Author: susanwalkerartsblog

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

Josiah escapes to freedom in Ontario

Contemporary interpretations of slave narratives have kept the focus on the relentless cruelty of slave owners. Whipping and more whipping, repeated, horrific rape, humans reduced to beasts of burden and tools of their slave masters: it amounts to torture porn.

Male creators crafted Twelve Years a Slave, The Book of Negroes and Django Unchained – slave women’s stories are depicted in a way so violent as to make the viewer feel complicit in the abuse. Nothing can be learned from this.

Josiah, based on the life of Josiah Henson (born 1789, died in Dresden, Ontario in 1883)is no such tale. Charles Robertson, a Kingston scribe and author of the supernatural horror story Dark Church, has crafted a script told in dance and movement, a saga of literacy, redemption, hope and a kind of freedom.

Tap-dancing phenom Cassel Miles, a triple threat who has been appearing in dance and musical shows since 1984, is Josiah. We meet the young slave as a boy, sold down the river with his mother by a Maryland slave owner. He’s considered too wilful, too prideful “for his own good.” He is, after all, a piece of property and must learn to accept that.

Josiah and his mother are sold to the highest bidder, Master Adam Robb, because he’s a “vigorous, healthy boy.” Robb is a brutal man “especially addicted to the vice of licentiousness.” He is “a beast who wants to be a man.”

Slavedriver and overseer Master Isaac Riley in the fields is even worse. His ultimate threat is to sell Josiah down the river if he doesn’t behave. This action is accompanied by an overhead sound of lashings – we are not exposed to any raw, open suppurating wounds on the back and shoulders here, thank goodness.

Long story short, Josiah learns to read, finds God, meets a preacher and becomes one himself, raises the $400 to buy his freedom and finally enters Canada crossing the border via the Underground Railway in 1830. There the play ends.

Charles Robertson is no Shakespeare; the text of this play is serviceable, but nary a word of poetry creeps in. And it is way too long. A one-man show is normally an uninterrupted work of 85 to 90 minutes. Neither performer nor audience member can concentrate on a work such as this for longer than 90 minutes. So Robertson chooses to break the play after an interminable first act for an intermission. Then, for another hour or so we learn of Josiah’s journey on the Underground Railroad. Thus, two plays, both of which have been done before, more movingly and profoundly in works such as Middle Passage (1990) by Charles R. Johnson and the fascinating, poetic Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead.

The one-man show that my companion and I were keen to see is Josiah entering Canada in 1830. What happened to him after that?

As for Cassel Miles, he is a lovely mover, can sing and mime and keeps the cadence of the piece. But the speaking voice is not his tool. He does a reasonable job of impersonating all the characters, male and female, but the voice of Josiah is not distinct. Josiah should have something akin to a preacher’s or an orator’s voice, and it should change over the course of a long life seen from boyhood into middle age. It doesn’t.

Still, I’m glad I saw Josiah.

Josiah

Written by Charles Robertson, directed by Jim Garrard and performed by Cassel Miles

Produced by Thousand Miles of Bricks Productions

At the Alumnae Theatre, Toronto, until February 7

Photo, courtesy of the producers:  Cassel Miles

Other Desert Cities; Catch it before they burn up

It says a lot about the dysfunctional Wyeth family, portrayed in John Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities,that the only truthful and nuanced character is a barely recovering alcoholic: Aunt Silda.

Silda (a similarly nuanced Deena Baltman), despite her struggles to resist alcohol, is the one family member who can look herself in the mirror and not profess to be something she isn’t. But she’s not the character who dominates this rousing Alumnae Theatre production of Other Desert Cities, the name derived from the  green signs over California Interstate 10, directing drivers to Indio California and “other desert cities,” i.e., Palm Springs. The show closes Sunday, February 2. Catch it if you can.

It’s the Wyeth mother, Polly, who drives this play. As embodied by a dynamic and convincing Lynn Oldenshaw, she’s the centre of the action, even when she’s not on stage. Polly is the expert, an old guard “Hollywood Republican,” friend to Nancy Reagan, fundraiser, socialite, happily sitting on top of her Palm Springs, California world. She quickly establishes her point of view, railing at her daughter Brooke (Melody Schaal) who’s come from New York to spend Christmas with her parents and brother Trip (Bobby Markov), a reality tv showrunner.

Here’s Polly on east coast lefties: “It’s all vegans and meth addicts.” Her children, particularly Brooke, belong to the “entitled Me generation.”

