A Year of Gothic - March 2026

In February I was lingering in the shadowy rooms of haunted houses. In March I found myself drawn onto the stage. Here the Gothic no longer belongs to architecture but to the body itself. Performance becomes the threshold and crossing it comes at a cost.

March’s theme, Obsession and Art: When Performance Takes Possession, was shaped by seeing The Red Shoes at the Mayflower Theatre.

Seeing this ballet adaptation, choreographed by Matthew Bourne, of the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film, I was struck by how powerfully it frames artistic creation as both transcendent and dangerous. Ambition slips almost imperceptibly into compulsion and performance begins to eclipse the self. Identity dissolves into the demands of art.

The body, disciplined, admired and exhausted becomes the site of sacrifice. Movement is no longer simply expressive but something closer to obligation. The dancer does not just perform, she is compelled. Like the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale that underpins it, the story asks what is lost when art refuses to release those who serve it.

What stayed with me most was the sense of pressure, the quiet horror of not being able to stop even when stopping might mean survival.

The films I watched this month kept returning to that same idea, performance as something that reshapes and ultimately consumes.

The Red Shoes (1948, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) still feels definitive, its central question, art or life, as stark and unresolved as ever. Watching Black Swan (2010, Darren Aronofsky) again, I was struck by how completely identity fractures under the strain of perfection, the body and mind turning against themselves. Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon) takes that even further, collapsing the boundary between performer and persona until there is nothing stable left to hold onto. In All That Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse) the tone shifts but the outcome does not, performance dazzles, distracts and ultimately devours.

Across all of them I kept coming back to the same thought, that performance demands total absorption and with it a kind of sacrifice.

The novels I read in March deepened that sense of unease.

In The Turnout by Megan Abbott, the closed world of a ballet school becomes almost suffocating, shaped by control, rivalry and the constant scrutiny of the body. Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead takes a longer view, tracing how devotion to art leaves its mark over time, shaping identities long after the moment of performance has passed.

What interested me most here was repetition, the daily class, the constant correction and the incremental pushing of limits. The Gothic is not dramatic or sudden, it accumulates.

March also unfolded in other, unexpected ways. Watching Giselle in a live broadcast from the Royal Opera House, I was reminded how enduring the Gothic is within ballet itself, in this tale of intense love, betrayal and the afterlife.

Reviewing Alchemy by the Liam Francis Dance Company at the Brighton Corn Exchange for The Spy in the Stalls offered another perspective on transformation through movement, even if this time without a Gothic connection.

Re-reading Just Like Jenny by Sandy Asher, one of many dance and theatre-infused YA novels I read in my early teens while attending Saturday dance/singing/drama classes, brought a more personal perspective. It offered a younger lens on performance and identity and a reminder that these pressures begin early, perhaps not unrelated to why I quietly let go of the idea of being on stage when I was about fourteen.

In other Gothic viewing I also caught The Bride! (2026, Maggie Gyllenhaal) at the cinema, more on that in a separate blog, continuing this year’s thread of reimagining and reinterpreting classic forms.

I rounded off the month with The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960, Renato Polselli), which felt like the perfect bridge between March’s focus on ballet and what is to come in April and May, with two months turning to Dracula and vampires.

March became a month of bodies, trained, watched and pushed to their limits. Again and again I found myself returning to the idea that the Gothic does not always need ghosts or houses to unsettle us. Sometimes it is enough to watch someone give themselves over completely to something they cannot control.