart as associated to art n (...)
• 18 On Duncan and Delsartism, see Ruyter 1979 36-37, and Daly 122-139, where she also discusses Duncan’ (...)
• 19 For a longer discussion of Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller and Delsartism, see Cappelle (ed.) 159-171. (...)

11Wharton’s account reveals that what moved her was the plastic quality of the performance (through the references to fabric, but also to visual arts and poetry made flesh), as well as its synesthetic quality, where dance, music, and poetry all combine in one glorious performance. Duncan’s performance is life itself for Wharton (as revealed by the image of the “dead boughs” turning into “acres and acres of silver fruit-blossom,” 322): the multiple references to flowers in this passage of Wharton’s autobiography also recall another contemporary performer, Loïe Fuller, and particularly her “Lily” dance—which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue was part of the cultural web of references that impacted Wharton’s understanding of the body in motion (138-139).17 Like Stebbins, Duncan was influenced by the physical ethics of Delsartism, and its quest for “true” movement: according to Nancy Ruyter, Duncan “agreed completely with the two basic ideas that underlay Stebbins’ work: that classical antiquity represents the ultimate in artistic achievement; and that by means of the physical, the divine may be reached” (Ruyter, 1979 37).18 Her early performances were also tableaux vivants, as Ann Daly explains in her seminal work on Duncan, and she too performed scenes from Botticelli’s paintings (92). In her autobiography, Duncan herself underlines the importance of the influence of Greek art on her conception of dance (64-67), recalling her visits to the Louvre and her days spent reading books about Greek art in the library of the Paris Opera. Duncan’s signature flowy Greek tunics at the beginning of her career were meant to allow the body to move freely, without the constraints of a corset and the intricacies of the ballet costumes and footwear of the time, but the draperies, folds, and creases also duplicated and prolonged the smooth flow and organic movements of the liberated body. With her own experiments in costume and lighting, Loïe Fuller pushed this use of fabric as an affective conduit further: her dance was even more abstract than Duncan’s, since the body was mostly hidden under the layers of fluid fabric animated by the twirling motions of the dancer and the rods she had inserted in the sleeves. In many respects, these early experiments with “emotive fabrics” prefigure Martha Graham’s own use of the tube dress in her piece Lamentation (1930), in which the torsions and stretching of the fabric worn by the dancer echo and prolong the tortured emotions portrayed in this dance conceived as an anti-war protest.19 They were truly revolutionary at the time since in traditional classical ballet technique—which was dominant when Duncan and Fuller started their careers, especially in Europe—affect was mainly expressed through the pantomimic code established in the wake of Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse, with gestures to signify joy, pain, crying, etc, which are still performed on stage today. In this context, costume has a narrative function, according to Noverre’s principles; Duncan and Fuller, on the other hand, performed non-narrative dances, whose aim was less to tell a story than to show the beauty of the dancing body, to be the dance, to allow the body and the costume to perform unadorned, unaffected natural emotions onstage with more immediacy than when mediated through more elaborate costumes and an entire narrative arch. If for Wharton dancing equaled “joyful abandon” (Wharton, 1933 321), the unrestrained expression of emotion, Duncan and Fuller’s experimental techniques would have corresponded to her conception of dance. In an 1898 interview for the New York Herald, Duncan explained that “the dance is a series of movements being the expression of connected thought, and is in its higher exercises a concentration of mind and body on the understanding of a form of emotion”; Duncan’s expressive dancing, its organic expression of emotions, is what appealed the most to Wharton according to her autobiography (320). Daly underlines that although Duncan did resort to pantomime to some extent in her more narrative dances (like her patriotic Marseillaise created at the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914), her dancing “mined the body’s unique capacity for displaying in its form the subtlest shades of emotions” (139) and adds that:

• 20 In her autobiography, Duncan explains that her first “instincts for dance,” to quote a line from Em (...)