Polly is a big problem for daughter Brooke, a New York magazine writer turned novelist and memoirist. She’s suffered a mental breakdown in the not too distant past, protests her mother’s biases, Polly utters the classic denial statement: “I haven’t got a bigoted bone in my body.”

Brooke, is equally set in her ways. She’s a large person, but proud of her vulnerabilities. A bit of a whiner, she harbours huge resentment against her domineering mother, who just happened to be the person who nursed her in the midst of mental breakdown. “Why couldn’t you back your daughter instead of that wet little . . .,” she says of one of Polly’s favourite causes.

Trip is a hyperactive, hypomaniacal, Los Angeleno in the thick of a career he might have landed in easily, given his parents’ long run as minor Hollywood actors. He is trying his best to play the peacemaker, the bridge between his sister and his parents Polly and Lyman, and not succeeding very well.

Rob Scavone as Lyman Wyeth tries to project the authoritative actor and TV commercial spokesman whom Ronald Reagan later appointed an ambassador. But he’s bland enough for the role of peacemaker, especially with Brooke, burying the memory of his dead son and being suspiciously evasive on what happened to Henry.

The story is that Henry was implicated in the bloody bombing of a US military recruitment centre by some urban terrorists. He disappeared for three weeks after the incident in which a person was killed. The authorities find his body and it bears a suicide note.

In the in the climax to Act 1, Brooke announces her “novel” is actually a memoir. The New Yorker is about to publish excerpts from it. Her real purpose in coming to sunny Palm Springs, a place she hates, is to ask her parents to read her manuscript before some of its contents appear a short time hence. She would like their consent to publish it.

The second half of Other Desert Cities contains the explosive denouement. But even before that revelation, the play has descended into histrionics, with Silda coming into her own as the mirror up to her sister’s and niece’s behaviour; Polly going on full attack, threatening to sue her own daughter if the New Yorker publishes her; and Brooke getting increasingly angry, digging in her heels about publishing. As for Trip, he goes postal in an unnecessary way on the subject of why no one takes him seriously as the showrunner of a TV series about the courts, the judges, the juries, and so on. Lyman’s true role in the events now under discussion is finally revealed.

The lighting on the set was rather weird and the set itself, although well designed, just sits there. Palm Springs was traditionally the playground of Hollywood actors and directors because it was close enough to LA that performers could drive there on breaks and be back in time for shooting. But no effort is made to recreate that ambience.

The play could have used a soundscape to shape the mood, especially given the musical heritage of Hollywood. Nevertheless, Other Desert Cities demands to be seen.

Other Desert Cities

Written by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Ilana Linden and produced by Amélie Martyn and Melody Schaal.

At the Alumnae Theatre, until Sunday February 2, 2025

Photo by Amanda Matlovich: From left, Lyman, Polly, Trip, Brooke and Silda

Opera Atelier’s Acis and Galatea acquires French panache

Just suppose that the Sun King, Louis XIV, reappeared in his dancing guise to attend Opera Atelier’s remounting of Actis and Galatea opening tonight at the Elgin Theatre. He might well experience a tinge of pride to see how a contemporary opera company performs George Frideric Handel’s pastoral “serenata”  in the baroque style that the Sun King established.

The Bourbon king (1638 – 1715), himself a more than decent dancer, laid the groundwork for classical ballet mounting 26 ballets de cours in the royal theatre at Versailles. In such ballets, dance, instrumentation, song, spoken dialogue and acting were all given equal weight. As Opera Atelier co-artistic director Marshall Pynkoski, says, “Every aspect of theatre was treated with equal importance. I like to say [baroque ballet] is like a Broadway musical. You will not have a successful show if you have great singing and a great book, but the dancing is horrible…Everything must be firing at the same level to ensure success and that’s precisely what theatre was meant to be in the 17th and 18th centuries, and, I would argue, for the most discriminating audience in the history of the western world.”

Small wonder that Pynkoski and co-artistic director Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg are happy to have enticed two young, acclaimed French tenors to make their debuts with the company in the remount of Opera Atelier’s Acis and Galetea. Antonin Rondepierre, singing the role of Acis, began his training in the 17th-century French baroque repertoire a mere eight years ago, when he began studies at the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. Praised for his musical intelligence and poetic sensibility, Rondepierre has performed in Opera Atelier’s productions at Versailles. For the final show of Opera Atelier’s 2024-25 season, the nimble young tenor will reprise his role of the violent villain Joabel in the company’s production of Marc Antoine Charpentier’s David and Jonathan, scheduled to run from April 9 to 13 in 2025.

