Vera Frenkel brings us a sparkling, thought-provoking video installation

It would be a mistake to try to sum up As If by Chance, Vera Frenkel’s newly completed two-channel video and print installation. But an entry point to this multivalent, moving – in both senses – picture could be in the notion that there are many ways of telling a story.

In most traditions a story is linear. We speak of a story arc, a climax, a resolution, a beginning, a middle and an end. Indeed video – remember tape? – is a linear medium. But poetry, music, painting and dance tell us that a story can be multilayered, circular, non-chronological and open-ended.

The title As If by Chance, says a note about the work, alludes to “an inter-generational card game, evidence of which was found by the police after a Toronto art centre was closed by the City.”  The complex video work began with a film shoot Frenkel organized in which seven elders, all older than 70 and seven children, all 10 or younger, were paired, seated at a glass table and given paints, brushes and markers.  Colourful cards were displayed, which the participants turned over to reveal words – boat, or sky, house or flower — that were prompts for the creation of art works. Naturally, conversations between young and old ensued.

As in previous works of hers, Vera acts as narrator, lending her even-toned statements to a voiceover that is convincingly objective. But she also provokes with statements such as, “I’m telling the story from the end again. That’s what happens when there are so many beginnings.”

The narrative has at least three strands. One story line is mostly descriptive, the voiceover explaining how the children “painted their dreams” and the elders were “mapping their memories.” There’s also the underlying saga of the art centre promised by the City as a place for working artists to call their own. Through political jockeying and outright lying, the artists are cheated out of the space, the property instead turned over to a laundromat.

And then there’s the story of Natasha, the narrator’s landlady. Natasha has evicted the narrator who lived in an upstairs apartment, possibly to make way for the art centre, which is Natasha’s project. Except for her love of Russian poetry and a possible connection Russian interference in our elections – art centres serving as covers for espionage – we know nothing about Natasha.

She has gone missing; we get no clues as to how and why. The narrator refers to the disappearance from time to time, but the implication is that some mysteries are never solved. For the viewer, the mention of Natasha’s absence heightens the immediacy of the exchanges between the elders and the youngsters.

Adding yet another dimension to the composition is William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The title is superimposed on the scene of the card game early on in the video. At random intervals, Blake’s illustrated, hand-printed poem “The Tyger” floats into view. A five-year-old girl, who surely can’t be familiar with Blake, is drawing a tiger, meticulously painting in the stripes and sharing the task with her twin sister. Their innocence is expressed in this spontaneous artmaking. Blake’s metaphysics included a “higher innocence,” a recovered innocence, now informed by experience.  The artists among the elders could be an example of this higher or “organized” innocence that allows for self-expression without self-consciousness.

As If by Chance proceeds through a flow of moving and still images, written and spoken words. Sometimes the images, black and white in one stream, richly coloured in another, overlap each other. Digital prints of stills extracted from the videos, hang on the walls of the Charles Street Video premises, where Frenkel and her co-editor Konrad Skręta have been toiling for many months to make As If by Chance.  

The viewer is a necessary participant, not just passively watching, but interpreting the flow of juxtaposed words and images to complete the artistic process. We observe an elder drawing a spiral and associate it with the hand of a child drawing a circle. A simple statement, such as “the present, as usual, is invisible,” offers another insight. Of course: we see the past and the future in pictures, not so the present.    

After 30 minutes, the video comes to an end, but then comes Part 2, a rearranging of the video elements as if the author were telling the story from another perspective.

As If by Chance is surprising, absorbing, spiked with subtle wit, and a little bit challenging. As the credits roll after another 30 minutes, this viewer’s immediate reaction was, “I’ve got to see this again.”

As If by Chance

By Vera Frenkel

Screening November 26, 12 pm to 4 pm; November 27, 6 pm to 8 pm; November 29, 12 pm to 4 pm.

Charles Street Video, 76 Geary Avenue, Toronto

25 years . . . and counting

Older and Reckless? At its inception, the name of the show for dancers and choreographers (initially over 40) had a whimsical air, implying “nothing left to lose.” Over time, the showcase for senior dance artists, established in 2000 by Claudia Moore when she led Moonhorse Dance Theatre, has become an occasion for artists more than 45 years of age to advance their craft, take new risks and mentor younger dancers and choreographers.

At first, says Allison Cummings, Moonhorse artistic director since 2022, Older and Reckless “was a more casual, small series where they had three shows a year at the Dancemakers studio. In 2016, Claudia felt our seasoned artists need a bigger stage and so it was pared down to one show a year at Harbourfront Centre.”

So the Older and Reckless show celebrating 25 years of the event, with three performances November 21 to 22 at the Fleck Harbourfront Centre stage, is kind of a big deal. Since the very first show, in which Robert Desrosiers performed a solo, Older and Reckless has been a platform for a long line of dancers and choreographers, from Karen and Allen Kaeja, to José Navas, to Peter Chin, Denise Fujiwara, Learie McNicolls … the list goes on. For the 25th anniversary, Moonhorse is assembling an eight-minute video drawing on archival footage to show the range of work presented. (Among my personal favourites is a performance by Elizabeth Langley in which she presented herself as the child of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.)