12Loïe Fuller, like Duncan, believed that the dancing body should express natural, unrestrained human emotions; both choreographers extensively resorted to natural metaphors to express how the body should move organically.20 In her autobiography, Loïe Fuller delineates her philosophy of movement and dancing:

• 21 As Wharton’s own biography reveals with the Newport episode, Isadora Duncan’s first performances we (...)

13My contention is that Duncan and Fuller’s somatic practices and emphasis on the connection between nature, the body, and affect are part of the general conversation around the body—and particularly women’s bodies—that Wharton also participated in, as we have seen earlier. Like Duncan and Fuller on stage, the expressive and natural bodies in motion of Lily Bart and Mattie Silver in Wharton’s fiction both convey and provoke emotions in the spectators and readers; they are transgressive for a late-Victorian turn-of-the-century conservative mindset (as their unfortunate end shows) and echo the revolutionary audacities of dance pioneers Fuller and Duncan, who both struggled to find their place at the beginning of their careers.21

• 22 This warmth associated to Mattie is echoed in Marston’s Snowblind by the costume choice (Mattie’s v (...)
• 23 In a similar way, what sets Lily Bart apart in the sequence of tableaux vivants is the natural simp (...)
• 24 In every company, and for every ballet, there is always an A cast and a B cast, which alternate dur (...)

14In the dance scene in the opening chapter, Ethan experiences a host of emotions and sensations while watching Mattie dance freely. The window separating him from the room where the dancers are seems to be an affective and sensitive conduit, reflecting both the “pure and frosty darkness” Ethan is looking in from and the “mist of heat” of the room (Wharton, 1911 28-29). Later in the chapter, Mattie’s face is also compared to “a window that has caught the sunset” (35), an image which associates expression, emotions, and sensations.22 The volcano metaphor used in the same paragraph when the stove is somewhat anthropomorphized, its “flanks” “heaving with volcanic fires” (29) like the expanding ribcages of the young dancers, exacerbates the contrast between Ethan’s “snowed under” (15) emotions and the youthful joy and energy of the dancers. It also reflects Ethan’s inner state of emotional turmoil: when he sees Mattie dance, Ethan’s emotions are expressed somatically (his heart is “beating fast,” 30), and watching her dance triggers the memory of their emotional affinity (33) as well as feelings of jealousy towards her dance partner, Denis Eady. Mattie’s movements are compared to nature several times, from the light and dynamic “whirl” of her dancing recalling the falling snow (35) to the swift motion of birds: “the motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches” (46).23 In Marston’s choreography, a lot of Mattie’s movements are articulated around stopping and soaring, as well as the momentum of her youthful and lively longing to move, to escape, to live and love; there is something birdlike in both her delicate fragility in the “frozen” sequence when she’s curled up on a chair and in the way she soars towards Ethan in all their pas de deux, as if she was taking flight, transported by her emotions. In the novella, the moment when mediations through nature, sensations and affect are most tragically connected is certainly after the sledding incident, when Ethan initially thinks the “twittering” of pain he hears, as well as the “soft and springy” hair he touches, belong to an animal, before realizing they are Mattie’s (170). According to Jenifer Travis, “it is certainly the most excruciating instance of the kinds of displacements that the novella presents: feeling made real and given substance, as in this final scene, through the body, voice, or pain of another” (149). The natural element, as well as affective mediation (through fabric, between bodies, through various materials—snow included), were crucial in Cathy Marston’s translation process of Wharton’s novella into dance. Indeed, a choreographic translation is itself a form of displacement, since affect is mediated not through verbal language but through the body—or rather, through the bodies of the various performers who interact on stage and the successive bodies that will interpret each role, depending on the cast and when / where the ballet is reprised.24 Displacement in translation is articulated in the changes in syntax, metaphors (a dynamic concept in itself), and idiom. In the case of a choreographic translation of Ethan Frome, Ethan’s inexpressiveness (Dawson 124) and inability to articulate his emotions are expressed in all the somatic and non-verbal cues that come before expression, under the surface, in everything that precedes language—before the granite forms and becomes visible. In dance, all these things that cannot be said can’t be danced in any expressive choreographic idiom, therefore leading to an exploration of pre-movements, thwarted gestures, and expressive immobility—displacing silence through mediation.

