Inside ‘Dickinson’s Ridiculous, Hilarious and Sexy Spider Dance

One aspect of Apple TV+’s superb series Dickinson that probably goes slightly underreported is how factual it is. Though those facts may occasionally be mixed up timewise to help serve the story, nearly everything in Season 1 — and even the less documented area of Emily Dickinson’s life being tackled in Season 2 — has some sort of antecedent in the real world.

Take, for example, Lola Montez and her Spider Dance, which play heavily into the plot of this week’s “I Like a Look of Agony.” Montez has been mentioned multiple times throughout Season 2 as the ex-girlfriend of Henry “Ship” Shipley (Pico Alexander). She’s a figure from his past who haunts him, accompanied with each mention of her name by a hilarious musical cue, and Ship looking off dreamily into the middle distance. She’s also an endless frustration for Lavinia Dickinson (Anna Baryshnikov), who sort of hates, sort of likes the dumbly masculine Ship; and as she’s trying to branch out her own creativity, can’t seem to match up to the ideal of Lola he’s built up in his head.

…And the fact of it is, most of this is real. Or, sort of real. Henry Shipley was a real newspaper editor. Lola Montez was most certainly real, and in her prime one of the most famous women alive. The Ship on Dickinson is an amalgamation of a few different characters, but the real Ship did in fact encounter Montez, though later than is depicted on the show.

Originally born Eliza Gilbert (no relation to Ella Hunt’s Sue Gilbert), she took on the stage name Lola Montez in about 1832. From there, she traveled the world, romanced Kings, launched the catchphrase, “whatever Lola wants, Lola gets,” and as mentioned earlier became incredibly famous. After a revolt in Bavaria forced her to leave the country (as one does), she fled to America. In 1855, she first performed her Spider Dance (in Melbourne), which began with her pretending a spider was crawling up her dress, continued with her being “possessed” by the spider, and ended with her lifting her skirts to reveal she was wearing nothing underneath.

Audiences hated it. With a fiery passion. Despite the uproar, Montez took the show on the road, and that’s where the real Henry Shipley comes into play. Though reports vary, it seems that in 1854 the real Shipley wrote a scathing review of Montez’s Spider Dance in his paper, the Grass Valley Telegraph. Montez, of course, challenged him to a duel. She met him in the middle of the street, tried to whip him. He grabbed the whip, and then the two proceeded to exchange barbed statements (again, reports vary, but you can check out one of the original accountings in Montez’s obit from the Daily Alta California from 1886) before parting in disgust.

Naturally that’s not exactly what happened in Dickinson, but it does help provide a little bit of context for the absolutely ridiculous and hilarious scene in this week’s episode where Lavinia proves she can out-Lola, Lola Montez, by performing a Spider Dance of her own.

“I’m sure that is the weirdest, most fun, sneakily avant-garde thing I’m going to be allowed to do on television,” Baryshnikov told Decider about the scene. “It was choreographed by Danny Mefford who is so, so talented. I joke with everyone that I wish they could see Danny’s spider dance, because it was a thing to behold. But it was really a blast.”

The trick here, as Baryshnikov noted to Decider as she continued, is that this isn’t the actual Lola Montez Spider Dance. Lavinia hasn’t seen Lola perform the dance, so she’s essentially making up her own version of the choreography.

“Lavinia wasn’t able to look it up on YouTube, so this was all her imagination of what it would feel like to be a woman who was bold enough to do that,” Baryshnikov continued. “Who had the kind of power to draw men in and then spit them out.”

Despite the seeming spontaneous nature of the dance, which features Lavinia miming a spider crawling up her bedpost and hitting Ship with a whip, most of the dance was carefully choreographed; though Baryshnikov added that there were a few, small moments that were improvised, particularly Ship’s reaction shots.

“Some of those reactions are probably real,” Alexander said. “Anna had to learn the dance and rehearse it before coming in to perform it in front of me on the day. So I knew that she had this dance… I had no idea what it was gonna look like. So, I was just excited. I’m just sitting there, like, okay, let’s see the spider dance. We would yell cut, and everybody would burst out laughing.”

You can see that fun on screen, as Alexander gets knocked in the face, bites the whip, and eventually succumbs to Lavinia’s charms. And not only that, but the sequence is scored to Volbeat’s 2013 single “Lola Montez,” the perfect accompaniment for the over-the-top sequence.

It may have taken 166 years, but thanks to Dickinson, Lola Montez’s Spider Dance is finally getting the respect it deserves.

Dickinson streams Fridays on Apple TV+.

Where to watch Dickinson