“I’ve changed the word ‘senior,’ to ‘lifelong.’ I think it’s more appropriate,” says Cummings, who curates each Older and Reckless through a combination of performers reaching out to her and calling on artists to present existing or new work. She makes every effort to ensure that all the people involved in putting on the show, which typically features three 20-minute works, are also in the 45-plus category.

The 2025 show includes an intriguing pairing – Montreal dancers Marc Boivin and Louise Bédard – in a duet, Handmade, exploring what it means to be older and (possibly more) reckless. Carol Anderson first presented Elsinore/night hours, a solo for Julia Sasso, in 1999. Sasso will reprise the work for this show.

Dancer/choreographer William Yong, who began his career in ballet, has joined up with Sonia Rodriguez, former principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, to present the solo de corazón (from the heart). Collaboration with Rodriguez, who retired from the National Ballet in 2022, began with a conversation.

“I discovered such richness in her life story,” says Yong. “I felt that, at this moment in her career, a solo for someone like Sonia — a true ballet legend — needed to come from something deeply personal, something from her heart. We spoke about everything: her journey to Canada, her extraordinary career, her family, and motherhood.” What he gleaned from became the basis for a dance that Yong says is “simple, direct and full of feeling.” 

Year-round, Moonhorse sponsors workshops and dance classes for people over 45 and interdisciplinary exchange programs by and for older dance artists.

More than a decade ago, Moonhorse began a community performance project that was, says Cummings, “a way to get people from our audiences who were not dancers into a creative process and on stage.” This year Jenn Goodwin has created a six-minute piece for 26 dance enthusiasts.

“We have people who come back every single year. It’s an opportunity for them to really experience from the inside what they love so much to watch,” adds Cummings.

Like the trained professionals, these untrained dancers are driven by a lifelong passion: “I want to dance.” 

Older & Reckless
November 21 at 8pm
November 22 at 2pm and 8pm, 2025
Fleck Harbourfront Centre Theatre, Toronto

Procession is a triumph

Just blocks away from the Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays were playing in top form in the final game of the World Series on Saturday night, the National Ballet of Canada offered up an equally thrilling performance with the world premiere of Procession.

Created on the company by choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, Procession brings 32 dancers, a cellist and a soprano to the stage for a show that reinvents the story ballet in an extraordinary piece of theatre.

Both professional and life partners, Smith and Schraiber developed their craft as members of The Batsheva Dance Company under the leadership of Ohad Naharin. They are among the most sought-after creators in contemporary ballet and in commissioning this full-length work from them, NBoC artistic director Hope Muir was betting on a collaboration that would take the company to a new level of artistry.

And so it has. Procession will knock your socks off.

The curtains come up on an empty stage that is soon inhabited by a stately procession of dancers in evening dress, each costume designed by Dana Osborne unique to the individual wearing it. The music is mainly baroque – Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau – arranged by Coleman Itzkoff in six movements for each of the two acts. Itzkoff also performs, joining the dancers on stage and playing cello in ways you’ve never seen it played before.

The music provides a strong framework within which the dance can move in unexpected directions, just as the elegant formal wear is loosened or removed as the dancers burst forth with a passion that upsets our expectations of sombre rituals. As does the presence of on stage of mezzo-soprano Rachel Wilson who at one point appears with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail glass in the other.

Procession is all about the possibilities of imagining a world on stage, a journey on which anything might happen. Traditional forms are evoked, from the Jewish wedding dance, the hora, to the procession of ballerinas down a ramp in “La Bayadère,” to bits reminiscent of the dancey musical Grease.

Formality is juxtaposed against everyday actions as the dancers break out into trios or solos or pas de deux, then coalesce in grand ensemble moments.

By turns complex, witty, moving and demanding, Procession is like life itself. Not always easy to process, but profound. A kind of Canterbury Tales in dance.

Procession

Choreography by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schreiber

Performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto until November 8, 2025

Photo of Hannah Galway and Christopher Gerty by Bruce Zinger

Pat Ferns: trailblazing Canadian television producer

Pat Ferns’ The Big Picture: A Personal History of Independent Television Production in Canada is a revealing, five-decade account of Ferns’ significant contribution to film, television and documentary production. Among the revelations:  if you want to make it in television production in Canada, you’d best be able to think on your feet and improvise. And even then, the odds are against any Canadian making a fortune producing films or miniseries for broadcast in Canada and abroad.

Ferns’ story is one of sheer resourcefulness, putting together co-productions wherever he could find a broadcaster or a source of funding. Along the way he was a lobbyist for more effective government support for independent tv and film producers and a champion for the Canadian broadcasting of Canadian productions. Official statistics show that in 2023, the independent production sector delivered $12.2 billion in annual production volume, generating $14.1 billion in GDP, “supporting nearly a quarter of a million jobs.” 

The memoir foregrounds the life and activities of a passionate Canadian creator against a backdrop of disappointment with the way the CBC, Canadian commercial networks, and cultural institutions such as the National Film Board have failed the independent production companies that blossomed from the ‘70s to the ‘90s. Production houses such as Nielsen Ferns, Ferns’ own Primedia, Nelvana, Rhombus Media and Alliance Atlantis (now Lionsgate) now are either defunct or have changed direction, their works seldom picked up by Canadian broadcasters.  

