The National Ballet of Canada: Frontiers at Sadler’s Wells

National Ballet of Canada, Frontiers, Sadler’s Wells, October 3, 2024

The National Ballet of Canada is related by blood lines, repertoire and co-productions to its Royal cousin across the Atlantic, so it may have been more appropriate to welcome it on its recent visit to London after an 11-year hiatus to the stage of the Royal Opera House. But the company’s new artistic director, Hope Muir, is evidently keen to negotiate between past and present, bringing to Sadler’s Wells what critic Deidre Kelly calls a ‘bold statement of artistic intent, signalling a seismic shift in the choreographic landscape.’ It is not clear from the program what this seismic shift entails or what it augurs for the large-scale classics in the company repertoire, but the constraints of the smaller Sadler’s Wells stage have the effect not only of reducing the size of the 70-strong company but limiting its repertoire choices too. Sadler’s Wells is a fine dance house, but the identity of large companies is effectively tailored to the image of the theatre; The National Ballet of Canada is not the first; it happened to New York City Ballet in March.

Muir also inadvertently positioned the company somewhere in the colonial past by calling the program Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada. Even in a context of artistic frontiers, it is questionable if the three choreographers represented — James Kudelka, Emma Portner and Crystal Pite — are developing new territory. There is no reference to frontiers in the company’s subsequent stop in Paris, where it opened on October 12 at Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Their almost identical program — Portner’s islands is replaced by William Yong’s Utopiverse — is called simply Made in Canada.

The company’s repertoire of full-length classical ballets means it has a roster of artists fully capable of embodying their leading roles. One is Heather Ogden who featured in James Kudelka’s Passion, set to the first movement of Beethoven’s piano transcription of his violin concerto, Op. 61A. Kudelka is one of the most musical of choreographers, and he has set Passion as a visual counterpart to the structure of the Beethoven score, using two couples and a corps de ballet to weave a triple response to the music. Beethoven himself straddled the musical eras of classical and romantic, and Kudelka seems to acknowledge this in his choreography. Ogden and her partner, McGee Maddox, costumed in contemporary dress by Denis Lavoie, give the piano playing of Zhenya Vitort a full-bodied gestural language as they pursue their passionate relationship unaware of the dancers around them, while Larkin Miller and Genevieve Penn Nabity, inhabiting the codified classical style with a youthful sense of joy and passion, keep the musical structure tight. The corps de ballet takes on the orchestral role of providing the colour and rhythm against which the soloists can flourish. It’s not as easy to register the three visual strands as it is to hear them — my attention focused primarily on Ogden and Maddox — but they form a vital choreographic unity. Passion is the one work on the program that, particularly in the luminous presence of Ogden, recalls the company’s heritage.

Kudelka choreographs the person, whereas Portner choreographs an idea. The irony of Ogden’s subsequent appearance in Portner’s islands, a duet in which ‘two dancers move in perfect harmony, physically connected by a single pair of trousers’ (Deirdre Kelly in the program notes), is that her presence is subsumed by the concept; she and Penn Nabity are little more than interlocking shapes. Intriguing at first, the choreographic concept — supported by an intriguing musical mix of Brambles, Guillaume Ferran & David Spinelli, Forest Swords, Lily Konigsberg and Bing & Ruth — begins to run out of steam and loses the plot when Martin Sauchez’s trousers are abandoned.

The final work on the program, Angels’ Atlas, sees Pite on a similar flight pattern to earlier work with mass movement. Whether the theme is refugees, the environment or, as here, ‘impermanence…in a vast, unknowable world’, she uses a new set of dancers with the same artistic team to similar effect. Judging from the string of new commissions that have found their way inexorably to either Sadler’s Wells (where she is an Associate Artist) or the Royal Opera House, Pite is in great demand, but in the creative industries, as any environmentalist will understand, over-excavation carries with it the danger of artistic depletion. Nobody can deny the quality of Pite’s work — and that of her collaborative team — but the groove of choreographing massed bodies against ‘a morphing wall of light’, however spectacular, begins to wear thin. She needs time to replenish her precious resources.

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young/Kidd Pivot in Assembly Hall

Crystal Pite & Jonathon Young/Kidd Pivot, Assembly Hall, Sadler’s Wells, March 23, 2024

The role of critics used to be, for better or worse, to pen a considered appreciation of a show that might guide the public as to its value. Some critics took that responsibility to heart, others to their head, with the result that some had the power to decide whether a show was worth seeing or not, which, according to the renown of the critic, would affect ticket sales. That critical role has effectively been taken over by the publicity department of the theatre, especially with dance performances limited to short runs, replacing the art of criticism with the act of selling. The pre-publicity machine gives the public an appreciation of what it will be seeing by extrapolating past successes into the present and underwrites the public’s future enjoyment with any number of five-star reviews. This has eviscerated the national press of a critical dance voice.

