The Nashville literary world is small enough that most writers know, or at least have met, the other writers who live here. I first met Caroline Randall Williams when she was 4 years old, the year I met her mother. As part of my job as editor of a literary publication here, I celebrated the arrival of “Lucy Negro, Redux” when it was published the first time, in a tiny print run from a tiny press.

But I was not at all prepared for “Lucy Negro Redux,” the ballet. There is nothing tiny about it, or about the scope of its artistic ambitions. It is a full-throated, full-bodied exploration of love and desire, exultation and loss, belonging and expulsion, ownership and autonomy. A mixed-media, multigenre embodiment of a scholarly theory about an arcane point of literary history might not seem like fertile ground for enchantment, but it was absolutely transformative.

Who is Lucy Negro? We may never know whether she was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, but we know that she is Kayla Rowser, who has spent her entire professional life in a field that rarely elevates a dancer with brown skin. We know that she is Rhiannon Giddens, who moves fluidly between African diaspora music and American symphony halls. We know that she is Caroline Randall Williams, an African-American woman with depraved white ancestors who grew up in a literary household and learned to love Shakespeare when she was still a child.

And now Lucy Negro is Nashville, too, for she has taught us something about who we are. Flawed and impossible as this city may be on so many scores, it is also a place where a choreographer and a poet and a composer can come together with an entire ballet company to make something wildly original, something so unlike anything else that all description falls short of its otherworldly reality. A place where, when the curtain drops, the very city cries out: “Brava! Brava! Oh, brava!”

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