Ferns, born in Winnipeg in 1945 to Harry and Maureen Ferns, spent his childhood and adolescence in Birmingham, England. “We were thrown out of Canada, basically,” says the now (nearly) retired producer. In 1949 Harry’s teaching post at Royal Roads Military College in Victoria suddenly dried up after someone dug up his Marxist leanings and accused him of being a Communist.

The happy result of this exile was that Pat (short for Paterson), only four when the family landed in the UK, got into an especially good grammar school in Birmingham and went on to earn a BA from Cambridge University and his Master’s from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. It was at Cambridge that Ferns got the acting and producing bug.

Following graduation and now engaged to Jenny, his childhood sweetheart, Ferns made plans to return to Canada. He got the address of the CBC and wrote to a staff producer named Dick Nielsen.

“He was thinking he was getting the big weekend current affairs show and he was looking for a director of research,” Ferns writes. “He liked my handwriting and he remembered letters my father had written to The Globe and Mail. So, on the basis of that, I was hired.”

Early on, the callow director of research was sent out on a shoot in Red Lake, Northern Ontario with producer Don Cumming. They were documenting life in a mining town for a segment of a show inspired by Richard Rohmer’s idea to develop a mid-Canada corridor, to facilitate more extraction of natural resources. Cumming got into a confrontation with some drunken youths and ended up in hospital. “That left me with the duties of the producer, who in those days was in effect the director, writer and interviewer,” as Ferns tells it. “Somehow, I pulled it off.” Relying on a good cameraman, the new hire made himself look as if he knew what he was doing.

The left-leaning Nielsen soon realized he wasn’t destined for promotion at the Mother Corp. “We plotted to leave and form an independent production company,” says Ferns. Nielsen-Ferns was born in 1972. Their first production was a six-part series on Christian faith called A Third Testament, written and presented by British author and Christian convert Malcom Muggeridge, introducing six men in search of God, from Augustine of Hippo to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The series was aired in French and English on the CBC/Radio Canada in 1974-75 and was acquired for international distribution by Time-Life Films.

From its launch in 1972, Nielsen-Ferns Ltd was a trailblazer and its productions were a cut above the daily fare of network television. In1976, when Torstar bought the company, they continued to cover the waterfront of Canadian culture with such titles as The Newcomers/Les Arrivants, the impressive Cities series, a collaboration with John McGreevy Productions in which presenters such as Peter Ustinov and Glenn Gould toured their home cities, and  Portraits of Power, profiling leaders such as Mao Zedong and post-war German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. As well, Nielsen-Ferns created a platform for British naturalist and writer Gerald Durrell, with two series, The Stationary Ark and Ark on the Move.  The Wars, an adaptation of Timothy Findley’s novel about a Canadian in World War I, was a Nielsen-Ferns International feature film directed by then Stratford Festival’s AD Robin Phillips, in collaboration with the National Film Board. Released in March 1983, it was lovingly restored forty years on and screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022.

Torstar retained rights to the Nielsen-Ferns brand, so in 1981, Ferns established Primedia Productions Ltd., whose remarkable output includes feature adaptations of Canadian plays Billy Bishop Goes to War (John Gray), Waiting for the Parade (John Murrell) and Stage on Screen (8 Canadian plays). Primedia’s specialty was TV movies and mini-series such as such as Heaven on Earth, Going Home, Glory Enough for All Passion and Paradise, Young Catherine and many more.

From the very start, Ferns had assumed a key role as lobbyist for independent television producers, having become in 1978 the president of the Canadian Film and Television Association. He helped shape the terms of federal government support for independent producers. He voiced an opinion that has only magnified in recent years that the CBC needs to step up to partner with independents. CFTA made an intervention when the national network’s license came up for renewal at the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, producing a document entitled Make or Buy: The Case for Independence.

“I argued,” says Ferns, “that the CBC had a publisher function, but no publisher puts all his authors on staff. You need creative competition to get the best stuff on air. At that CRTC hearing, I proposed that in addition to its government-supplied operating funds and capital funds, it needed a third envelope for independent production. We’d planted a seed. Ultimately it was the concept on which Telefilm Canada’s Broadcast Fund was launched.” Telefilm later morphed into the Canada Media Fund.

As Ferns wrote in a recent op-ed for The Toronto Star, the CBC needs to review its business model. “Governments appoint CBC presidents as if it’s a big organization that needs to be managed. Wrong. CBC is a creative organization that needs to be led.” Instead of appointing civil servants, lawyers or even engineers with no media or journalistic background, the Mother Corp, Ferns believes, should be led by a creator and program maker, such as Mark Thompson (with whom Ferns once co-produced) who went on to become Director General of the BBC, and subsequently CEO at both the New York Times and now CNN.

“What [the CBC] needs to do is rethink who they are and who they’re serving. In British Columbia, the Knowledge Network is frequently outrating the CBC in the province and they have a miniscule budget, but they’ve got a mix of the best of the world. And they have the public donating to the service as Knowledge Partners.”

What if the CBC were to partner with national organizations such as the National Ballet of Canada, the National Arts Centre, The Canadian Opera Company? Ferns muses. “I mean these companies cannot tour to Whitehorse or Yellowknife, but the CBC could televise their shows and virtually tour them.” After all, one might add, the Broadcasting Act stipulates that the CBC’s mandate includes a need to reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences and “contribute to a shared national consciousness and identity.”

