No matter what one’s taste in ballet, one can be assured of an evening of wall-to-wall, bravura dancing at the National Ballet of Canada’s Winter Triple Bill, running at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until March 24.

For those with a craving for the cutting edge in dance, there’s William Yong’s UtopiVerse, a dreamy, multimedia spectacle performed by 25 or more National Ballet dancers. Yong, a Hong-Kong-born dancer, choreographer, dance filmmaker, designer and artistic director of Zata Omm Dance Projects and W Zento Production, arrived in Toronto – via studies and performing in London, England – in 1999. A commission from artistic director Hope Muir to make a piece for the National Ballet, has been a huge opportunity for this multi-faceted artist to think big and make ample use of the finest single group of dancers in the country.

And think big he has, for UtopiVerse is a high-concept feast for the senses, involving huge moving and mesmerizing projections, a resounding, evocative score consisting of excerpts from violin works by Benjamin Britten (with additional music from composer Constantine Caravassilis), and an enormous, glowing glass circle that rises and lowers over the dancers, sometimes enclosing them, sometimes quite ominously.

Mystery and ambiguity abound in UtopiVerse, intended, Yong has said, to be “a visually stimulating playground, where the quest for an ideal and alternative universe takes centre stage.” Bits of Yong’s symbolism send mixed signals, such as the black, wide-brimmed hat worn by The Daemon, (a commanding Christopher Gerty), which to viewers of a certain age, conjures up that TV hero of the 1950s, Zorro.

Koto Ishihara as Lotus and Ben Rudisin as Leo lead a dynamic cast on a wandering narrative set out in sinuous contemporary ballet moves. The dancers – questing strangers in a strange land dressed in flesh-coloured leotards, with shoulder armor and outlined spinal columns to make them look other-worldly – are at times overwhelmed by giant projections of themselves and by the constantly swirling, expanding and transforming white forms etched on the scrim behind them.

But is that not the point? Humans, depicted here as energetic, curious seekers, partnering and re-partnering, are but specks on the surface of a planet that is itself a microdot in our ever-expanding notions of the cosmos we inhabit.

In setting out to create any new dance, Ottawa-born, internationally renowned choreographer Emma Portner asks herself, “What have I not seen in the world?”  Such was the conception for islands, a fascinatingly complex duet for two women made for and premiered by the Norwegian Opera & Ballet in March 2020.

In the National Ballet’s North American premiere of islands, Heather Ogden and Emma Ouellet made an extraordinary duo in a sculptural, ever-evolving partnership, in which they define their own performance space as well as a new physics of women partnering each other. Portner has reimagined the ballerina role without the tutu, a costume that keeps women at a four-foot distance apart from one another. In islands, she puts her dancers in the same pair of pants, so that for the first half of the 20-minute performance, Ogden and Ouellet appeared not so much a pair of conjoined twins, but as one unified creature, limbs intertwining and unwinding in a technique called threading.

Out of the pants, the women can lift one another or leap into the air just as well as any male dancer, shaping the space around them with the imaginative soundscape: excerpts from haunting music by Brambles, Guillaume Ferran, Forest Swords, Lily Konigsberg and Bing & Ruth. Yet islands is not so much a statement of queer identity as it is a demonstration of giving ballerinas their own agency in the context of a dance form traditionally directed by men.

As a closer to the triple bill, nothing could please a classical ballet purist better than the National Ballet’s Canadian premiere of Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc from 1943, staged by Charles Jude and Stéphanie Roublot Jude.

From the opening tableau with the all-white costumed dancers ranged on black elevations like sculptures about to be set in motion, Suite en Blanc is an homage the étude, a classical ballet tradition akin to a competition. With unmatched precision and a joyful savoir faire, the dancers perform to Édouard Lalo’s 1882 Suite from Namouna to thrilled applause. On opening night, Isabella Kinch in the Sérénade section, Koto Ishihara in Presto, Spencer Hack in Mazurka and Svetlana Lunkina, with and without partner Harrison James, were especially impressive.

UtopiVerse

Choreography by William Yong

Music of Benjamin Britten with compositions of Constantine Caravassilis

Set and costumes by William Yong

Lighting design Noah Feaver

Projection design Thomas Payette / Mirari

Islands

Choreography by Emma Portner

Music by Brambles, Guillaume Ferran, Forest Swords, Lily Konigsberg, Bing & Ruth

Costumes by Martin Dauchez

Lighting by Paul Vidar Sævarang

Suite en Blanc

Choreography and music arrangement by Serge Lifar

Music by Édouard Lalo

Costumes adapted by the NBoC wardrobe department under supervision of Stacy Dimitropoulos

Lighting adapted by Jeff Logue

A production of the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until March 24, 2024

Photos by Karolina Kuras, clockwise: Koto Ishihara, Ben Rudisin and artists of the National Ballet in UtopiVerse; Emma Ouellet and Heather Ogden in islands; Monika Haczkiewicz, Tene Ward and Chelsy Meiss in Suite en Blanc