Another rising star of French opera ballet, Blaise Rantoanina, singing for the first time in Canada, performs the role of the shepherd Damon, Acis’ close friend. Born in Madagascar, Rantoanina began his vocal studies in his native country and then enrolled in France’s Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), where he earned a master’s degree. He’s known for roles such as Belmonte in Die Entführung aus dem Serail with the Clermont-Ferrand Opera and, last season was cast as Joe in George Gershwin’s Blue Monday, with the Picardy Orchestra in France. Rantoanina is lined up for a role in a in a yet-to-be-announced Opera Atelier production in 2026.

“These two young men bring tremendous finesse musically to this production,” says Pynkoski. He and Zingg have worked with both of them in Versailles.

Rounding out the cast of four in Acis and Galatea is longtime Opera Atelier performer and soprano Meghan Lindsay, who has appeared in more than twelve OA productions, including Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Ilia in Idomeneo, Alcina in Alcina, and Agathe in Der Freischütz. Bass-baritone Douglas Williams, a featured performer wit Opera Atelier since 2017– cast as Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro and as the Don in Don Giovanni — performs as Polyphemus, the monster rival who wants Galatea for himself.

The Opera Atelier artists Eric Cesar de Mello da Silva, Juri Hiraoka, Elizabeth Kalashnikova, Kevin Law, Courtney Lyman, Kealan Mclaughlin, Julia Sedwick, Cynthia Akemi Smithers, Edward Tracz, Dominic Who, Laura Willis, Xi Yi, Jeannette Lajeunesse-Zingg and supernumerary Peter Akiki provide the dancing, while Tafelmusik and the Nathaniel Dett Chorale lend a big sound to complement set and costume designer Gerard Gauci’s immersive and dreamlike set.

Acis and Galatea has a history as Handel’s most popular opera, often considered a starter work for those new to opera. The pastoral masque, as it is sometimes called, is based on a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses  about Acis the shepherd and Galatea the nymph who fall in love. Their affair is upset by the jealous monster Polyphemus who wants Galatea for himself. Polyphemus threatens dire consequences for Acis, until Damon comes in with a stone to crush the monster.

“It’s a wonderful story for audiences of all ages. It’s a classic fairy tale,” says Pynkoski, comparable to the experience of an adult reading a fairy story to a child. “I mean Acis is probably the most sensual, the most sexual opera that Handel ever wrote. But there’s nothing there that parents might feel they should shield their children from. For children, it’s a fantasy with crazy people on stage doing crazy, improbable things to beautiful music.”

The excitement in Pynkoski’s voice as he talks about Opera Atelier’s evolution and its productions has not dimmed over the years since Opera Atelier began in 1985. Born of a dream of two classically trained ballet artists, Pynkoski and Zingg, who took to Versailles and Paris to research Louis XIV’s court ballets – they took jobs at Moulin Rouge in Montmartre, “sharing the stage with dolphins and horses” to support their studies – Opera Atelier today is struggling to make up for the vanishing audiences that COVID lockdowns brought. But there’s no shortage between them of imagination, inventiveness or enthusiasm for revitalizing a 17th- and 18th-century theatrical form that brings dazzle to the contemporary stage.

Acis and Galatea

By George Frideric Handel

Presented by Opera Atelier at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto

October 24 to 27, 2024

Photo by Bruce Zinger: Opera Atelier artists with soprano Mireille Asselin in a previous presentation of Acis and Galatea.

Fall for Dance North: 10 years of many more hits than misses

News flash: Company Wayne McGregor will perform Autobiography V88 + V99, as the renowned British contemporary troupe makes its first ever appearance in Canada, October 1 and 2 in the at The Creative School Chrysalis (the former Ryerson theatre) for the rock-bottom price of $25 for all seats.

The event is sure to make many newcomers fall for dance, a chief mandate for Fall for Dance North, subtitled “Toronto’s Premier International Dance Festival.” The 10th anniversary edition of FFDN, with performances running from September 26 to October 6 in multiple venues, makes a suitably grand swan song for founding artistic director Ilter Ibrahimof. 