Ferns’ third act, as a chairman of the board of the Banff Television Festival and subsequently CEO, made further opportunities for independent producers in a public pitch session where creators got to present their projects to broadcasters from around the globe. This innovation spread around the world taking Ferns to five continents and finally to China for GZDOC and the China International Conference of Science and Education Producers. These days he hosts the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum in Taiwan. He says, “I have been leading a pitch session in Taiwan for the last 16 years. It’s become a huge success. Ninety percent of the projects pitched have been produced, a stunning achievement”.

 Accolades, including membership in the Order of Canada, The Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal and numerous film awards, have not been wanting, but Pat Ferns is not ready to down tools for good. As president of Ferns Productions, based outside Victoria in Shirley BC, he has since 2004 been producing notable documentary miniseries and docudramas, including Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Darwin’s Brave New World, Listening to Orcas and 1491: The Untold Story of the Americas Before Columbus.

The 80-year old Ferns shows two projects in development in on fernsproductions.ca. The closest to getting realized is Trade Routes, a three-part documentary series presented by Scottish-based geographer Vanessa Collingridge, to be helmed by Pat’s son Andrew Ferns.

“It all began with an ancient map. I wanted to make a show about trade, because it’s the geopolitical issue of our time, and tell the story through the history of cartography. I thought I had half the money in China, but now that its economy is suffering, that’s in doubt. I can raise a third of the money in Canada, and perhaps another third with Arte in France and Germany.”

“It will be my last hurrah.”

The Big Picture: A Personal History of Independent Television Production in Canada, by Pat Ferns, Sutherland House. $34.95 hardcover

Photos courtesy of Pat Ferns: Richard Nielsen and Pat Ferns; Ferns at the CNEX Chinese Documentary Forum in Taiwan. Cover of the Sutherland House book

Victoria dancer Patricia Sparks and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet at 85

Patricia Sparks’ long career in ballet culminated with her recruitment into the Winnipeg Ballet and a command performance for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in October 1951.

She was 20, and no neophyte. The Victoria native, now Pat Taylor, began dance lessons at age six. At 94, she still resides in Oak Bay, near the beach, keeps fit with tai chi and has total recall of her ballet training and performance. It all began with her mother’s friend and Pat’s godmother, Wynne Shaw, whose Victoria dance studio ran from 1941 to 1983.

“Wynne made up her own dances,” Pat recalls. “She wasn’t a dancer at all. Couldn’t demonstrate anything. But she was a phenomenal teacher.”  

It was through Miss Shaw that a 20-year-old Patricia Sparks was invited to join the Winnipeg Ballet. Shaw knew Gweneth Lloyd, co-founder of the company that earned its royal charter from Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. The Royal Winnipeg Ballet is this year marking its 85th anniversary.

Lloyd, an English ballet teacher and choreographer, arrived in Winnipeg with Betty Farrally, a former student of hers, in 1938. In 1939 they founded the Winnipeg Ballet, the oldest, continuously operating ballet company in North America. At the time when Sparks joined the company, Farrally was the ballet mistress.

In 1951, Pat Sparks, as she became known, Victor Duret and Beverley Ivings, all of Victoria, were among seven new dancers invited to join – in their case without auditioning — the Winnipeg Ballet. Another Victoria dancer, Bill McGrath, was already a member of the company. Sparks, Duret and Ivings were photographed for the Victoria Times, looking elegant with their suitcases, just before boarding a bus for Winnipeg.

“We got back there at the beginning of September,” says Pat, as if it was yesterday. “Our first performance was in front of Princess Elizabeth [a year before her coronation] and Prince Philip. It was the first thing we rehearsed for.”  After the show we were all introduced to them.”

The program consisted of Visages, Finishing School and The Wise Virgins, all choreographed by Lloyd, and Ballet Premier, created by Arnold Spohr. All 17 dancers performed for the royal couple. Jean Stoneham, who had danced with the Ottawa Ballet, was the star of the show. Pat recalls princess Elizabeth as stunningly beautiful. “They watched the first half of the program. After the show we were all introduced to them.”

For a still young and impressionable Pat Sparks, artistic director Arnold Spohr was a welcoming and encouraging figure. “He was a very kind man. On Christmas Eve, we out-of-towners were invited to his family home. It was the first time I had ever seen a Christmas tree with candles.” Spohr, whose heritage was German, “was a very tall man as were his brothers, all of them policemen.”

Among the dancers Pat met at the Winnipeg ballet was Hungarian-born Eva von Gencsy, who would later go on to co-found Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal.  “She was quite a character. I became really good friends with Eva and she would stay with me when in Victoria.”

Dancing professionally with a company on a shoestring budget was something of a challenge. “The costumes were already made. You either fitted into them or you didn’t. There was no money for adjustments.” And, for a young dancer from Victoria, dancing and touring in a harsh Canadian winter was an adventure of another kind.

“The first thing I did was buy a winter coat, a fur. In January 1952, we toured to Calgary. We took the train. I remember on the walk to the hotel. It was 60-below [Fahrenheit] with the windchill. We were billeted on the top floor of a house with a lovely lady. There were no cooking facilities, so we got a hotplate.”

