A Reimagined “Prometheus” Brings Beethoven Down From The Pedestal

Sharmont “Influence” Little held out his hands, his voice traveling heavenward. Between his palms, he had already conjured two nations at war with each other, children caught in the crosshairs. He breathed, drums swelling behind him, and bombs fell from the sky. Babies were burned to ash and buried under the rubble. An ocean away, someone called out for his mama, and thousands of chests flew open at the sound. 

"Prometheus," he said, and the word travelled bone-deep. His voice was a heavy rock, still raw at the edges. "You must be angry. The fire was never meant to incinerate each other." 

Little brought that fire to Southern Connecticut State University on Sunday, as the New Haven Symphony Orchestra (NHSO) staged a thrilling, audacious, and fully reimagined take on Beethoven's The Creatures of Prometheus with poetry, dance, and healing drums at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts. A collaboration with New Haven’s inaugural poet laureate and Tia Russell Dance Studio, the work became a conversation made for the moment, in which artists pushed back at a world upturned by violence.

“It’s a really gory story—but in the Beethoven ballet, he doesn’t focus on Prometheus,” said NHSO Music Director Perry So, who began his tenure earlier this year. “The title of the ballet is ‘The Creatures of Prometheus.’ The thing that Prometheus created, which is humankind. Us. With language, with culture, dance, poetry, music.” 

First composed in 1800 and performed in 1801, the ballet tells the story of Prometheus, a Greek Titan who stole fire from the Gods to bring to humanity. Here on earth, it gave people the tools to build civilization as we know it. But back on Mount Olympus, the Gods saw it as a theft and a betrayal, and endeavored to punish Prometheus for the rest of eternity. Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, and sent an eagle to eat out his liver each day. When it had finished pecking it out, a new liver grew back, and the cycle repeated itself. 

There’s something universal there. Since the moment humans have been able to experiment with fire (and, it seems worth noting, weave oral tradition around it), they—ahem, we—have been trying to order the world. We do it with myth, with music, with movement, and also with war, with capital, with hierarchies that are as arbitrary and as punishing as Zeus. As a cautionary tale, the myth of Prometheus is everywhere in pop culture, from punk and heavy metal music to television and film.  

Photo by Matt Fried, courtesy of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

And yet, the ballet is rarely performed. When it debuted in 1801, it received a reception that was warm but never effusive, with comments like “possesses more than ordinary merit” according to the then-nascent Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, and "too learned for a ballet,” according to the Zeitung für die elegante Welt. Even now, it’s not common for orchestras to perform more than the overture, a sweeping introduction to the work that declares itself boldly, then mellows out with a steady, sometimes heart-pounding clip.   

It was here that artists began Sunday, as light fell in blues and pinks over the stage and attendees headed to their seats. When So first connected with Little and Tia Brockington, he was struck not just by the idea of a collaboration itself, but by the artists and their respective forms, with which they tapped into whole histories of oppression, resilience, creation. 

“I had the opportunity to sit back for a moment and think, ‘what can we do together to tell a story that is kind of universal and extends through thousands of years of human history, but at the same time, can bring us back to the current moment and give us something to leave the theater with?” So said. “And something that reflects on the life that we’re living together.”

As musicians launched into the overture, a single dancer dressed in white swept onto the stage, nearly glowing as she moved beneath the light. To a game of tag between the strings and woodwinds, she made her way to the center of the stage, her legs and arms in sync with the music. Behind her, more dancers entered, dressed as if they had wings. They extended their arms, and for a moment it seemed they might take flight. 

At his podium, So seemed so in tune with the musicians that he could have commanded a small army. He raised his baton, and summoned a flicker of light from somewhere at stage right. He turned to the center, eyes gleaming, and pulled out a spirited, cresting energy from the violins. Brass came back in, the sound swelling over the orchestra and hanging like a dome over the dancers as they moved. 

When it dissolved into heartbeat-like drumming from Brian Jawara Gray, it felt like a natural transition. So stilled at the podium. Musicians stopped to listen behind him. From stage left, Little emerged, walking in time with the drum. When he looked out over the audience, it seemed that he was drawing them closer, ready to turn the darkened college auditorium into a holy space.     

