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I won’t lie. When I saw Georgia Oakley’s new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, I was blown away.
The expansive pastoral landscapes and rocky seascapes are breathtaking. The pond scene in Norland House Park with its stately, if overwhelming, stone steps and wild purple flowers was perfection. Each scene is a visual delight that draws viewers into the pastoral world of Jane Austen and the Georgian era.
Textures, costumes and music accompany Austen’s witty dialogue to breathe new life into the story of sisters Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne Dashwood (Esmé Creed-Miles) as they navigate through grief, happiness and love. The attention to storytelling, however, is perhaps prioritized at the expense of the realities of the period. In particular, the social import of the dance would be understood as essential for the sisters’ success in the social space and on the marriage market.
The Dashwoods’ and Austen’s world was rooted in social hierarchy. Ideals of politeness, civility and decorum dictated standards of behavior and dress among the nobility and gentry, visibly distinguishing them from their social inferiors.
Taste, status and wealth were displayed and assessed through the clothes people wore, the things they bought and how they acted. Appearance and movement were therefore physical manifestations of politeness – hair being no exception. Marianne’s unkempt and shaggy hair and Elinor’s soft waves, even if the girls’ characters are indicative, would correspond to wider social expectations and be noted on a daily basis.
Hop on it
As with the sisters’ wild locks, the two dance sequences—a hop and a ball—capture the spirit of Dashwoods more than they evoke the atmosphere of the period.
Dance was central to Georgian society and by extension, matchmaking and courtship. Girls and boys took lessons from an early age to learn posture, formations, footwork and eye contact with the expectation that they would show grace and ease when the time came to play in front of their peers and superiors.
A lack of physical proportion means ineptitude, meekness and subservience. This also applies to the types of dances themselves; Country dances and balls are socially acceptable among the sophisticated middling and upper ranks of society, while informal hops are relegated to the meaner types.
The hop, and the act of hopping that gave the pastime its name, were in direct opposition to the tenets of decorum, politeness and civility – making it an unlikely pastime for the Dashwoods. In the novel itself, there are no hops, only balls.
Sir John (the Dashwoods’ friendly landlord and distant relative, played by Turlough Convery) makes the only reference to the hop during a conversation with Marianne. He reveals, much to her dismay, that her love interest, Mr. Willoughby (Frank Dillane), is a passionate dancer. He visited “a small hop in the park” where he danced from “eight o’clock to four without sitting down once”. This should perhaps have been a red flag for Marianne, as respectable persons were not used to the hops.
The dance in the film
The hop scene in the film is more akin to a country dance and as such mixes Georgian country dance steps and formations with modern choreography.
The exuberance of the company certainly evokes the spirit of a country dance, but the movements themselves are quite sharp, even if jovial. It is at this point that the preference for creative license begins to erode the film’s carefully crafted world – so painstakingly assembled through light, texture and sound. Contemporary choreography lures the viewer back to the modern day and diminishes the cultural significance that dance had in social spaces throughout the Georgian and Regency periods.
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the second sequence, in a London ballroom. Elinor finds herself dancing with Edward Ferrars (George MacKay), the man she loves but cannot marry. The ball, both in Austen’s novels and in Georgian society, was the epitome of politeness embodied. Serpentine lines, precise footwork and confident eye contact were essential and signaled not only a good partner in dance, but also the potential for a good partner in marriage.
While the dance sequences in the film depicted couples moving across the room in paired or line formations, the exaggerated sweats, lifts and over-arched backbends are more reminiscent of musical theater than the regulated Georgian ballroom.
The ability to dance and dance well is something that permeates most Georgian and Regency period adaptations in one form or another. This is evident in everything from the 2020 adaptation of Austen’s Emma, where Emma and Knightley’s characters lock eyes and fingers, to Mary Bennet counting her steps in The Other Bennet Sister, a TV sequel to Pride and Prejudice, to Hyacinth, who trampled her teeth in the last season of Bridgerton. In all of these, dance is portrayed as a fundamental, if not unnerving, component of Georgian and Regency society.
It is to the detriment of Sense and Sensibility that this is lost through his choreography, which acts more as a spectacle than serves a function. Despite nods to the period, the dancers burst through the ambiance of the scene. Modern moves made in silk dresses and embroidered waistcoats tear the viewer out of the candlelit 1790s and place them firmly back in the 21st century.
Choreographer Holly Blakey, the mind behind the dancing in the film explained her avant-garde approach by saying “it was vital that everything we did in the choreography… felt like an expression of how the girls were feeling”.
Although the thought of expressing oneself through dance might have appealed to Marianne Dashwood, it would have been unheard of in the 1790s. As such it looks out of place in the period. If the film had not been so effective the 18. Century mentioned in a different way, then the crown against the infiltration of modern dance (and hair) might have been less noticeable.