Pat Sparks danced with RWB for two seasons, 1951 and 1952, but continued to perform after returning to Victoria, notably with Theatre Under the Stars, the musical theatre company that puts on shows to this day in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. “It was really fun,” she says. “We would rehearse all day in English Bay. Mostly, the old chestnuts.  Chu Chin Chow. The Merry Widow [as cancan girls] . . . waltzy kind of things, where we danced with the men.” One time, in a departure from routine, TUTS staged Brigadoon.

Once married to John Olsen, owner of The Strathcona Hotel, and later to Trevor Taylor, Pat is single and remains a participant in Victoria’s active dance scene. In 2016, she, along with some other volunteers and University of Victoria MA candidate Elizabeth Bassett and initiated the Dance Victoria Archives, an important record of professional dance on Vancouver Island. The archives document dancers such as Anna Marie Holmes and Patricia Sparks and renowned Victoria-born choreographer Crystal Pite.

The ballerina in Pat Sparks Taylor has not disappeared. She keeps moving and she keeps informed about the dance world. And she makes for fascinating conversation for anyone interested in Canadian ballet history.

Photos: Beverly Ivings, Kay Bird, Eva von Gencsy, Pat Sparks, Sheilagh Henderson and Viola Busday in Rondel 1951; Pat Sparks in costume for Finishing School; Pat Sparks Taylor at home.

Credits: Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet Archives; Susan Walker

Dancing on the Edge keeps it fresh

 

Arguably, Noam Gagnon has been dancing on the edge ever since he started classes at Concordia University, where he had thought he might major in psychology. The Quebec-born dancer, choreographer and pilates instructor has no fear of risk: safe is not in his vocabulary except as a synonym for boring.  

Gagnon will be the opening show at the 37th Dancing on the Edge festival, June 12 to 21 at the Firehall Arts Centre and SFU Woodward’s in Vancouver. The longest running dance festival in Canada will this year feature 17 companies, making up an eclectic but intriguing program of the kind artistic producer and DOTE co-founder Donna Spencer has perfected over the years.

As anyone familiar with Holy Body Tattoo, the company formed by Gagnon, Dana Gingras and musician Jean-Yves Theriault in 1993 will know, edginess has long been a hallmark of Gagnon’s work in dance. It’s true, he says of Holy Body shows such as our brief eternity: “We left it on the floor. Physically, emotionally, in every way, we gave it our all.”

being is the title of the piece Gagnon is bringing to the festival. “I think everyone is going to be surprised. It took a turn,” he says of this solo, created in collaboration with musician Stefan Smulovitz and first performed two years ago.

The solo, he explains, was a driven by a physical language and emotional language that emerged in the creative process. This version, Gagnon says, “is more based on the maturity I have gained . . . Now there’s a different emotionality that goes with my being.”

Recognizing the honour in being chosen to open the festival, Gagnon had to ask himself whether he was delivering what the festival audience would expect with him. So he kept working and re-working, with lots of input from Smulovitz, who join Gagnon on stage, because, he says, “at the end of the day, I’m a showman.”

Newton Moraes, a Toronto performer and artistic director of the 25-year-old company, Newton Moraes Dance Theatre, performs in the second half on the opening mixed program with Gagnon (which repeats later in the festival). He’s a first-timer with Dancing on the Edge. Moraes, a native of Porto Alegre, Brazil, also started out with a different idea of what he career he might pursue before dance found him, especially after he moved to Canada.

Moraes is thrilled to have been programmed into this festival. “It means so much to be part of this incredible platform that celebrates powerful and innovative dance.” He’ll be performing a new solo called Dance Is Not My Hobby. A woman who was once a close friend challenged him one day by suggesting that dance was simply a hobby for Moraes. It’s not. “Dance is a vital expression of my identity. At 62 years old, as an LGBTQ man, I’m committed to continuing my performances.” His choreography has drawn on a “rich tapestry of influences,” including African Brazilian spirituality and many artists he admires. The solos, pays homage to some of those artists and to the late Robert Shirley, the partner who brought Moraes to Canada.

Donna Spencer is much admired by dancers and choreographers familiar with the festival. One of them is Serge Bennathan, the French-born dancer, choreographer, artistic director, painter and poet. A Vancouverite for a good part of the year, Bennathan says, “Ah oui. Dancing on the Edge holds a very special place in my heart.” Spencer invited him to perform in the first festival in 1988 when he’d only been in Vancouver for a few months. Dancing on the Edge, says Bennathan, introduced him to the West Coast dance community and has been a launching pad for many a dance artist.

Dance festivals in Canada have had a hard time staying alive. According to Spencer, who founded the festival with Esther Rausenberg and since the early 1990s has held the title of artistic producer, DOTE’s longevity is a function of “the need for its existence.” The festival has had to operate on a small budget so they have to keep overhead and administrative costs to a minimum to give as much of their funds as possible to the artists. “We believe in the artists and strive to raise their profile with every festival.”

One of the aims of Dancing on the Edge is to represent as much of Canada as possible. Jenn Edwards, performing The Centre of Time on June 18 and 19, has been based in Labrador since 2019. She grew up in Burnaby, BC, and came to dance and choreography from figure skating. Edwards spent some formative years of her career in Berlin and Vienna, so she too has absorbed influences from far and wide.

