Running towards the Green Light: Returning to Gatsby

There are works you create, complete, and eventually leave behind. Then there are works that remain with you because you know, somewhere beneath what made it to the stage, there is still something unresolved. Gatsby has always been that kind of work for me. Revisiting it at the top of my 10th anniversary season with Ballet Arkansas feels particularly meaningful because this production is not simply a return to something we have done before. It is an opportunity to confront the distance between who we were as a company when we first made it, who we are now, and what the story itself has come to mean to me.

We first approached The Great Gatsby in 2022, at a moment when the world, and our company, was still finding its footing after the pandemic. Our dancers were returning from layoffs and extended periods without the consistency of training and performance that professional dance requires. We were conscious of injury prevention, illness, changing health protocols, interrupted rehearsal periods, and the very real limitations of asking bodies to return immediately to full capacity. The organization itself had fewer resources. Our ambitions were large, but our ability to realize them was often confined to the essentials. We made choices based not only on artistic preference, but on what was responsible, possible, and sustainable at that particular moment.

That first production took a much more traditional route, and multimedia became one of the tools that allowed us to compensate for what we could not yet accomplish financially. Projection helped us establish environments, move the narrative forward, and create a sense of scale. In fact, approximately twelve minutes of what might otherwise have been live stage action was carried almost entirely through projected material. The production was a tremendous success with audiences, and I remain proud of what we accomplished. But success does not necessarily mean completion. I came away from that experience knowing there was another version of Gatsby I wanted to make, one that was less interested in illustrating Fitzgerald’s world and more interested in excavating it. Four years later, I finally have the opportunity to do that.

Returning to a Story That Has Changed With Us

A tenth anniversary naturally invites reflection. You look backward at the things you hoped for, the things you struggled through, the mistakes you made, the people who helped build something with you, and the distance between where you began and where you stand today. That makes Gatsby an oddly perfect work for this particular season because Fitzgerald’s story is, in many ways, consumed by that same impulse. Gatsby looks backward so intensely that he believes the past can become the future. He does not merely remember another time; he attempts to reconstruct it, believing that if he can gather enough wealth, beauty, status and spectacle around himself, he can force life to conform to the dream he has created.

That idea feels especially potent now. Fitzgerald was writing about a period marked by enormous wealth and enormous disparity, social upheaval, conspicuous consumption, shifting values and a pervasive desire for escape. People were recovering from collective trauma while simultaneously throwing themselves into reinvention and excess. There was tremendous optimism, but underneath it was instability. The glitter was real, but so was the anxiety beneath it. It is difficult for me not to recognize something of our own moment in that world.

We live in a culture where we are constantly constructing versions of ourselves for other people to see. Wealth, beauty, success and belonging are displayed with unprecedented immediacy, while loneliness, uncertainty and fear remain largely hidden. We are surrounded by images of lives that appear complete, yet many people feel increasingly disconnected from one another. We are still asking questions about who gets access to opportunity, who absorbs the consequences of other people’s choices, and whether the promise of becoming something more is equally available to everyone. That is why I did not want this Gatsby to feel like a beautiful artifact from the 1920s. The references may belong to another era, but the human behavior cannot. If we do this correctly, the audience should recognize parts of the world outside the theater in the people standing onstage.

The resulting production is darker, more abstract and much more psychologically driven than our earlier iteration. It is potent, monochromatic, modern and elegant, but there is something unsettling underneath that elegance. I wanted beauty to exist alongside danger because that contradiction is essential to Gatsby. Nearly everything in this world is seductive until you examine what it costs.

Why We Begin at the End

That is also why this production begins with death. We open with Gatsby already dead because I am not particularly interested in treating his death as a surprise. Most people entering the theater know how the story ends, and even those who do not will understand almost immediately that they are watching a tragedy. Revealing the destination allows us to ask a more interesting question: how did these people arrive here?

From that first image, the production becomes an act of reconstruction. We are not simply watching events happen chronologically; we are entering a memory and watching the forces that shaped these people begin to pull them toward an ending we have already witnessed. That structure led me to create the muses: Excess, Desire, Fate and Memory who exist outside the literal world of the novel while exerting influence upon it. They give physical form to forces that Fitzgerald could describe in prose but that I needed to make visible through movement.

The muses are important to me because I did not want every action in the ballet to be explained through realism. Sometimes human beings are moved by things we cannot articulate. Desire can overwhelm reason. Memory can become more persuasive than truth. Excess can become a substitute for fulfillment. Fate can look remarkably like a series of choices until the moment there is no choice left. These figures allow the audience to see those currents operating underneath the narrative, and they allow the choreography to move between reality and recollection, past and present, agency and inevitability.

