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.