The Centre of Time, developed during a couple of residencies, is a world premiere. The piece came out of Edwards’s meditations on time as perceived through the moving body.  An important element of the piece is a film created by Brad Dillon that screens on a backdrop. “It was shot on a frozen lake — the temperature was minus 30 that day — using a video camera and a drone. I really like the otherworldly effect of that.” Dillon’s camera also captured the shadows cast by the dancers — Edwards and three others — to produce an effect where the dancers and their shadows are interacting.

Be sure to consult the full festival line-up at www.dancingontheedge.org  or if you want to be surprised and delighted, just turn up and see what you can see.

Dancing on the Edge

June 12 to 21

Firehall Arts Centre, SFU Woodward’s, Vancouver BC

www.dancingontheedge.org

Photos, courtesy of the artists, clockwise: Newton Moraes/Dance Is Not My Hobby; Jenn Edwards/The Centre of Time; Noam Gagnon/being

The National Ballet of Canada is on a roll with Hope Muir

When the National Ballet of Canada opens its mixed program on May 30, a farewell to Guillaume Côté entitled Adieu, the company can expect record-breaking box office numbers. Such has been the effect of a rebrand that coincided with the 2022 appointment of Hope Muir as the Joan and Jerry Lozinski artistic director of the company.

A lot of development has occurred under her tenure, both for the company and for an expanding and diverse audience that has been invited to engage and challenge the dancers and choreographers.

On a chilly April morning, Muir, dressed for a long working day in casual clothes and no-nonsense running shoes, offers some background. After a career that has made her the most fully rounded artistic leader the company has ever seen, Muir has lost no time in re-shaping the company to ensure it can thrive and engage its audience as it approaches its 75th anniversary.

Changes she has introduced have been swift and effective. Following the pandemic, Muir had the opportunity to recruit dancers who have been with her from the beginning of her tenure. (“There was a lot of natural attrition and some key retirements.”) Today the average age of the performers is around 25, with an age range appropriate for a big classical company.

Developing new repertoire and reviving works such as next season’s Pinocchio, balancing the contemporary with the classical “legacy” ballets such as Swan Lake, has been at the forefront of what Muir sees as her mandate: to be a company that keeps the art form relevant and shows others the way forward.

The path to artistic directorship of a major ballet company has been quite intentional. Born in Toronto, Muir danced from a young age. Her formal training began at 15, when her mother’s work took her to London in the late 1980s. She was one of 10 out of 400 applicants accepted into the London Festival Ballet School. She first danced with the English National Ballet. Over her 17 years as a performer, Muir developed expertise in both classical and contemporary dance, performing with Rambert Dance Company and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

After retiring from dancing in 2006, she took on the job of rehearsal director and assistant artistic director for the Scottish Ballet, and in 2017 took over as artistic director of Charlotte Ballet, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Throughout this time, Muir worked with a range of choreographers and companies, including the National Ballet of Canada, where she staged Christopher Bruce’s Rooster in 2008 and assisting in the mounting of Crystal Pite’s Emergence in 2009.

Muir is well equipped to strike a balance between the classical and the contemporary and to find what excites both dancers and audiences. “What is interesting to me is the way classical and contemporary ballet support each other.” Both afford dancers an avenue to innovation. Dancers become part of the creative process in any given season, along the way developing new skills.  “If you make smart choices within a season, you’re giving dancers a chance to access the work. It’s quite visceral and the dancers are really engaged. That balance [between classical and contemporary] is what is giving us this momentum.”

Director of Marketing and Communications Belinda Bale has been working closely with Muir on the rebranding of the National Ballet. In 2022 the company hired Bruce Mau Design to conduct a process that was as much about attitude as about giving the company a new look. In consultation with all the stakeholders, from dancers to audience members to those with little awareness of professional dance, some key elements emerged. “The word ‘bold’ kept coming up,” Bale says. “And that’s very much Hope. She is bold and she is brave.”

Box office numbers tell the tale: with Muir’s first season in 2022-2023, the ticket sales returned to pre-pandemic levels, at $13.4 million. For the 2024-25 season, sales are on track to reach $16.4 million.

Since 2022, the company has performed a host of works that are either new or new for the National Ballet. Traditionally the mixed program has been a bit of a hard sell, but with the Winter mixed program this past February/March, a buzz of  excitement arose from what seemed like a packed house for a North American premiere of David Dawson’s The Four Seasons, a world premiere of Marco Goecke’s Morpheus’ Dream set to the music of Keith Jarrett and Lady Gaga, and a dynamic new staging of Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading.

Muir herself says it’s an exciting moment to be at the helm of the National Ballet in the approach to the company’s 75th anniversary season in 2026-27. David Dawson, the Ballet’s resident choreographer for the next five years, will create a full-length work for the season, in what promises to be a very forward-looking celebration.

“It’s not just about acquisition,” says Muir of the works coming into the repertoire. “It’s about the creation as well. You’re giving the dancers a chance to access the work. What style, how much improv and how much acting: all of these things feed one another.”

As one of her bolder moves, Muir has introduced Sharing the Stage, a program to bring in prominent dancer/choreographers from outside the company to perform with them at the Four Seasons Centre. Tickets to the show on June 17 are only $20. Nova Dance will perform works by José Navas and Nova Bhattacharya and the National Ballet will present excerpts from Swan Lake and Jennifer Archibald’s new work, King’s Fall.