• 26 I’m referring here to Martha Graham’s famous phrase “movement never lies” (Graham 122). Graham was (...)
• 27 This sequence of frustration is also repeated in the indoor pas de trois, while Mattie helps Zeena (...)

16The snow is actually the first thing that appears on stage in the ballet: it’s always there, always connected to the characters’ emotional states. When the curtain goes up, the dancers embodying the snow perform various sequences stage right: some are in plié parallel, arms outstretched above their heads, and undulate on a vertical axis as if moved by the wind. Meanwhile, three dancers in grand plié à la seconde do a port de bras with one arm bent and the other à la seconde, which moves right to left as they sink into a deeper plié; others roll like a ball on the floor, left to right, towards the wings, before they all successively perform the same gesture, a port de bras with their arms crossed in front of their faces in a semi-circular motion from left to right, as if shielding them from something, while shifting their weight from the left leg to the right leg and going into an arabesque penchée. Finally, the last sequence is a grand plié in first position with the arms crossed, elbow pointing upwards and hands downwards, in a sinking motion towards the floor, which ends with the dancers rolling like a ball towards the wings. The sequences are repeated with different trios of dancers within the group, as they progressively exit stage right. This section works both on verticality and horizontality, to convey the fall of the snowflakes (in the sinking action of the pliés), the force of the harsh wind whirling the snowflakes around (in the upright undulating motion, which also evokes resistance to the elements), and the sweeping motion of the snowflakes whose vertical fall is altered by the wind (in the rolling motion on the floor, but also in the circular and side to side arm movements). The slow pace of the whole snow sequence has an introductory quality, like a second curtain of snow rising to open the main “human” plot, and sets the scene for the unveiling of the main characters; Ethan and Zeena appear as the snowflakes exit, Ethan in a thoughtful posture recalling Rodin’s Thinker (first sitting on a chair, then standing up, always with the Thinker port de bras), Zeena slowly and precariously entering on pointe, clutching her head and stomach as if in pain. The snowflakes’ dance also works as a marginal note commenting on the main action since the port de bras with the arms crossed before the face expresses pain, something one seeks to shield oneself from, a protective gesture, a way of retreating into oneself, and enacts the retreat and stifled emotions of the characters. In the opening segment, the movement combines explicitly narrative pantomimic gestures (like Zeena’s, signifying pain) and less explicitly narrative non-classical steps to recreate the elemental, natural quality of the snow: in that sense, Marston’s exploration of non-human movement and gestures as well as the very notion of an elemental dance, where humans embody non-human entities (in this case, the snow), showcases the influence of dance pioneers like Loïe Fuller on contemporary choreographers and shows how fundamental the nature-inspired Delsartean kinetic investigations of choreographers like Duncan and Fuller have been for the next generations of dancers and choreographers. Natural movement­—that is, dancing inspired directly by the elements, nature, and movement that is organic to the body, that does not “lie”26—is therefore best suited to convey the complex nuances of affect: the snowstorm outside announces the emotional storm within, and as the first pas de deux between Ethan and Zeena ends, the snowflakes reappear stage left, performing the same choreography at a faster pace, thus changing the quality of the choreographic sequence, whose now tenser quality stresses the stormy conflict between the pair and the escalation of tensions. This time, the snowflakes exit on a big renversé attitude with a swifter port de bras that seems to cut into something: all the while, Ethan walks backwards as if violently hit by the snowstorm and looks at his hands before falling backwards and dancing a pas de deux with a snowflake. This dance Ethan does with the snow allows him to express everything that was kept below the surface in the first pas de deux with Zeena: once the snowflake exits stage left, Ethan stands in parallel, with one leg bent and the other extended on the side, and does a circular port de bras as if he was cradling something, before rocking his arms frantically side to side, with more and more force. Then he stands in a lunge and forcefully kicks his back leg and his arms around, as if releasing pent-up frustration, in a movement that amplifies the light jerks of the right leg and lunge at the start of his pas de deux with his wife.27 The two pas de deux have similar features: Ethan carries his wife and the snowflake on his back, but there is more weight, a stronger sense of heaviness in the way he handles Zeena­—it is labored, and almost mechanical, conveying his weariness with his wife’s condition, especially in the split penché, where he takes her elevated leg and tries to bend it, a motif that is repeated several times and which gives the impression that he is trying to put something back in its place.

