Read through a philosophical lens, the form of Waves can be understood as a visualization of a way of perceiving the world that is very connected to the tension between isolation and communion in Woolf’s novel. In his last, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in an attempt to understand our relation to objects in the world, introduced the term “flesh” as that which connects sentient beings to everything that is visible and tangible. Between the subject and object, flesh is “the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.”^[14] Flesh exists without our awareness or acknowledgement of its existence. To borrow Merleau-Ponty’s example, it is that which allows us to know that a red dress is red, and not just red, but a particular shade of red, different from the red of an apple or a fire truck, yet from the same source, or what Merleau-Ponty calls field, as the red of the apple, the fire truck, the Revolution of 1917.^[15] Merleau-Ponty goes on to say:

I use the concept of flesh to help articulate the particular relationship between the images on the screen and the ensemble on the stage, by considering the ensemble to be the visual representation of the flesh of the characters’ reality: that which sustains, nourishes and connects the characters.

We can consider the ensemble onstage to be the flesh of the world on the screen: the ensemble sustains and nourishes the world, hidden from the world and its inhabitants, but ever present.

In devising Waves, the company set up strict guidelines for itself that delineates between the world on the screen and the action on the stage. Actors only perform as characters from The Waves when being filmed. The moment an actor moves out of the frame of the shot, she ceases to portray the character. Thus, the characters only fully appear on the screen. Further, the characters on the screen never acknowledge or appear aware of the action going on onstage. However, the actors onstage often look directly at the screen, particularly when it is their job to create sound effects, in order to match sound with image at the correct moments. While the characters on the screen are unaware of the ensemble onstage, the ensemble onstage is not only aware of the world on the screen, its sole task is to continue to create that world, to make it cohesive and complete. We can consider the ensemble onstage to be the flesh of the world on the screen: the ensemble sustains and nourishes the world, hidden from the world and its inhabitants, but ever present.

The ensemble as flesh also connects the characters to one another. Though the audience often sees only one character on the screen at a time, it is the same ensemble using the same equipment and objects in different combinations and assemblages that creates each “isolated” character. The characters are not isolated after all. The flesh connects. Merleau-Ponty asks in The Visible and the Invisible, “Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each?”

He continues, suggesting that “this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same ‘consciousness’ the primordial definition of sensibility.” Are not the characters in The Waves trapped within their belief in consciousness, their conviction that they are isolated within their own thoughts and reflections?” “‘We differ, it may be too profoundly,’ said Louis, ‘for explanation.’”^[17] “Life stands round me now like a glass round the imprisoned reed [said Susan].” ‘Drop upon drop,’ said Bernard, ‘silence falls … For ever alone, alone, alone…’” The characters will always accept “the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box,” an assumption Merleau-Ponty rejects. But in Waves, flesh is “rendered visible” by the ensemble on the stage, allowing the audience to see the connective tissue that unites the characters, despite their inability to break out of the box of the screen.