In the meantime, we have Adieu, a celebration of principal dancer and choreographic associate Guillaume Côté, who departs the company to work full-time with Côté Danse. From May 30 to June 5 he’ll perform in two of his own works, Grand Mirage and Bolero and company members will introduce Toronto-born Ethan Colango’s new work, Reverence, inspired by the Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. 

Photo of Hope Muir by Karolina Kuras

Citadel Dance Exchange offers a fair trade in exuberance

We all could use some exuberance in these troubled and angst-ridden times. A good place to find it is at the Citadel Dance Exchange, a Montreal-Toronto collaboration, now in its second week at the Citadel on Parliament Street in Toronto.

A joint initiative with The National Ballet of Canada’s Creative Action program, the exchange of dancers and choreographers from both cities has resulted in a high-octane show sure to get feet stomping, hands clapping and spirits rising. Catch the final performance Saturday April 12, at 8 pm.

Hair in pigtails, garbed in a shiny suit a size too big for him, back to his audience, Montreal’s Sovann Rochon-Prom Tep makes an inauspicious start to “Soft manners,” taking slow, sideways and back and forth steps toward a microphone stage front, where he turns to face the audience, a little bashfully, and begins to undress.

“Soft manners,” is an inward-looking solo that morphs through several costume changes, Tep peeling down to underpants at one point, to reveal a street performer of high caliber. This Montrealer whose breakdancing cred got him from the sidewalk to the stage, performing with Animals of Distinction and RUBBERBAND, knows how to engage an audience. During an interlude where he perches on a stool, microphone in hand, the dancer offers a little autobiography. Then, with escalating energy provided by a soundtrack of electronic beats and lounge-style music, he runs through a repertoire of moves from voguing to spinning on the floor, moving with style for the sheer joy of the dance.

Carol Anderson, a founding member of Toronto’s Dancemakers, a choreographer teacher and dance writer, set a memorable solo, “Elsinore/Soliloquies” on Julia Sasso in 1999. She has reworked the themes and images of the solo, expanding the dance into a work for four dancers, including Sasso, as sure-footed and emotionally expressive as ever. In this well rehearsed 18-minute piece, Toronto performers Sasso, Sully Malaeb Proulx, Katherine Semchuk and Natasha Poon Woo combine and recombine in muscular, gravity-defying duets, trios and a quartet, to the evocative classical-sounding strings of composer Kirk Elliott.

An accompanying poem and the sounds of waves washing on a pebbly shore or the crackling of a campfire, suggests that nothing is lost in dance. What was old can be reborn, reimagined on new bodies, captured fleetingly in timeless moving images.

In the 15-minute show closer, Toronto’s TUFF – The Unknown Floor Force – performs “Binary Codes.” Coming on strong and menacing in baggy pants and dark hoodies they brawl like a street gang. But, once stripped down to white undershirts, they turn collegial, but competitive, as a b-boy ensemble. Jayson Collantes, Mark Collantes, Keimar Russell-Farquarson and Bryce Taylor scrum like a rugby team, spin like tops and get the audience hooting and hollering to their beats like it was springtime on a basketball court.

Citadel Dance Exchange Week Two

Produced by Citadel + Compagnie in collaboration with the National Ballet of Canada Creative Action program

At the Ross Centre for Dance, Toronto, until Saturday, April 12, 2025

Photo of Natasha Poon Woo, Julia Sasso and Sully Malaeb Proulx by Drew Berry

A Swan Lake for the ages

Karen Kain, then the outgoing artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, set herself a tall order when she determined to re-stage the Erik Bruhn 1966 production of Swan Lake. Premiering in 2022, this new edition of the Tchaikovsky classic, directed by Kain, with new choreographic invention from her, Christopher Stowell and Robert Binet, brings the 1895 story ballet by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, into the 21st century.

And if it is wall-to-wall bravura dancing you’re looking for, this is the crowd-pleasing-est ballet you are ever likely to see, performed with precision by 50 dancers of the NBoC.  That is exactly what any ballet company needs and what Kain and her team have delivered. The Swan Lake run was entirely sold out before it opened.

Gabriela Týlešová’s lavish set, props and costumes and Bonnie Beecher’s inventive lighting design ensure that this Swan Lake enchants as it should. (Check out the 1966 film of the Bruhn Swan Lake on YouTube if you want to see what a museum piece looks like.)

Any Swan Lake demands a flawless technique and plenty of stamina and this one, with its relentless pace, perhaps more others. Just ask Heather Ogden, who will dance her seasoned Odette/Odile for the last time March 15, 18 and 21.

Among the human touches brought to this production is a brief, ghostly prologue showing the young women dancing in a forest glade before stumbling into the clutches of the bewitching Baron Rothbart, who turns them all into swans. The giant, feathery, scene-stealing wings symbolize his power over human happiness. Second soloist Peng Fei Jiang makes a haunting Rothbart who moves with beautiful cunning to envelope all who approach him in his spell. Odette is his chief prize and it is she who reverts to human at night, when Prince Siegfried encounters her, setting aside his crossbow to learn of the curse of Rothbart. Only Siegfried’s vow of undying love can release Odette from swanhood.