Ibrahimof passes on the leadership of the festival to co-CEOs Lily Sutherland and Robert Binet, as he leaves a record of success that includes launching works encompassing more than 30 dance forms, including hip hop, professional folk dancing, Indigenous dance, several kinds of Indian classical dance, even ballroom and social dance. In the process he  has annually commissioned work from renowned creators such as Peggy Baker, Aszure Barton, Anne Plamondon, and Mthuthuzeli November and hosted big-name companies from abroad, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Brazil’s Grupo Corpo, Compagnie Hervé KOUBI from France, Nederlands Dans Theater and Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company. 

Under Ibrahimof’s direction, FFDN has attracted audiences in the tens of thousands to experience dance in TO. He leaves the city for a new home in Porto, Portugal. The move is a chance, he says, to be closer to his family in Istanbul and to take a rest for a while, becoming a dance consultant.

Lily Sutherland, the new co-CEO of FFDN will hold the role of festival director, a job she’s well prepared for. Coming out of a theatre background, she has worked with Luminato, The Toronto Fringe Festival and The Hamilton Festival Theatre Company. She joined the FFDN creative team in 2018 and is currently the fest’s executive producer. She and Binet officially take over November 4.

Choreographer, curator and ballet mentor Robert Binet, maker of many works for the National Ballet of Canada, the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet among other companies, will be leaving a role he’s held since 2013 as director of artist development and choreographic associate at the NBoC to take up the post of co-CEO and artistic director.

The two CEOs already appear to be a good partnership. Says Binet, “We want to use the natural connections that dance has to other art forms, such as music, theatre and the visual arts to get people who love those forms to see that dance engages the same parts of our brain.”

Sutherland and Binet share a passion for getting more bums in seats or other ways of engaging, including actually dancing themselves. “For some people, coming and sitting in the dark with your phone off for two and a half hours is a blissful experience and for others, it can be a bit alienating and uncomfortable. The festival offers such people a chance to meet dancers on their own terms,” Binet notes.

Here’s a punter’s guide to 2024’s Fall for Dance North, September 26 to October 6. For complete details on performances, the International Presenters Program, free workshops, dates and venues, go to Home | Fall For Dance North (ffdnorth.com).

Homecoming: the 2024 Signature Programme: Ilter Ibrahimof has chosen to showcase three female choreographers whose work has been advanced through their participation in FFDN. The three-act program opens with Havana’s  Malapaosoa Dance Company performing The Last Song (La Última Canción), choreographed by Daile Carrazano. The piece was developed in a creative partnership between Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School and the FFDN. Act II brings the National Ballet of Canada back to the FFDN stage for the first time since 2019, with islands, choreographed by Emma Portner and first staged at FFDN in 2018. Two of NBoC’s ballerinas will perform islands. Ballet Edmonton returns to the FFDN stage in Act III with the world premiere of the festival’s inaugural artist-in-residence Anne Plamondon ensemble piece Feel no more set to the live music of Zach Frampton. September 26-27 in the Creative School Chrysalis at 7:30 pm.

Tkaronto Open II is a competition designed to celebrate Indigenous culture and showmanship among local Indigenous dancers. Contestant registration is $25, but the event is free to watch on September 28 at Union Station TD Carriageway, starting at 12 pm.

Studio 24 / Celebrating a Decade of FFDN. An evening to honour departing director Ilter Ibrahimof will feature performances by Nederlands Dans Theater,Malpaso Dance Company, Lady C & Raoul Wilke and a world premiere by Peggy Baker. The fundraiser VIP tickets include a cocktail reception, gala performances, followed by a catered dinner and disco dancing on stage with DJ Andrew Tay. Drinks and dinner at $300 (qualifying for a $180 tax receipt). A limited block of tickets at $75 each gets you into the performances, dinner and disco. Saturday September 28 at 6:00 pm in the Betty Oliphant Theatre.

Photos: from left, Ballet Edmonton’s Feel no more, by Nancy Price. Company Wayne McGregor in Autobiography, by Ravi Deepres.

Gallery

East merges with West in Mukashi Mukashi, to hilarious effect

Once upon a time, David Danzon, the peripatetic artistic director of Corpus Dance Projects, decided to embrace Japanese theatrical traditions to come up with a cross-cultural contemporary fairy tale.

After touring shows through Japan, Corpus partnered up with Osaka’s 53-year-old Kio theatre company to co-produce  Mukashi Mukashi, a contemporary interpretation of two characters central to European and Japanese folklore: the wolf and the crane, respectively.

