From the sublime symmetry and purity of Serge Lifar’s Suite en Blanc to the palpable despair and Stygian gloom representing the plight of refugees in Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, the superb dancers of the National Ballet of Canada leave an audience — stunned into silence — with plenty to ponder.

Serge Lifar (1905­1986), a native of Ukraine, served as ballet master of the Paris Opera Ballet between 1930 and 1944. He made it his mission revive the company’s flagging spirit and make it an exemplar of the French style of classical ballet, reinterpreted for the modern era.  Suite en Blanc, which premiered in Zurich on June 19,1943is modernist to the core. In its stripped-down form, the eight-scene work occupies the same pantheon as say, Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo (1942), or Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos), first performed 1944. At the peak of human sacrifice in World War II, a European audience might well have found solace in such an expression of pure, harmonious dance arrangements.

As the curtain comes up, 36 men and women, costumed entirely in white, are frozen in place, like statues in a sculpture garden. Once animated they perform eight scenes – tricky variations involving kaleidoscopic combinations and re-combinations in multiples of two, four, eight and twelve. The suite belongs to the classical canon, several of the movements being of a kind trotted out for ballet competitions.  A march of ballerinas dancing down facing staircases, for instance, recalls the oft-performed “Kingdom of the Shades” ramp scene from Marius Petipa’s 1877 ballet, La Bayadère.

The focus on pure form and elegant lines could easily turn into a sterile exercise, but in this case, principal dancers Agnes Su, Koto Ishihara, Genevieve Penn Nabity, Beckanne Sisk and second soloist Isabella Kinch showed a joie de vivre beyond technical prowess. As for the men, Peng-Fei Jiang, Naoya Ebe and Chase O’Connell gave assured performances that literally rose above the rather routine score, Édouard Lalo’s Suite from Namouna. Their leaps and bounds achieved a ballon that had them soaring above the stage.

From the elevated sphere of Suite en Blanc, we descend in the second half of the program to the reality on Earth for the world’s refugees and migrants in Flight Pattern. The Royal Ballet premiered the 30-minute dance in 2017 and now the National Ballet is presenting the North American premiere.

As of 2026, 136 million people worldwide are in camps or on the march, forcibly displaced or stateless. They are here represented here by 36 dancers in long slate-grey overcoats, entering in a cluster stage left, legs heavy, heads bowed, moving in unison like a dying beast, to the slow, mournful first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. From the orchestra pit comes the upwelling voice of Measha Brueggergosman-Lee like a long sob, the song based on a 15th-century Polish religious lament. It is Mother Mary, singing to Jesus on the cross, asking how she should mourn him. On stage, First Soloist Hannah Galway sits, her long coat cradled in her arms, making the image of her dying infant. Slowly, the other dancers gather up their coats and pile them up around her: one child’s death is a collective loss.

Jay Gower Taylor’s excellent set and Tom Visser’s lighting design drive the production. As dancers with raised arms escape through a narrow passage to dance in a merciful snowfall the flight from danger becomes a flight toward freedom. Taylor’s black wall closes like a curtain coming down and in front of it Hannah Galway and Sisphesihle November perform a muscular pas de deux that is an ode to human persistence in the face of unspeakable cruelty.

Who speaks for the hundreds of millions of downtrodden, oppressed, displaced and outright murdered families? Artists like Crystal Pite, whose way of coping becomes an eloquent acknowledgement of suffering and a glimpse of redemption.  

Video clip of Suite en Blanc : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3xZYg55Uyo&list=TLGGTK0B5E7tJaEwMjAzMjAyNg&t=8s

Flight Pattern: https://national.ballet.ca/productions/2526/flight-pattern/

Flight Pattern / Suite en Blanc

Choreography by Crystal Pite and Serge Lifar

Performed by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts until March 6, 2026

Photos: (top) Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Suite en Blanc by Karolina Kuras; (below) Artists of the Ballet in Flight Pattern by Ted Belton