Genevieve Penn Nabity, a sparkling Odette, captivates both Ben Rudisin’s noble Siegfried and the audience, agog at Swan Lake’s famous feats, such as her 32-fouettées in Odette’s dance or the Act II pas de deux with Siegfried.  Ben Rudisin, understandably a little jittery in an opening night performance he wasn’t originally scheduled for, has the grace, the stature and the physical talent for the part of a prince under pressure from his mother to marry. Nuances indicating thoughts and feelings will come later. Veteran character dancer Stephanie Hutchison makes an appropriately stately yet fiery presence, insisting on her gloomy son’s need to find a wife.

First soloist Donald Thom, in the powerful supporting role of Siegfried’s close friend Benno, gave the most animated and expressive showing of the evening. Kain told her principal dancers to put something of themselves into the characters and once they’ve mastered the steps most ballerinas and male dancers do just that.

The big set pieces of Swan Lake, such as the linked-armed dance of the little swans put this viewer in mind of ballet competitions past, and tend to dispel any thoughts of romance, character development or the arc of tragedy that is Swan Lake. In the end, drama is subsumed by the Tchaikovsky score and finesse of Russian classical ballet.

Not to worry, as this production develops, the dancers will grow with it. In the meantime, better catch experienced tragedians Heather Ogden and Harrison James before this show closes on March 22.

Swan Lake

Directed and staged by Karen Kain; choreographed by Kain, Christopher Stowell and Robert Binet after Erik Bruhn, Lev Ivanov and Marius Petipa

At the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto until March 22, 2025

Photo of Genevieve Penn Nabity and Ben Rudisin with artists of the Ballet in Swan Lake by Karolina Kuras.

The National Ballet’s perfect mix

In all the years of enjoying the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed program I have never seen a program so well attended and so loudly appreciated. You might, without too much exaggeration, call this artistic director Hope Muir’s perfect mix.

This two-hour program, with one last performance today, Sunday, March 2, opens with something old, Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading, marking 50 years since its world premiere at the American Ballet Theatre in July 1975. The something new is an NBoC commission, Marco Goecke’s thrilling duet Morpheus’ Dream, set to Keith Jarrett’s Budapest Concert, Parts VII and VIII, and Lady Gaga’s rousing love/hate anthem, “Bad Romance.”

And for the finale, something reinvented: David Dawson’s brilliant re-conception  of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to a score by Matt Richter that reshapes the original four violin concertos in a dramatic way.

The evening pays equal homage to a youthful, skilled edition 2024-2025 of the National Ballet and the talented players of the National Ballet Orchestra under the sensitive directin of principal conductor David Briskin.

The Leaves are Fading is a late work of Tudor’s (1908 to 1987) and the most unfussy, in its purity of form and abstract conception. Tudor set it to chamber music for strings by Antonín Dvořák, another perfect mix, as it turned out. For this dance is about a woman looking back on her life from a long distance, as the autumn leaves are falling, contemplating the years with a fusion of nostalgia and regret.

Alexandra MacDonald, in the role of the woman looking back, performs by turns wondering, nostalgic, solemn and celebratory. Leaves gives parts to nearly 20 dancers, all of them as light on their landings as the faded falling leaves. Tirion Law and Naoya Ebe performed a particulary poetic pas de deux near the end.

Tudor’s neo-classical signature is etched with precision on this work, the dance inseparable from Dvořák score, with the orchestra’s fulsome violin section performing as one, like the lyrical voice of the woman reflecting on life’s seasons.

After the autumnal Tudor, Spencer Hack bursts onto the stage like a bolt of lightning in Morpheus’ Dream, named for the god of dreams. To call the 10-minute piece edgy is anunderstatement. German-born Goecke, once associate choreographer of Nederland Dans Theater, is a favourite of European ballet companies, lauded with good reason for works such as Nijinsky and The Big Crying.

In this commission, supported by the Gail Hutchison Fund, the choreographer seemed to find the bad-boy, bad-girl element in Tene Ward and Spencer Hack. Their muscular partnering makes for an exciting push-pull of love on the hoof and a not-so-playful lover’s quarrel, bringing the audience to its feet with a roar, completely invested in this dream of the dynamics of an affair to remember. Lady Gaga says it all in what many a woman might want as her theme song, the Jarrett determinist keyboard playing counterpoint to her ballad “Bad Romance:” I want your love and I want your revenge.”

British dancer/choreographer brings his striking, abstract, full-immersion Four Seasons to the NBoC stage for its North American premiere. Dawson was finely inspired in this stark, yet fully absorbing dance with the recording Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. Nothing is lost but much is gained in Richter’s streamlining of the main themes of the Vivaldi seasons to give it a bigger sound and more range for the dancers.

This reinterpretation of The Four Seasons does not supplant James’ Kudelka’s more literary reading of the Vivaldi classic; rather Dawson’s piece with its dramatic lighting and moving geometric shapes on stage to represent the rise and fall of the light, of the associations with the seasonal changes that have governed our lives for millenia.

Violin soloist Aaron Schwebel shows the way, as swarms of the Ballet’s nimble best criss-cross the stage in colour-coded leotards meant to represent the intermingling of the seasons’ themes.

The Four Seasons / Morpheus’ Dream / The Leaves are Fading

Performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto February 26 to March 2, 2025

Photo: Calley Skalnick and Spencer Hack in The Four Seasons. Credit: Karolina Kuras