At the theatre there is the glossy programme with more positive endorsement for the show. Then at the end of the performance come the inevitable ovations. It all adds up to a spectacular evening that closes the virtuous circle of the theatre’s pre-publicity. Either you agree with the publicity, or you are disappointed because you evidently didn’t ‘get it’. This is endemic of the commercialisation of culture, or perhaps more precisely of cultural commerce.

A case in point is Assembly Hall, a new collaboration between Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young with Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, presented at and co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, where Pite is an Associate Artist. Recommended by the ‘success’ of their previous collaborations, Assembly Hall was sold out. Pite, a brilliant choreographer (my value judgement) in her own right, has been associated with theatre maker Young in previous productions (Betroffenheit, The Statement, Revisor). I only know Young’s work through these collaborations but have seen Pite’s work independently of Young. Their chemistry has produced a Pite variant that thrives on the intersection of speech and movement. Young’s side of the equation is the writing and adapting of text, but as a theatre-maker — he is the founder of Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver — he is also keen to explore the movement-to-speech and speech-to-movement relationship. There is thus a natural meeting of creative focus in their work that starts at a high level of affinity and excitement but seems to dissolve at the point where the writing takes a detour into the hinterland of the surreal before some sort of recapitulation and resolution. If the level of affinity and excitement lasts for the initial 30 minutes of the work’s exposition, in which the level of dance and recorded speech artistry is highly charged, we are left for the next hour to experience Jay Gower Taylor’s sets, Tom Visser’s lighting, Nancy Bryant’s costumes and Owen Belton’s musical sleight of hand. All are brilliantly inventive, but instead of enhancing what happens on stage, they are what happens on stage, which reduces their contribution at this point in the production to theatrical effect. Given that the subject of Assembly Hall is the AGM of a financially precarious benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enacters with props and costumes to hand, the scope of visual imagination runs wild. And while this is going on, Pite contrives with uncanny regularity a series of substantial solos for each of the dancers that have little to do with their initial characters or roles, and everything to do with their phenomenal ability as dancers. That Revisor followed a similar path indicates a certain structural fatigue in the Pite/Young alloy. Where it worked admirably was in their very first collaboration, the harrowing Betroffenheit in 2015, and in the tightly woven treatment of The Statement, for Nederlands Dans Theater the following year.

Where Pite excels is in her choreographic sensibility, her ability to match physical, emotional and spiritual sensation with music to create a single experience that arises from that transformation. In matching movement to the speech in Assembly Hall, it is the procedural nature of the words that seems to reduce the emotional and spiritual realms into which she can extend her choreographic sensibility. If it is a constraint for the choreographer it is not for the theatre maker, whose craft consists in the manipulation of words to dialectic or poetic effect. Pite and Young have proved their collaboration can work, but both Revisor and Assembly Hall leave one with the suspicion it needs to be reeled in or, like the AGM of the benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enactors, risk foundering on a point of order.

NDT1 at Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT1) at Sadler’s Wells, April 20

Gabriela Carrizo / Jiří Kylián / Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney

Nederlands Dans Theater has a rich association with choreographer Jiří Kylián, whose 100^th work* for the company, Gods and Dogs, is a welcome addition to the Sadler’s Wells program. Created in 2008 for NDT2, the choreography, with lighting by Kees Tjebbes, décor by Kylián, costumes by Joke Visser and brought to life by NDT’s superb dancers, shines like a polished hallmark of the company brand. For all the time Kylián has choreographed work for NDT, his prolific output has come to define that elusive (for some) crossover between classical technique and contemporary aesthetics. He matured as a dancer and choreographer in Stuttgart under the guidance of his mentor, John Cranko, who, as artistic director and choreographer, turned the Stuttgart Ballet from a provincial institution into an internationally renowned company. Kylián was thus a progeny of a fertile artistic turbulence that encouraged his own creative talents while he learned the craft of dancing (William Forsythe was another who benefitted from Cranko’s vision). For the 25 years Kylián was artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater (1975-1999) he created the company not in his own image but, like Cranko at Stuttgart, in the image of his choreography. Whether it’s the hundredth or the ninety-fourth work he created for the company, Gods and Dogs is as fresh and confident in its use of language as ever. Kylián has the ability to imbue his choreography with a sense of thought that is endlessly intriguing, like a communication from an unknown land. Perhaps this is why Kylián considers Gods and Dogs an unfinished work, a glimpse of a world far away yet tantalisingly close.

What makes for an intriguing introduction to the evening is Gabriela Carrizo’s La Ruta (The Road), a crossover genre of mime, theatre and dance (Carrizo is the co-founder of Peeping Tom) that has the visual appeal of an Edward Hopper painting come to hallucinatory life. There is a connection between Gods and Dogs and La Ruta in the rubber-legged virtuosity of the choreography — and the rubber-legged virtuosity of the dancers — but where Kylián incorporates it as an extension of his fluid style, Carrizo makes it into a theatrical image of spectacular unease and humour (sitting in on an audition for La Ruta would have been a long gasp of amazement). La Ruta is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, of murky associations and the inexplicable sequence of events. It is beautifully designed by Amber Vandenhoeck, lit by Tom Visser with a score of original music and musical fragments by Raphaëlle Latini.  