Photo by Matt Fried, courtesy of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

“Imagine if humanity could turn war into a party,” he announced, his hands lifted as if to point to that party somewhere on the stage. ​“A barbecue / a cookout / a pool party, where / bombs are balloons / where / missiles are streamers / where / bomb-sniffing dogs are actually the petting zoo / and drones, drones spell out happy messages in the clear blue sky.” 

The room crackled, electric, and he pressed on. “You see I shouldn’t need a candle to wish / That when I heard about a party / When I heard about a party / It had nothing to do with searching for bodies they had left.”

The room listened, the silence thick and tense enough to slice through with a knife. In this world, which was also the audience’s world, celebrations as people knew them were being turned on their head. Somewhere, humanity fired up a collective grill, and suddenly there was the smell of burning flesh, the reality of broken, bloodied bodies, the cruelty that follows believing someone is no longer human.

Little turned his body as he spoke, words bridging thousands of miles. He took a breath, and buildings crumbled. Dust settled over tiny arms and legs destroyed before their time.

 “When has protecting yourself ever meant / eradicating a land full of people who never laid a finger on you,” he continued, and channeled over a year of war in Gaza, a level of destruction that has left thousands of children dead. He mourned their lives aloud, and parents in the audience hugged their kids a little closer. He prayed that peace was possible, flowing between Arabic and Hebrew as he built to a climax. 

“This is for the children,” he said, and it became a refrain, his voice breaking as he pressed on. “I hope they know / That it’s okay to cry / And that your tears drop like bombs / Eradicating all the pain—” The drums swirled evenly beneath him, a nod to the birth of oral tradition itself. Every so often, a whimper or cry went up from a young member of the audience, bringing the message home.  

It threaded a narrative needle for the performance, the most striking parts of which placed poetry and dance in direct conversation with the symphony and with each other. When dancers entered to the ballet’s first movement, their heads and torsos wrapped in ivy-like vines, it seemed as though a forest might erupt in the middle of the stage, birthed into being by the instruments behind it. 

 Photo by Matt Fried, courtesy of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

Just moments later, a few appeared to gossip amongst each other, falling into line when a peer turned toward them with steely eyes and a severe kind of stance. This was ballet, entirely reimagined: dancers entered in leotards, bodysuits and enough tulle to please the Bolshoi, but brought quotations of lyrical, modern, jazz, and African dance with them as they swept on and off of the stage. 

“It opens the door and allows you to see that just because we’re not a classical school, we can still bring forth the beauty, we can still tell the story of creation, the story of love, of life, we can still be artistic,” Brockington said in an interview before the performance. “No matter the skill level, no matter the genre that they may come from, they’ll be able to get up there and express themselves as much as any other person would be able to.” 

And they were, often in dazzling detail. At one point, dancers tapped into a sense of suspense and play, feeding off of each other and the swirling, building strings as they made a light-drenched slice of stage their own. At another, a soloist answered a low-bellied call from cellist Rebecca Patterson, starting a gentle back and forth that became a case study in grace.

Another still, and dancers became one with Beethoven’s military march, showing off their athletic skills in a way that felt at once like an exploration of the human body and recognition of its finite, sometimes farcical limits.  

Around those numbers—11 in all, with a total of 23 dancers—it was Little’s poetry that became the soul of the performance, at turns a window and a mirror onto humanity (Little never shies away from his own lived experience as a Black man, a poet, a father and a nurse, and it made Sunday’s performance both visceral and profound). When he returned between Beethoven’s third and fourth movements for his poem “Smile,” he bound together fear, acquiescence and survival with 400 years of American history, drums undergirding the performance.     

“A smile is Trayvon / Don’t think we forgot,” he said, the words landing with more depth and lyricism than the Beethoven ever could have had alone. “A smile is the hip hop / The bebop / The breakdancing / So a smile / Is the rhythm—”

He jumped from enslavement to resistance, using culture as a through line. He wove stories that leapt from reconstruction to jazz, from police violence to the possibility of abolition. He, like a kinder, wiser version of Prometheus, harnessed light and language and knew exactly how to put them out into the universe. 