The kid-friendly show, launched at a festival in Japan last October is playing now, for its first North American run, at the Theatre Centre in Toronto, until Sunday, September 29.

Mukashi Mukashi is a madcap mash-up of physical theatre from two distinctly different cultures. Corpus and Kio found their theatrical modus operandi quite compatible. Danzon worked with the Kio company to incorporate Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku (body puppetry) and Kyogen (the comic interludes between acts in a Noh play) into the Corpus brand of physical theatre. He layers these expressive movements, scene by scene, to create a melding of human and animal, as any good fairy tale would. The skills on display here revolve rapidly through mime, to dance, puppetry, mask, clown, live origami-making, Asian shadow puppetry, to a manic, sequin-jacketed TV game-show host — all accompanied by Anika Johnson’s evocative  soundscape.

By turns hilarious and thought-provoking, Mukashi Mukashi proceeds  through a series of nine short scenes, the performers speaking mainly Japanese, with a few lines of English thrown in. There is not a lot of dialogue, but English and French surtitles, white on black panels, spark memories of the talk panels in the silent films of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, early influences on Danzon’s comedic practice. The dream-like sequence follows an arc from mortal danger through comical transformations, to peace and fulfilment, tapping deep into the collective unconscious.

In The Uses of Enchantment (1976) child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim famously argued that the violence and fantastical nature of traditional fairy tales were not to be shunned in favour of anodyne realist children’s literature, because stories such as Little Red Riding Hood cathartically deal with primal fears and lead to healthy childhood psychological development. Mukashi Mukashi is enchantment at its best.

Guffaws greet the opening scene, as performers Sakura Korin, Kio artistic director Kohey Nakadachi, Takako Segawa and Kaitlin Torrance arrive on stage, costumed by designer Atsuko Kiyokawa, in black tights with big bushy  wolf tails. They are soon howling at the moon overhead and with the next scene we’re plunged into the fantastic, as Nakadachi in a wolf headpiece morphs from the big bad wolf to little red riding hood being tantalized by Mr. Wolf, to later hilarious scenes when he’s begging for sympathy from little red riding-hood. Mr. Wolf’s funeral ushers in scenes involving the performers making origami paper cranes – in one case screwing up, prompting a live demonstration of how to make a paper crane.

The crane is a powerful symbol in Japanese culture. Considered mystical creatures who may have lived for eons, they are thought to bring luck and prosperity, peace and hope. A paper crane may be gifted as an emblem of honour. The wings of the crane took mortals to paradise, hence the scenes with Kaitlin Torrance as an ethereal crane, arms gracefully spread, her signature origami crane or orizuru atop her head. The final scenes bring a soothing feeling of something transcendent after the set-tos of big bad wolf, grandma and little red riding hood.

A note to parents: make sure your child is familiar with the story of the Little Red Riding Hood and maybe take them around the exhibition created by Carolin Lindner displaying Japanese masks and explaining the four traditions of Japanese theatre and the making of orizurus.

Photos: The Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, the  wolf takes on an outsized little red riding hood and Kohey Nakadachi as Mr. Wolf.

Nova Dance animates shared sites

Starting out as a seven-year-old training intensely as a new Canadian in the classical Indian dance form Bharatnatyam to staging a cross-cultural activation of a historic site in Toronto may seem like an unlikely journey. But not if you are Nova Bhattacharya.

From Thursday through Saturday this week, Nova Dance presents Offerings at Ishpadinaa, a free outdoor show that like so many of Bhattacharya’s projects almost defies categorization. She and her dancers, her co-creators, invite you to “to witness reclamations of resistance and joy” at 285 Spadina Road, site of the Spadina Museum, formerly the mansion of financier James Austin, who purchased the land on the ridge in 1866.

Bhattacharya talks about “listening to the land” and the conversations  that went on –among the performers and creators, including dramaturge Dainty Smith, Thrasher, research intern Mushtari Afroz, Neena Jayarajan, composer/percussionist Dhaivat Jani, Ravyn Wngz, Candace Kumar and herself — as a truth and reconciliation process. But not just between Indigenous peoples and everyone else, but among all who have experienced colonialism and its attendant suppression of cultures.

Dance, the universal language, as she points out, is a way to not just be on the earth together, but an act of unearthing long ago uses of the land. “The Mississaugas of the Credit River used have gatherings there,” says Bhattacharya. The space is also associated with the arrival of immigrant populations, including African Americans, and of course with the British colonial administration of Upper Canada.