In another, perhaps subliminal link to Kylián, the choreographer’s own words — part of an apologia for creating his website — could have introduced Crystal Pite’s collaboration with Simon McBurney: ‘…And yes, I am also painfully aware of the fact that whatever we do or make is doomed to disappearance, and that our “Planet Earth” will be burnt to ashes and then frozen to death and finally it will become a totally insignificant dwarf within the universe…’ Yet Kylián’s pessimistic expression contrasts to the rather saccharine ‘journey into climate emergency’ that characterises Figures in Extinction [1.0]. McBurney provides as a structure a recorded list of extinct species and geological phenomena — with text excerpts from John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? read by himself with interpolations from his six-year-old daughter Marnie — which Pite illustrates with some beautifully crafted animal cameos costumed by Nancy Bryant with Jochen Lange’s puppets under Toby Sedgwick’s direction. But lists are more the domain of lecture demonstrations, not of choreography. Left to her own devices (with her close artistic associate Jay Gower Taylor, playwright Jonathon Young and lighting designer Tom Visser), Pite has created memorable choreography based on a play (Revisor), spoken text (The Statement) and a scenario of personal trauma (Betroffenheit); she has also transformed the atmosphere in the Royal Opera House with a full evening work (Light of Passage) on the subject of existence. But with Figures in Extinction [1.0] she seems constrained by McBurney’s didactic structure. There is a spark of her feisty spirit in the creation of the climate change denier (a verbatim dance to words recorded by Max Cassella), a delicious and caustic cameo that flails against the evidence of destruction. Pite is a choreographer who, like Kylián, delves deep into the human psyche to create her works; in Figures in Extinction [1.0] McBurney seems to have appropriated that power but, in so doing, diminished its value.

* On his own website, Kylián lists Gods and Dogs as his 94^th work.

Crystal Pite, Jonathon Young, Kidd Pivot in Revisor at Sadler’s Wells

Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young with Kidd Pivot in Revisor at Sadler’s Wells, March 5

Choreographer Crystal Pite and playwright Jonathan Young have collaborated previously on two productions, Betroffenheit for Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, and The Statement for Nederlands Dance Theatre. Although each work is quite independent of the other in terms of emotional heft, they both use the technique of lip-synching to recorded voices as a choreographic tool. In The Statement, the relationship between language and choreography is the basis of the entire work, taking Young’s one-act play about corporate disinformation to expressive heights, while Betroffenheit combines choreography and text in a haunting expression of trauma. Their latest collaboration for Kidd Pivot, Revisor, presented recently at Sadler’s Wells, pushes the boundaries of text and its physical embodiment further than both The Statement and Betroffenheit, with mixed results. 

What Young has proposed is his adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (Revizor in Russian), a farce written in 1836 on the theme of government corruption in a small provincial town. Young’s production uses the recorded voices of nine actors directed by Meg Roe with original music and sound design by Owen Belton and Alessandro Juliani. By making a pun on the Russian title, Young changes the function of the Revizor to a Revisor of government documents; it has no bearing on the outcome of the farce but the word play informs the adaptation. After the curtain rises to an ominous rumbling of thunder, we hear the voice of a narrator (Roe) revising her description of the scene a couple of times before she’s happy with it. We’re in the office of the Director of the Complex (Doug Letheren) who has called in his cronies to discuss the arrival of a revisor (Tiffany Tregarthen) who they mistakenly believe has been sent by head office to report on their incompetent practices. The clarity of Jay Gower Taylor’s minimal period set, Nancy Bryant’s lush costumes and Tom Visser’s lighting engage with that of Pite’s gestural response to the voices. The ensuing scene of heated discussion sets in motion a thrill of choreography-as-farce as we take in Pite’s transmutation of language into gesture and the imagery she extracts from every nuance of the script. The dancers embody their characters through total corporal articulation and lip synchronisation to a degree of verisimilitude where we see the voices and hear the gestures. Jermaine Spivey’s physical translation of Juliani’s speech-impaired Postmaster Wieland’s dialogue keeps the audience in gales of laughter and on the edge of their seats in anticipation of its continuation, while Ella Rothschild as Minister Desouza fleetingly combines imagery of the Russian orthodox church and classical ballet in a passing phrase about religion and culture. 