• 28 In any fouetté, the point is to contrast the rectitude of the body (the torso and the supporting le (...)
• 29 The snowflakes perform ominous and affectively-charged movement in the still scene when Ethan carri (...)

18In her first solo, Mattie also dances a pantomime with the imaginary snow—at first not embodied onstage by dancers: she whirls her arms and hands around, as if dancing with an invisible snowfall, picks up and throws a snowball, lies on the ground and moves her arms and legs as if to make a snow angel. Midway through the solo, a snowflake and Ethan appear, and Ethan has taken on the playfulness of the young dancers and Mattie’s snow-play, repeating with Mattie the prank the youngsters played on each other during the dance scene (a light kick behind the knee). The snowflakes enter one by one and individually repeat the sequences of the opening choreography in a very slow and light way (again, showcasing how changing the intention of the movement in the same choreographic sequence changes its whole color and tone) to signify a moment of respite and lightness during Mattie and Ethan’s first pas de deux. By contrast, when she is (literally) kicked out by Zeena, Mattie’s dance with the snowflakes is full of anguish: the snowflakes’ movement is faster and elevated since jumps are introduced while they were always closer to the ground in their previous appearances. Mattie sways, stumbles, and seems to be dancing against the current, against the snowflakes’ motion, as if pushed back and forth and sideways by the raging snowstorm. The snow pushes her around, replicating Zeena’s violent rejection in the leg extensions and port de bras which create a similar line to Zeena’s harsh kick, on the same diagonal; the battements attitude of the snowflakes is echoed in Mattie’s battement fouetté, after which her upper body collapses instead of staying upright,28 which makes it seem that the force of the attitude kick is blowing Mattie away and around like a leaf in the wind. When Ethan enters, the snowflakes’ movements seem ominous,29 running around behind the dancing pair and performing a violent port de bras, one arm bent upwards at a 90-degree angle and the other one across the upper chest, with the left hand clutching the right shoulder and grabbing the right arm to swing it in a movement that seems to chase away something, as if they were chasing the pair away from one side of the stage to the other. These movements are repeated and amplified in the suicide attempt scene, where Ethan and Mattie, instead of being blown around by the snowflakes, run headlong into them as if into a wall, again and again, until they end up broken on the floor. Marston’s choice not to resort to artificial snow in her piece (as in Balanchine’s “Dance of the Snowflakes” in his version of The Nutcracker, for example), but to have it embodied by a group of dancers testifies to its importance in Wharton’s original novella (where it is almost one of the main characters). It also confirms its affective charge: by being embodied by dancers onstage rather than artificial snow, it mediates the characters’ affective states more efficiently, as the dancers are able to perform similar sequences in many different ways just by changing the intention of the movement—that is, the type of affect it seeks to convey. As Marston explains in the interview quoted earlier, snow has different qualities and evokes many possible affective states—the childlike joy of playing with freshly fallen snow (as when Mattie plays with it making the snow angel, or when the youngsters play around), a picturesque northern winter occurrence that can be enjoyed looking through the window inside the house (as in the opening sequence), freezing cold that feels unpleasant to the skin, or a full-on blizzard, impossible to walk through.… Having the snow danced by a group allows for a wide array of kinetic and affective textures to be presented on stage, as the group of dancers can portray individual nuances while still contributing to a group dynamic, like individual snowflakes in a snowfall or brushstrokes in a painting.