A dancer, choreographer and teacher, Bhattacharya recalls the dawning of her awareness of a common colonial past from an early childhood visit to Kolkata (Calcutta) where her family came from. “The architecture that I saw there was very similar to the architecture I saw in Canada,” in Halifax, where she was born and Toronto where she grew up. Because of course the buildings all bore the stamp of the British Empire.

Nova Dance is enjoying a year of performing in public spaces. In July at Quebec’s Furies contemporary dance festival in the Haute-Gaspésie region, Bhattacharya gave two performances of her solo Love Becomes Her on the shores of the St. Lawrence River – at 10 o’clock in the morning. Nothing says rooted more than dancing in a wet, rocky shoreline.

She says her 10 years of Butoh training is coming to the fore in such performances. Next up is a work that will take place around the Colonial Building in St. John’s Newfoundland, where she was teaching last year. The physical act of walking the steep inclines of the city was inspiring, in the feedback it was giving her body. As she explored the history of the buildings, she learned that the city  had entered into conversations with the Indigenous communities who insisted on keeping the name, “because it’s the truth. That’s what truth and reconciliation is about.”

Having become an independent dancer at 16 and forming Nova Dance in 2008, Bhattacharya has covered a lot of ground and earned labels from bad-ass to boundary-breaking. It seems she was born to explore, experiment and collaborate. From her early days dancing with fellow students of Menaka Thakkar, she was investigating other contemporary forms.

She began choreographing in 1997 and was soon performing with Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Compagnie Flak and Fujiwara Dance Inventions. The late Tedd Robinson created wonderful pieces for Nova Dance. As a choreographer Bhattacharya made ground-breaking dances in collaboration with Louis Laberge-Côté, among others. And how do these collaborations across disparate, dance disciplines work, one asks. “Dance is the first language, in a way. It’s gesture. If we really communicate with each other, from a place of parity and respect for each other, it’s absolutely possible to get to a cohesive artistic expression.”

In that regard it’s possible to see Svāhā! her epic piece for 22 dancers first performed in 2021 as a culmination of all that Nova Dance has been striving for. The work embodies 29 dance forms and is a realization of dance as story, ritual and transformation. But it is certainly not the finale for Nova Dance.

Offerings at Ishpadinaa

Produced by Nova Dance

5:30 to 6:30 pm, August 29 through 31, 2024

285 Spadina Rd, Toronto

Free admission

Photo of Nova Bhattacharya by Jack Udashkin

A few fine days in Mayenne, Normandy and Brittany

The last time I travelled in this part of France was in June 1983. Colin Vaughan and I arrived here via London following the conclusion of the Progressive Conservative convention that made Brian Mulroney our next prime minister. In Boulogne, we picked up a rental car. Our first destination was Vimy Ridge

Now, here I am again in the year in which Brian Mulroney died. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also in Normandy, along with the British, French and American leaders, to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-day landing when nearly 160,000 Allied troops accompanied by 11,000 planes arrived to liberate France from the German occupiers on June 6, 1944.

My journey began in Paris, where I caught a fast train to Le Mans. My friend, the choreographer, poet and painter Serge Bennathan, met me at the station. He lives for a good part of the year in a beautiful part of Mayenne, the province wedged at its northernmost boundaries between Normandy and Brittany. Serge was an excellent guide over my three days in the region.

The drive alone is worthy of any travel brochure: vast gently rolling fields of wheat, corn, grazing cows, horses and goats, and near the village of Saint Mars du Désert, some handsome donkeys.

Trout break the surface of a murky pond, dining open-mouthed on surface insects. Goats approach a fence where a hand offers grass. There’s hardly a vehicle on the road and the birdsong is undisturbed by human or vehicular noises.

The cheerful chorus of birds (more than 280 species thrive in Mayenne), no longer heard in big cities in such numbers, is a consequence of a French ban on certain pesticides. In addition to birds such as chaffinches, magpies, dunnocks and wood pigeons, the removal of toxic pesticides has brought back the red poppies that dot the roadsides and fields in such abundance you’d think you’d walked into a Monet painting. Add the sight of the distinctive limestone-, slate- and plaster-built barns, cottages and grander residences and you have a recipe for serenity.