The sheer energy of creative investment in this opening scene, so intricately woven and detailed, is remarkable. In the subsequent dialogue with the revisor and his assistant (David Raymond), however, and in the further convolutions of the plot, Pite’s transmutation of language plays second fiddle to Young’s adaptation of the script, which now takes us on a digression through a conceptual landscape — what Young calls a deconstruction of a farce. The dancers are in rehearsal clothes, and the dialogue is replaced by the narrator’s ‘report’ on the action using stage directions, looped vocal phrases and fragments of recorded text. It is difficult to tell if this ‘report’ demands something less precise of Pite’s choreography, or if her choreographic ingenuity loses traction in the treatment of dialogue. What were the dancers’ individual textual-corporal characterisations gradually evolve into danced solos and duets — even sections of unison choreography — that change Pite’s focus away from the text into movement. Just when Young’s deconstruction seems in danger of completely losing the plot, the opening scene and its characters return for the play’s resolution. Once again the dancers are in their costumes and their dialogue becomes lip-synched action. But by now the effect has waned and a sense of déjà vu sets in. What Pite and Young had begun with such promise just an hour before appears to be already overused, or perhaps that long, conceptual, self-reflexive middle section has numbed our choreographic interest and drained the dramatic action of its momentum. In an intense collaboration like this, if one partner pulls too much in one direction the other’s contribution suffers. Betroffenheit and The Statement held the balance like a high-wire act between theatre and choreography, each on their own terms; Revisor is ultimately disappointing because that balance is not maintained throughout the work, and there is nothing the extraordinary cast can do to save it. 

Rambert2: Triple Bill at Sadler’s Wells

Rambert2, Triple Bill at Sadler’s Wells, November 5

This second year’s program of Rambert2 at Sadler’s Wells shows a sophistication and artistry, both in terms of choreography and interpretation, that one would expect of the main company, so it is worth remembering that Rambert2 is the practice component of an MA in Professional Performance Studies that Rambert School offers students through the auspices of the University of Kent. The quality of dancers is high because the Rambert brand can attract a large number of applicants to the course. One of last year’s students, Salomé Pessac, is now in the main company which gives an idea of the level of proficiency on offer. There is also an interesting transatlantic connection — four of the thirteen dancers and two of the three choreographers this year are American — through Rambert’s artistic director, Benoit Swan Pouffer.

Choreographer Jermaine Maurice Spivey has spent time in Crystal Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, which is an indication of both his quality as a dancer and his good fortune in witnessing a bourgeoning choreographic talent at work; furthermore, he has deconstructed and reconstructed Pite’s works in order to set them on other companies. In Terms and Conditions, Spivey is experimenting with ideas of his own; he develops the work in sections, choreographically and musically, that are structurally connected but not yet coherent. It starts with words that are manipulated verbally and choreographically with an initial cue from Emily Gunn. A seated Nathan Chipps repeats the word with a variety of inflections and intonations while opposite him in another chair Minouche Van de Ven improvises movement to them. Costume designer Noemi Daboczi’s idea to embed flexible mirrors in the back of her white overalls initiates another section; the dancers later remove them and place them over their faces. It’s a visually arresting idea but doesn’t seem to lead anywhere and is quite impracticable in a section of Spivey’s head-tossing choreography. A final section relies on the repetition of a circular pattern with the dancers taking it in turns to lie like a victim at the centre while the others walk or run around. Terms and Conditions is an articulate study for a promising, but as yet unfulfilled contract. 

Sin is a duet taken from the 2010 Babel by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet. Based on the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, it is a narrative with a straightforward formal structure that gradually inverts its opening position over its sinuous course. The connection between Prince Lyons as the male figure and Van de Ven as the female is intense and dramatically coherent; they could be complementary elements of each other in an internal battle for survival or separated as incompatible egos within a couple. From its title, Sin could also be understood as the story of Adam and Eve and the choreography uses snake-like imagery throughout. Whatever the interpretation, the two performers manifest a fateful attraction to each other that oscillates in a riveting yin-yang altercation between power and subversion. Adam Carrée’s lighting plays its own dramatic role that includes a large reflective surface descending obliquely from which the performers cannot hide. 

In her programme note for Sama, choreographer Andrea Miller, who is the artistic director of New York-based Gallim Dance, writes: ‘There are essential, ambiguous and complex elements of our humanity that can only be accessed through our physical experience.’ With its inherent capacity for physical embodiment, dance is fertile ground for elaborating the importance of our bodies in social discourse. For Sama, Miller and her creative team — lighting designer Paul Keogan, costume designer Hogan McLaughlin and composers Vladimir Zaldwich and Frédéric Despierre — delve deep into the realms of imagery and imagination to conjure up a paeon to physical expression, a sensuous and tangible whirl of theatrical and circus arts that the dancers elaborate with infectious abandon. At the heart of Sama is a lament for what Miller fears to be ‘the beginning of an apocalypse of the body’; at the beginning is an enactment of an Eastern parable and at the end a lullaby that follows an exultant jump into darkness by the dancers. Within this framework, perhaps the most significant role is for a young woman whose clearly articulated detachment could well be ‘the still point of the turning world’ from which all energy arises. Miller created it for Vivian Pakkanen but due to a last-minute illness she was replaced by an undaunted Artemis Stamouli from the previous cohort of Rambert2. That kind of coolness under pressure is what Sama celebrates.