Beginning with Gatsby’s death also changes the emotional contract with the audience. Every party contains the knowledge that the party will end. Every encounter between Gatsby and Daisy carries the weight of what we already know. Every moment of extravagance is haunted by consequence. In that sense, I think the production becomes less about death itself and more about the tragedy of watching people move toward something they cannot or will not see.

These Characters Are More Than Their Mistakes

The deeper I have gone into Gatsby, the less interested I have become in judging its characters. They make terrible choices. They hurt one another. They betray, manipulate, fantasize and retreat. But choreography becomes shallow very quickly if the choreographer approaches a character only as guilty or innocent, good or bad. My responsibility is to find the humanity that makes the behavior possible.

I have tremendous affection for George Wilson because, to me, George is the average person in a story dominated by extraordinary wealth. He is working, surviving and trying to maintain a life while people with considerably more power move through his world almost without noticing him. Yet the consequences of their choices eventually land squarely on his shoulders. His tragedy is not that he is insignificant; it is that the world around him treats him as though he is. In rehearsing George, I am interested in restraint, fatigue, dignity and the gradual collapse of a person whose emotional world becomes unbearable. If we only see him as the man who eventually kills Gatsby, then we have failed him.

Myrtle moves me for different reasons. Her desperation has layers. She wants escape, but I do not think it is enough to say that she simply wants money or status. She wants to become someone she believes she might have been under different circumstances. There is hunger in her, but also imagination. There is impulsivity, but also vulnerability. She reaches toward a life that appears close enough to touch and discovers that proximity to privilege is not the same thing as possessing it. That makes her both dangerous and sad to me.

Daisy, too, is far more complicated than the beautiful object at the center of two men’s conflict. I think of Daisy as a dreamer. Gatsby dreams of possessing the past; Daisy dreams of surviving the present. She understands more about the limitations of her world than she often receives credit for, and some of what can look like passivity is, to me, a person negotiating a system in which beauty and desirability are simultaneously her currency and her confinement. She is loved as an idea by Gatsby, possessed as an entitlement by Tom, and rarely given the space to exist without someone else’s expectation attached to her. The dancer portraying Daisy therefore has to communicate an enormous amount beneath the surface. I need to see the dream, but I also need to see the calculation required to remain inside it.

Even Tom, for all of his cruelty, cannot simply be played as a villain. His brutality comes from somewhere. He is a person terrified of losing a world that has always assured him it belongs to him. His power is real, but so is the insecurity underneath it. And Gatsby himself is perhaps the most heartbreaking contradiction of all. He has created a magnificent identity from sheer force of belief, yet the closer he comes to achieving what he thinks he wants, the more apparent it becomes that the object of his desire is not actually Daisy. It is time. He wants to reverse it. He wants the world to confirm that the years between then and now did not matter. He wants memory to become fact. That is impossible, of course. But who among us has never wished, in some smaller way, that it were not?

Those contradictions informed the casting of the production. I was not looking simply for dancers who fit a physical picture of Gatsby, Daisy, Myrtle, George or Tom. I needed artists capable of holding opposing ideas at once - strength and fragility, seduction and fear, arrogance and insecurity, love and possession. Ballet gives us an extraordinary vocabulary for physical beauty, but in a work like this, beauty alone is not enough. I want to see thought in the body. I want an audience to sense the moment before a decision is made.

The Weight of Making Violence

Some of those decisions lead us into very dark territory. Gatsby is often remembered through champagne, automobiles, fashion and parties, but it is a story containing abuse, infidelity, profound emotional distress, violence and death. Our production does not sanitize those realities, and creating them has been one of the most emotionally complicated parts of the process.

There is something deeply challenging about standing in a rehearsal studio and asking people you care about to make suffering more convincing. As a choreographer, I may find myself coaching the mechanics of a violent encounter: where a hand goes, how a body responds, how quickly someone falls, how another person reacts, whether the timing communicates shock or inevitability. You repeat it because repetition is how we make it safe and how we make it theatrically truthful. But then there comes a moment when the dancers become so convincing that the mechanics disappear. For a few seconds, you are no longer looking at colleagues rehearsing choreography. You are looking at someone you care about appearing to be terrified, assaulted, grieving or dying. I find those moments difficult, and I think we all would.

If simulated violence becomes emotionally casual for the people making it, then something has gone wrong. Our obligation is to create the illusion without losing sight of the human beings responsible for creating it. The dancers must trust one another enormously, particularly in scenes involving physical aggression or death, and I have been profoundly moved by the care they have shown each other. They understand that telling a dark story truthfully does not require sacrificing safety or dignity. In fact, the trust required to portray darkness may be one of the clearest demonstrations of the health of a company.