I’m desirous of a swim in the Atlantic and without my asking Serge has proposed a trip to see Mont Saint-Michel, not to tour it, for the roads there are crawling with tourists, but to get to a good look at it. Driving toward the coast of Normandy – after a quick stop to check out the Calvados, cider and other apple products en route – a sharp-eyed visitor will first see the tiny island with an abbey at its peak pop up like a blob on the horizon. Closer in, Mont Saint-Michel rises majestically like a mirage beyond the edge of the fields.

The next stop was Saint-Malo, across the border in Brittany. And a fine place for a swim it is, in La Manche, a bay off the English Channel. As well, Saint-Malo is a historic site with significance for Canadians. Here is where Jacques Cartier set out for what would become Canada; his tomb is in the magnificent Saint-Vincent de Saint-Malo cathedral. In August 1944, the Allied bombing that routed the Germans from France heavily damaged the church, which dates from 1146, including its 1859 neo-gothic spire, which wasn’t replaced until 1971. The pride of the repaired cathedral are paintings by Augustin Frison-Roche, including a triptych of the Apocalypse, installed in 2020.

Any visitor will quickly spot the images of the writer and politician François-René de Chateaubriand, who was born in Saint-Malo in 1768, but you need a guide to point out his tomb on an island just off the beach. It would be a shame to leave Saint-Malo, after a dip in the cool waters, without tasting the sweet Breton cake known as a kouign-amann; I tried the prunelle (sloe berry), said to be the traditional version. Shoppers should be sure to go into the high-end Épices Roellinger store for the finest selection of spices this side of Zanzibar. And after all that driving, reward yourself on the road home with a classic French meal at L’Assiette Gourmand in the small town of Pré-en-Pail.

Photos, clockwise: Augustin Frison-Roche painting in Saint-Vincent de Saint-Malo cathedral; estate home in Mayenne; Mont Saint-Michel; ramparts over the beach in Saint-Malo.

Hamlet, a tragedy in dance

Stripped of its nearly 30,000-word text, William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, becomes, in the hands of director Robert Lepage and choreographer/dancer Guillaume Côté, something more akin to an expressionistic painting than a spoken word performance.

Once awakened from his melancholic brooding as the curtain goes up, Côté’s Hamlet is never still again, his inner turmoil made manifest in powerful, athletic dance, driven by John Gzowski’s relentless, evocative, recorded score. This Hamlet is all passion, all action, eschewing narrative for character-driven dance arrangements on a sparsely furnished set where Simon Rossiter’s lighting design animates ever-moving curtains and billowing silks to make a drama that keeps one very much in the present, as only dance can do.

Côté may be the central character, but he doesn’t hog all the best moves. From the opening scene with Hamlet’s friend and supporter Horatio – a brilliantly cast and frightfully nimble Natasha Poon Woon – through emotional scenes between Claudius (veteran Robert Glumbek, who shows an aptitude for classical acting) and Greta Hodgkinson’s stately yet extroverted Gertrude, to the final scenes of violent swordplay, this 100-minute, intermission-less show keeps up the momentum.

Structured as a series of scenes that open with surtitled, white-lettered phrases, à la a 1920s silent movie, this Hamlet is more pastiche than episodic, lightening the mood when the intensity builds to a breaking-point with some humorous mask work, when the players arrive to re-enact the murder of Hamlet’s father. Lepage and Côté have selected elements of Shakespeare’s play most conducive to dance interpretation, including scenes such as Ophelia’s drowning, memorably performed by Carleen Zouboules who is manipulated from underneath a turquoise watery silk, that do not occur in the stage play.

Cast as Polonius, the multi-talented Bernard Meney also performs an expanded role as  Ophelia’s father, as ever so subtly, the show touches on the oedipal elements between sons and mothers, fathers and daughters. Connor Mitton as Rosencrantz and Willem Sadler as Guildenstern likewise see much more on-stage action than Shakespeare gave them.

One hopes that this short run at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre will not be the last for this danced through Hamlet, for it is the kind of show that will only get better with each lightning performance.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Designed and directed by Robert Lepage

Co-designed and choreographed by Guillaume Côté

Based on the play by William Shakespeare

Produced by Ex Machina/Côté Danse/Dvoretsky Productions

At the Elgin Theatre, Toronto through April 7, 2024.

Photo of Guillaume Côté and Carleen Zouboules courtesy of Show One Productions

Gallery

National Ballet’s Winter Triple Bill heats up the hearts of balletomanes

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