Nederlands Dans Theater 1 at Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theatre 1, León & Lightfoot, Pite and Goecke, Sadler’s Wells, June 26

Jon Bond, Roger Van der Poel, Aram Hasler and Rena Narumi in The Statement (photo: Foteini Christofilopoulu)

The first work on Nederlands Dans Theatre 1’s season at Sadler’s Wells plays uncomfortably between entertainment and oppression. It’s as if house choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot have abruptly interrupted the five dancers — Myrthe van Opstal, Chloé Albaret, Marne van Opstal, Roger Van der Poel and Jorge Nazal — in Shoot The Moon and leave us to observe the intensity of their unstable relationships on a revolving set of three rooms from which the only exit is through a door or window into the next one. The program note suggests each room contains its own love story, but the febrile gestural vocabulary, clinical partnering and the open mouths of despair suggest each individual is going through hell and has no psychological space for anyone else, while the pervasive trope of effortless high extensions suggest a compulsive narcissism. It is as if Ibsen’s dramas of domestic claustrophobia have met Virginia Woolf’s fragmented narratives without the nuanced psychology of the former and the acute formal tension of the latter. One might almost conclude that set, costumes and live, voyeuristic video of the dancers projected on the clerestory-level screen are all part of a hermetically sealed aesthetic of neurosis. León and Lightfoot choose Philip Glass’s Movement II from his Tirol Concerto for piano and orchestra to lend the work emotions that are absent from the choreography; it is not music on which the dancers rely for their musicality but rather a score to appease the audience.

If the elements of Shoot the Moon were limited to conjuring up the images it portrays it would make an interesting study in the power of the unconscious to affect a choreographic outcome, but seeing the company’s assistant choreographer Marco Goecke’s Woke up Blind suggests an NDT 1 house aesthetic. Again the subject is love, as expressed in two songs Jeff Buckley recorded, his own You and I and Van Morrison’s The Way Young Lovers Do. The first person we see from a cast of seven is Nozal who hasn’t yet recovered from the tension of Shoot the Moon, but Buckley’s voice is also in a register of despair. At least Goecke is trying to match the fevered pitch of his choreography to Buckley’s overwrought state of delivery, but given its gestural similarity to Shoot the Moon and its translation onto technically precise dancing bodies, the effect barely shifts NDT 1’s tormented aesthetic.

It only takes a pause to rectify this. In The Statement, Crystal Pite uses four dancers — Aram Hasler, Rena Narumi, Jon Bond and Roger Van der Poel — to recreate a boardroom scene in an international investment office that has just fomented an international conflict in order to profit financially. On an otherwise dark stage, Jay Gower Taylor places a long, shiny oval table that Tom Visser lights from a similarly dimensioned hood above it; the concentration of light on the figures assembled around the perimeter dressed neatly and expensively by Pite and Joke Visser is intense. Their preoccupation is how to make a statement that exonerates their superiors without taking the blame themselves. Using a recorded one-act play by Jonathon Young with the voices of Young, Meg Roe, Colleen Wheeler and Andrew Wheeler, Pite choreographs to the accents and inflections of its tightly woven and increasingly confrontational argument. In extending choreography into mime and mime into choreography, Pite puts the polished virtuosity of the dancers at the service of gesture; nothing is gratuitous. In its message and expressive power, The Statement can be seen as a contemporary successor to Kurt Joos’s The Green Table.

It’s hard to return to the house style of León and Lightfoot in the final work, Stop-Motion, where love is replaced by ‘a process of farewell and transformation’, the revolving rooms by an empty space and Philip Glass by a mournful Max Richter. The set by León and Lightfoot with its chalk dust is visually arresting under Tom Bevoort’s lighting and its effect is evocative of the ephemeral nature of life. The large-scale, close-up video work, directed by Rahi Rezvani, conceived by León and Lightfoot and featuring their daughter Saura, is reminiscent of choreographer Édouard Lock’s interest in and integration of film and performance for La La La Human Steps. However the visual gratification of Stop-Motion is no substitute for psychological insight and emotional strength and while the choreographic use of space has changed from Shoot the Moon, the vocabulary remains within a narrow band of imagination that fails to release the full potential of these dancers beyond their shapes and extensions.

Ballet British Columbia’s Triple Bill at Sadler’s Wells

Ballet British Columbia, Triple Bill, Sadler’s Wells, March 6

Scott Fowler and artists of Ballet British Columbia in Bill (photo: Chris Randle)

The UK tour of Ballet British Columbia that Dance Consortium has organized coincides with a change of government in Canada where the current liberal party under Justin Trudeau has filled up the cultural sector coffers the previous conservative party had spent years diminishing. Thus a medium-sized company from the West coast of Canada has been able to add to the country’s cultural profile in the UK and from the program Ballet BC offered at Sadler’s Wells it looks decidedly healthy. Artistic Director Emily Molnar’s opening choreography for this triple bill, 16+ a room, reminds us of the connection she has had with William Forsythe at Ballett Frankfurt although she has made the work very much in the image of her company. Only two of the current dancers remain from before Molnar became artistic director in 2009, so this is a group she has developed through exposing them to a rich gamut of commissioned works, choreographic methods and styles. It is a finely honed company that puts technical strength at the service of an engaging and generous choreographic language.