“The Brown / The culture the culture the Black the Black the Black Panther Party,” he continued with a lyricism so tight it could have been mistaken for a song. “It’s / Angela Davis Huey P. Newton Bobby Seale / It’s / Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther so a smile / Is mystical.”

Photo by Matt Fried, courtesy of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

By the time he began to read “Black Boy,” presented in the middle of the ballet, it seemed as though every single ear in the audience was leaning toward the stage (listen to an earlier performance of the work at last year’s Kulturally LIT Fest here). In the poem, Little reflects on what he has learned as a Black, male nurse—including an epidemic of gun violence killing young Black men. 

“Do you know what a street beef smells like,” he almost bellowed, and a few Mmmms were audible. “It smells like the hot slugs cooking in a Black boy’s chest. ‘Cause I’m from a city that knocks down projects ‘cause the rubber makes better battlegrounds.” 

From where he stood, So took it all in, so clearly immersed in the moment. “Black boy, you ain’t no soldier, I’ve seen how you die,” Little announced, a rumble in his voice, and So looked as though his face might cave in. “Tears running, fists clenched in fear, body quivering like mama’s little baby /I’ve seen bullets pulled from your rib the way food is pulled from your teeth.” So's mouth was a heavy, somber line. In the audience, you could feel it, this thick well of grief from which no one was safe. 

And indeed, some of the most moving moments came as the symphony wove the ballet into the art itself, moving as a whole. When, during Little’s  “Promise,” Keosha Little and David Southorn joined in on vocals and violin respectively, there was a lightness to the moment that reminded attendees how rare and sublime it is to fully love another person. When dancers entered wearing epaulettes, their legs vibrating with jazz and lyrical dance, it felt like the orchestra had no choice but to play something triumphal, as if they were responding to the movement and not the other way around. When white and pink light soaked the stage for a finale, it felt like resolution may have been possible for Prometheus after all.  

Nowhere, maybe, was it clearer than in Little's final poem "Real Talk," in which he entered holding a long, parchment-like scroll that felt at once classical and contemporary, a meeting of worlds that had already collided onstage. Speaking to both the audience and to Prometheus, Little let the music of the orchestra creep in beneath him, letting it swell until they were moving in lock step with each other. In the percussion section, Gray yielded to the other instruments, making clear how much the drum had carried.  

“The times that we are living in right now, especially looking at it from all people but especially my people, people of color, it’s almost like they want to rewrite the history books and send us back 60 years,” Little had said in an interview before the concert. “In so many different ways … there’s something wrong with the humanity bone in your body if you’re not moved when you leave this production.”

Sunday, it felt like even more than that. It was a kind of performance—breathtaking, heart-wrenching and deeply human—that suggested that another world is possible, if we can just shut up and listen to the artists and truth-tellers who have always been among us. Across five poems, Little addressed not just genocide, gun violence, Black Lives Matter, and centuries of American history—but also the freedom of choice, the future of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, the realities of more -isms and -obias than one person should ever have to carry. 

Which is also to say, if one must listen to Beethoven, let this be the way that it happens. When artists are allowed to converse with a text that is hundreds of years old, that text is reborn, too. A performance like this reminds listeners that the classical canon does and should not belong to anyone—that it is humanity's if they (we) want it, and Beethoven can come down from his pedestal and chill for a while. 

What would happen, after all, if we lived our lives more like dancers and poets? If instead of waging a campaign of mass death, whole swaths of humanity could recognize the miracle and weight of a single breath? What if people saw how divine, and how singularly human, the capacity to forgive can be? What would happen if the gun lobby started prioritizing human life—including and especially Black life—over profits? 

What if we got off our phones—if we relinquished the fire for a little while—and were fully present in our bodies? What if we remembered that we belong to each other?

“I think what all of us as artists do as a major part of our work is to always have a space in our imaginations and our hearts for both extreme joy and extreme tragedy,” So said before the concert, and the words echoed throughout Sunday afternoon. “Is it political? Yes, of course. All art is inherent and always, always political.” 

“But I think the joy of being able to do this together is that there are so many perspectives that are happening at the same time, and they don’t cancel each other out.”

Listen to an accompanying episode of "Arts Respond" with Perry So, Sharmont "Influence" Little and Tia Brockington about this collaboration above.