That darkness is also why Gatsby feels unexpectedly right for this time of year. It has become our Halloween production almost by circumstance, taking the place of another eerie-themed world premiere that we now intend to present in fall 2027, but I have come to appreciate how naturally Gatsby belongs here. It is a ghost story without ghosts. Gatsby is haunted by a former version of himself. Daisy is haunted by the life that might have been. George and Myrtle are haunted by lives they cannot reach. Nearly everyone in the story is pursuing an apparition, and by the end, the beautiful world they have constructed becomes something almost macabre.

When the Process Changes the Choreographer

There is another reason this production has become more personal than I expected.

Before the season began, I faced some unexpected and rather debilitating health concerns that forced me to slow down. I had to pay closer attention to self-care and confront the balance between work and life in a way I had not always been willing to do. There was considerable irony in that experience because these are conversations I have with our dancers all the time. I tell them to listen to their bodies, to understand that recovery is part of their work, to think about longevity, and to recognize the difference between discipline and self-destruction. Then I found myself having to follow my own advice. I was, as the expression goes, the pot calling the kettle black.

It changed the way I created this ballet. I am normally a physical presence in the studio. I demonstrate steps - to the degree I still can, partner dancers, move bodies through space, show sequences repeatedly and often communicate an idea by physically doing it. This time I was not always able to facilitate rehearsals that way. I had to sit more. I had to explain more. There were days when my mind wanted the rehearsal to move faster than my body would permit, and scenes could not advance at the pace I had imagined.

For someone accustomed to being activated in the studio, that was frustrating and humbling. It also required something from the dancers that I had not anticipated. They had to become more patient with me, more communicative with one another and, in some instances, more responsible for translating an idea into physical reality without relying on me to demonstrate each detail. I had to trust them differently.

What emerged from that experience is one of the things I will remember most about making this production. They were extraordinary.

I have watched this company become not simply stronger over the years, but kinder, more mature and more invested in one another. There is a camaraderie here that cannot be manufactured. The dancers work hard, but they also notice when someone else needs help. They take the work seriously without losing their humanity inside it. They have shown tremendous professionalism throughout a process that asked for patience, adaptability and emotional generosity. That culture is increasingly something we hear reflected back to us by the creators who come to work with Ballet Arkansas, and that may be one of the accomplishments of the last ten years of which I am most proud. A company can have beautiful dancers and impressive productions, but contributing towards the creation of an environment in which artists feel safe enough to take risks, fail, question, contribute and ultimately reveal something of themselves is far more difficult.

What It Means to Return

Perhaps that is why this Gatsby is suited for this season. The 2022 production belonged to the company we were then: a company of wonderful, resilient, ambitious, talented, resourceful artists still emerging from an extraordinary period of disruption. We made the best work we could with the time, resources and circumstances available to us, and its success helped make this return possible. The 2026 production belongs to the company we have become.

It is more confident but also more questioning. It is visually restrained in places where our earlier production was illustrative. It allows abstraction to coexist with narrative and asks the audience to participate in making meaning rather than simply receiving information. It is elegant and glamorous because Gatsby should be, but I hope the beauty feels increasingly unstable as the evening progresses. The surface should seduce you before you begin to understand what is happening underneath it.

In that way, the work has become deeply connected to what this tenth anniversary means to me personally. Ten years is long enough to understand that growth does not happen in a straight line. Institutions change. Artists change. Circumstances change. Sometimes progress means charging forward, and sometimes it means having the humility to recognize that the way you have always worked is no longer the way you should work.

Gatsby cannot accept that truth. He believes so completely in the possibility of returning that he sacrifices the present to a memory. There is something painfully human in that impulse. We all carry former versions of ourselves. We remember periods when we were younger, stronger, freer, safer, more certain, or simply different. We revisit decisions and imagine alternate lives. We hold onto people and places long after they have changed because our memory of them feels more stable than reality.

But memory is not a place we can live. That may be what Gatsby means to me now in a way it did not in 2022. Revisiting a work does not require recreating it. Revisiting the past does not mean returning to it. We can acknowledge where we came from, love it, grieve parts of it, learn from it and then allow it to become something else.

So when I look at this Gatsby, I see much more than a new production. I see the distance Ballet Arkansas has traveled. I see the generosity of people over the years who have built an artistic home together. And I see, perhaps more clearly than I expected, some of my own journey over these ten seasons. That makes this Gatsby intensely personal to me. It is the production I wanted to make four years ago but could not yet realize fully. More importantly, it is the production I could not have made without everything that happened during those four years. The limitations, the growth, the successes, the disappointments, the people who stayed, the people who arrived, and even the circumstances that forced me to create differently are all somehow inside it.

There will always be another production, another goal, another challenge and another green light in the distance. But there is also tremendous meaning in stopping long enough to recognize where we are and what we have managed to create together. For me, this Gatsby is that moment - and I am immensely grateful to all who brought us to it.