From the beginning of 16+ a room (2013) there is a sense of an intellectual approach to the physical language, as if the dancers are working out amongst themselves the problem Molnar has set them. At the same time the problem she has set — what would happen if you put 16 people in a room and started tipping it — creates its own dynamic of sliding, balancing, suspending and tilting that she wraps in a vocabulary of muscular classicism. Jordan Tuinman’s lighting provides a sense of both luminous intensity and architectural shift while Kate Burrows’ costumes give freedom to the contained force and articulate extension of the dancers. The energy that tips the room comes from the declamatory electronic score of Dirk Haubrich, providing a high-voltage current through its three sections to bind together the choreography, visual form and aural environment of 16+ a room into a single organic entity.

From Haubrich to Brahms is more of a musical step than it is to move from the style of Molnar to that of Crystal Pite. Each choreographer acknowledges a debt to Forsythe, and in Solo Echo (2012) Pite interpolates her vocabulary in the calm of Brahms’ chamber music (the Allegro non troppo from his Cello sonata in E minor and the Adagio affetusoso from his Cello sonata in F major). She quotes a poem by Mark Strand, Lines for Winter, in the program note, but Solo Echo is a poem in itself written on the bodies of the seven dancers and suggested in Jay Gower Taylor’s setting of falling snow. Between the exquisite opening solo of Brandon Alley and the ineffable sigh of his slumped body abandoned in the snow at the end is ‘a human journey from adolescence to adulthood’ that breathes with the emotional intricacy of the music. This is pre-Polaris Pite where the hive mentality has not yet coalesced; the sense of community is suggested rather through a constant tide of individual comings and goings, one motion inspiring another, not unlike the way the cello and piano weave their respective melodies yet maintain their respective voices. The unity of this intensely musical work is further enhanced by Pite and Joke Visser’s spare costumes of dark, pinstriped waistcoats and trousers while Tom Visser’s evocative lighting subtly indicates the shifting focus of our attention. If 16+ a room is extrovert and energetic, Solo Echo turns the dancers on themselves in a state of poignant reflection.

After the second intermission, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Bill (2010), originally created for Batsheva Dance Company with a score by Ori Lichtik, promises to further extend the scope of Ballet BC’s achievement. Unitards concentrate our attention on the structure of the body, its lines, shapes and gestures in four male solos that are respectively sensually outrageous, energetically comic, fluidly articulate, and stoically introspective. But the fifth, female solo begins to de-emphasise the individual to pave the way for the communal — a duality that pervades Israeli choreography. Expanding our focus to take in the entire stage at once, the nature of the visual game is searching the shifting unity of the 18 undulating, gesticulating dancers for subtle changes in rhythm and shape that Omer Sheizaf’s tonal lighting both emulates and encourages. Eyal and Behar extract sufficient differentiation within the group, but after the assertive individuality of the first two works Bill feels in its latter construction disconcertingly insubstantial. It is perhaps a case of the work’s formal integration into the company’s West coast ethos lacking the vital context of its social and cultural origins.

(Ian Abbott was the first to see this program at the Birmingham Hippodrome in 2016)

A preview of Ballet British Columbia at Sadler’s Wells

From an interview with Emily Molnar, artistic director of Ballet British Columbia

Artists of Ballet British Columbia in Crystal Pite’s Solo Echo (photo: Michael Slobodian)

On March 6 & 7 Ballet British Columbia will be performing on the Sadler’s Wells main stage. For those who might read into the company name images of evergreen forests, indigenous peoples, paintings by Emily Carr, a rugged Pacific Northwest coast and English weather, the association with ballet may not immediately spring to mind. But those who know the names of Crystal Pite and William Forsythe (both of whom feature large in the Sadler’s Wells program this summer), may be surprised to learn their connection runs through Ballet British Columbia (Ballet BC). The company, founded in 1986, is based in Vancouver and Pite, who was born in the province, started her dancing career there. In 1996 she joined William Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt and when she returned to Vancouver she began to choreograph for various companies, including Ballet BC, and founded her own company, Kidd Pivot. In 2010 Pite and Kidd Pivot moved to Frankfurt as the resident company of Kunsterlhaus Mousonturm. The paths of Pite and Forsyth are in turn intermingled with the career of Emily Molnar, Ballet BC’s current artistic director. Molnar is a graduate of the National Ballet School in Toronto and a former member of the National Ballet of Canada before she, too, joined Ballet Frankfurt where she met Pite. Forsythe’s approach to constructing and deconstructing ballet was a huge influence on both dancers. Molnar returned to Vancouver as a principal dancer at Ballet BC and took over the artistic directorship in 2009. So while the company’s name serves to identify it geographically, its artistic lineage is very much aligned with Frankfurt.

Although she also makes work on the company, Molnar has spent the last nine years selecting a broad range of works from different choreographers to develop a dialogue on dance and performance with her audiences. To commission and create 40 new works for a company of 18 dancers and to maintain healthy home seasons in a theatre the size of Sadler’s Wells is evidence of the success of her approach. She describes herself as having been a difficult student because she would constantly question the school regime, the way dancers trained and the technical as well as psychological effect of such training on the dancer. This propensity for questioning fed into her approach to choreography — working with Forsythe must have been especially stimulating — and later to her artistic directorship of a company. She is constantly instilling in her dancers not so much the ‘how’ of a performance but the ‘why’, and in building her choice of works and programs she pays attention to ‘why’ an audience may set foot in the theatre and to the dialogue that inevitably ensues. She wants to reward her audiences for taking that step, but she also wants to lead them on a journey that may take them outside their familiar frame of reference.

The program at Sadler’s Wells comprises works by Pite (Solo Echo) and Molnar (16 + a room) along with a third by the contemporary female voice of Sharon Eyal (Bill), a dancer and choreographer who spent 23 years working with Ohad Naharin in Batsheva in Tel Aviv. Pite and Eyal (along with her collaborator Gai Behar) are recognized names in the UK, so Molnar will be the outsider, setting up the kind of dialogue with audiences here that she has pioneered in Vancouver. Augurs are good; the program was first aired at the International Dance Festival Birmingham in 2016 and my friend Ian Abbott was impressed not only by Molnar’s ‘integrity, sense and articulate coherence’ in her advocacy of female choreographers at a pre-performance event but by the company’s triple bill which he likened to a delectable three-course meal. Dance Consortium was so impressed by the bill of fare and presumably by the bill that it has chosen to tour Ballet British Columbia in the UK this year.

UK Tour Dates

The Royal Ballet, works by Dawson, Wheeldon and Pite

The Royal Ballet, Triple Bill, Royal Opera House, March 23

Kristen McNally and artists of the Royal Ballet in Flight Pattern (photo: Johan Persson)

This is a program of repertoire works by former Royal Ballet dancers, David Dawson and Christopher Wheeldon, wrapped around a new commission by Crystal Pite, the first female choreographer to perform her work on the main stage in a long, long, time. Despite this landmark achievement, Pite is not a classical choreographer, nor are her works in the classical idiom. Borrowing a leaf from Tamara Rojo’s astute book, the Royal Ballet has brought in a lauded contemporary name on a contemporary theme at an appropriate moment. It is also borrowing from the book of Sadler’s Wells associate artists. Much as I love Pite’s work, Flight Pattern blends uneasily with both the accompanying repertoire and the surroundings. It’s a beautifully fraught work (beautiful and fraught) about the fate of migrants, not a subject that lends itself naturally to the velvet and gilded glamour of the Royal Opera House. It’s an oddly imbalanced program, too, because Flight Pattern is not a natural closer, and neither Dawson’s nor Wheeldon’s work prepares for it in any way; it comes out of nowhere. It is nevertheless a sublime conception, both scenically and choreographically, for a mass of 36 dancers with the suggestion of a lead migrant couple (an incongruous notion) of Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé. Anyone who saw Pite’s monumental Polaris on the Sadler’s Wells stage for the See The Music Hear The Dance program just over two years ago will remember her powerful massed forms of 64 dancers responding to Thomas Adès’ orchestral storm of the same name. Flight Pattern is more poetic and less menacing, influenced by the eerie refinement of the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony, but its subject is harrowing. The work visualises the endless lines of stooped humanity on a desperate trek to an unknown future but Jay Gower Taylor’s set, Thomas Visser’s lighting and Nancy Bryant’s costumes bestow epic proportions on the entire journey. The movements of the dancers are muted and repressed throughout the work, hemmed in by heavy overcoats and by the giant partitions of the set that close inexorably on them until only a gently rocking McNally and a seething Sambé remain isolated. It is a moment that almost spits with rage but Sambé at this crucial point allows his pyrotechnical wizardry to infiltrate his character, dissipating Pite’s entire psychological build-up.

There’s plenty of legitimate technical display on the rest of the program, however, and the men get a thorough workout in Dawson’s first work for the Royal Ballet, The Human Seasons, to a commissioned score by Greg Haines. You know you’re at the Royal Ballet with this level of technical skill, though the loud landings (and there are many of them) of the men in particular exhibit some weakness in execution. The women are on display too, especially when upright; they are less so when being dragged unceremoniously along the ground.

Seeing The Human Seasons (2013) side by side with Wheeldon’s After The Rain (2005) one can’t help seeing similarities; both are in the neo-classical style with stripped down costumes, and there are one or two quotes by Dawson of Wheeldon’s lifts and slides. Where the two works differ is in the use of space as part of choreographic form. For all its intense movement, its entrances and exits, and its asymmetrical groupings, The Human Seasons, unlike Keats’ sonnet that inspired it, is constantly crying out for some kind of form to hold them all together. This is amplified by a lackadaisical deportment in the men in between partnering duties or bravura steps; they just amble over to the next sequence, killing the dynamics. Haines’ score can’t hold the work together either, so with all these holes Dawson’s form fails to gel, leaking out in all directions over the course of the work’s 35 minutes.

Scored for three couples, the first section of After The Rain is set to the first (Ludus) movement of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa; as soon as it begins, Wheeldon’s spatial stagecraft is apparent. The form is held in place by the harmony of the music allied with the harmony of the choreography, pumpkin rolls and all. The second movement, to Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, is joined to the first but not closely related. It is often performed as a separate duet and its renown makes it appear as the feature film we’ve been waiting for. Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares make it a powerful meditation on the beauty of strength and the strength of beauty, where each gesture is thought through and flows seamlessly to its natural resolution. But while the consummate elegance of this movement is framed on one side, the absence of a final, contrasting movement leaves it floating in splendid isolation; it should either be set free for good or the frame completed.

Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, Betroffenheit

Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, Betroffenheit, Sadler’s Wells, May 31

Tiffany Tregarthen and Jonathon Young in Betroffenheit (photo: Michael Slobodian)

‘The accident happened. It has happened. It’s happened’. The past is irrevocable and unchangeable. The past can loop a person in a repetitive rewinding of backward motions; there is no escape. In Betroffenheit, a collaboration between choreographer Crystal Pite and theatre director and actor Jonathon Young, this space of no escape is ‘the room’ — the site of trauma. Based on Young’s own experience, the work deals with horror, pain, loss and guilt. Trauma is not an easy subject to engage with, not so much because of its resistance to representation but rather because of its pervasive presence in our culture. Overused and glamorized, trauma has lost meaning and with it the connotations of the experience it designates. As a result, the risk for any artist wanting to engage with the subject is either that of slipping into self-confessional indulgence or in facile generalization or, even worse, universalization. Pite and Young resist these pitfalls. Betroffenheit does not steer from ‘the event’: it is focused on a moment in time and on the individual locked in its repetitive occurrence, constrained within the claustrophobic narrowness of pain and loss. There is no generalizing. It is one man’s experience — performed by Young himself — that isolates and is isolating: ‘The accident happened. It has happened. It’s happened’, repeats Young in his disjointed re-telling of the drama that unravels in his mind and on stage. ‘The room’ cannot be shared. The shock and the encounter to which the title Betroffenheit alludes are his fears, unbidden memories, guilt and survival. They are the ghosts that unremittingly draw him back to that space where the past repeats itself and attempts to get to terms with it are futile. Indeed, as trauma theorist Cathy Caruth observes, belatedness and incomprehensibility are at the heart of the traumatic event and its repetition opens up realms beyond what can be known.

Performatively, Betroffenheit enters such a space of belatedness and incomprehensibility by drawing on and weaving together a broad range of references from art, literature, theatre, psychology, film and dance. The first half is set within a narrow perimeter of false walls, clinical and industrial at the same time that are open on one side − ‘the room’. Voices intrude, personages enter it and lure Young into a disturbing vaudeville acting out, sinuously performed by Pite’s five dancers. The narrow space of ‘the room’ temporarily blasts open into the event — reminiscent of Hollywood’s disaster movies — then the room closes again onto its painful repetition. Pite and Young have set in motion what Jacques Rancière refers to as ‘a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible’. This unleashes a chain of images, words, and movements that alter each other to convey ‘the sensible texture of an event’ whose forms are disquieting, grotesque, and nightmarish.

This motion continues in the second half, though the register changes. A spotlight defines the empty stage with its single pillar as a rarefied cone of incomprehensibility. If words and strident visual frames seemed to overtake the first part, dance regains its centrality in the second. Visual references are implicit in the moving tableaux of a Renaissance pietà and deposition reminiscent of the suffused rendering of Bill Viola’s slow-down video reenactments of The Passions (2000). Breathing becomes the sensorial punctum (in Barthes’s sense) on which the affective tension of Pite’s choreography unfolds. And breath carries the emotional movement of the work to its conclusion. The event happened, has happened. The event cannot be escaped nor understood. There is no resolution, only the possibility of acceptance. In the final solo by Jermaine Spivey, the spasmodic dance macabre of compulsive fears of the first half mutates into a fluid quietness of motion and emotion which weave through and across each other.

A question remains: where do Pite and Young position the audience in relation to the work? The first half of Betroffenheit makes subtle use of an alienating effect reminiscent of Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. Recorded applause cruelly marks the re-enactment of trauma. We are uncomfortably reminded of the spectacle and voyeurism with which horror is so often endowed. In the second half the carefully lit pillar whose shadow lengthens over the auditorium gestures towards another position for the spectator, that of attentive, intelligent and sensitive observance.