dance

Angels, rockers and a dying courtesan

“I felt like I was falling in the vastness of it all.” This is Crystal Pite recalling a childhood fascination with the cosmos. That, and a lighting technique by Pite’s set designer Jay Gower Taylor were all the impetus she needed to create Angels’ Atlas, a piece that premiered on opening night of the National Ballet of Canada’s mixed program.

As the curtain comes up, Gower’s cosmos hangs over the dancers – 37 of them folded over in baby pose – like an all-white shimmering Aurora Borealis.

Pite is a master of the moving tableau and Angels’ Atlas comprises some of her best. The dancers are costumed in loose split pants, some with fabric panels that make them look like sarongs. They move in unison as huge shimmering mass, like an underwater school of fish as the light reflects off their bodies with each turn.

The motif of ascendance and descendance builds a feeling of transformation and the connection between the heavens and Earth.

Siphesihle November, man of the moment throughout this program, was one of the starring solos in Angels’ Atlas. Muscular, quick-footed partnering between Heather Ogden and Harrison James, Jordana Daumec and Spencer Hack, Hack and Donald Thom made this half-hour co-production with Ballett Zürich unforgettable.

Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, last performed here in 2015, opened the mixed program as if to say, this is what contemporary ballet dancers of the highest caliber can do. Set to a score by Joby Talbot and Jack White of the White Stripes, the piece opens on loud dissonance, progresses through lyrical to romantic and back to big brass in an arrangement of songs including “Aluminum” “Blue Orchid” and “Transit of Venus.”

McGregor’s understanding of what a body can do – see his choreography for Thom Yorke in the Radiohead video of “Lotus Flower” – is paramount in witnessing Chroma, which The Royal Balled premiered in 2006.

Set in a white, L-shaped dance space with a wide picture window behind from which dancers entered, Chroma puts dancers Skylar Campbell, Heather Ogden, a very lithe and happy Tanya Howard, Svetlana Lunkina and others to the test. They come off winningly.

At first it is disconcerting to see the men wearing the same flowy teddies as the women. Then as two men partner each other, it all makes sense: dance transcends gender divides and achieves a harmony akin to a perfectly blended colour palette.

The middle work, Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, was first performed in 1963 by Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. Telling the story of an ill-used courtesan jealously loved by a nobleman named Armand, the ballet hasn’t aged well.

But as a showcase for Greta Hodgkinson in her final performances with the National Ballet, it sets off her acting ability, her beautiful arm movement and her virtuoso dancing. Guillaume Côté plays the lover Armand with ease; Jonathan Renna makes a Duke with attitude, and Piotr Stanczyk, woefully underemployed here, is Armand’s father in this melodramatic, over-orchestrated short piece to a Franz Liszt piano sonata. One might prefer to keep Hodgkinson in mind for her performances in Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, The Four Seasons and ballets by John Cranko, Jiří Kylián and Glen Tetley.

 

Angels’ Atlas, with Chroma and Marguerite and Armand

Presented by the National Ballet of Canada at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, until March 7

Photo of artists of the National Ballet in Angels’ Atlas by Karolina Kuras

Red Sky on fire

If you want to see some terrific contemporary dancing, set to an amazing score by Eliot Britton and Rick Sacks and performed live on stage, get down to the Berkeley Street Theatre to see the latest Red Sky production, AF.

Billed as “seven movements of contemporary dance and compelling physical storytelling,” AF is a show that grew out of Red Sky’s residency in the Berkeley Street Company. The initials are taken from Animal Farm, George Orwell’s allegorical novella of 1945 that depicted a rebellion among farm animals seeking freedom from their farmer overlord. It does not end well.

According to Red Sky artistic director Sandra Laronde, rather than recapitulating the dark path of Animal Farm, this show, choreographed by Thomas Fonua, took its lead from the more triumphant Anishinaabe mythology, specifically the eight fire prophecies.

The Anishinaabe fires correspond with epochs in the history of Turtle Island (i.e., the world), each fire a prophecy. The fourth fire, for instance, foretold the coming of a light-skinned people. The seventh fire, as explained on the website crystalwind.ca, was delivered by a young, clear-eyed prophet. The seventh fire was to lead to the rebirth of the Anishinaabe nation. The eighth and final fire will be an eternal flame signifying, “peace, love, brotherhood and sisterhood.”

None of this information is available to the audience, so the dancers have a daunting task – to explain in mime and movement what’s going on. What’s more, the wonderful voiceover from Anishinaabe speaker Albert Owl, is nowhere translated. It would have been a simple matter, given Chris Malkowski’s clever lighting design, to project surtitles on the brick wall that forms the back of the stage.

Story-wise, AF takes a while to find its feet. In a cone of light, a tall figure of powerful mien, with long hair and a cloth draped over his jeans, opens the show. In front of him in darkness is a long table and all we can make out are four heads. When the lights come on over the table, we see it a supine male, leaned over by two women dressed in flowing blue dresses, their hands clawing at the supine figure’s legs, their heads shaking rapidly back and forth, somehow in synch with the rhythm of the music and drumming to the right of them on stage.

Even those ignorant of the mythology will catch the meaning of the fourth or fifth movement, when a mottled circle of light slowly encloses the dancers in a tight formation. The paleskins take over the land and put the Anishinaabe on reserves.

The tall, warrior-like character might be interpreted as delivering the eighth prophecy, as flames (a trick of lighting) lick around the dancers: Eddie Elliot, Michael Rourke, Miyeko Ferguson, Marrin Jessome and Connor Mitten.

Fonua’s contemporary moves are pretty standard, but as barrel rolls flow into floor crawls or leaps and push-pull partnering, it’s hard to see any aspect of Animal Farm – or any necessity for it.

Yes, the dancers do a lot of sideways, forward and backward moves on all fours and sometimes there are farm animal sounds, but what you notice are the birds’ cries, blending with a soundtrack of recordings from Gabe Gaudet, Marie Gaudet, Nelson Tagoona, Tanya Tagaq and a Tribe Called Red. Jenifer Brousseau’s live singing and keening, invoking the spirits, takes precedence. The problematic dance language is in repeated poses with heads down and faces unseen, always suggesting submission. Problematic, because this is a hopeful, upbeat show and we need to know that before the final upright, towering formation.

AF

Direction and concept by Sandra Laronde

Choreography by Thomas Fonua

Music by Eliot Britton and Rick Sacks

Lighting design by Chris Malkowski

A Red Sky Performance production presented by Canadian Stage at Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto, until March 1

Photo from AF by Dahlia Katz

‘Let’s queer up the world together’

“Toxic masculinity” is such an oft-used term, one almost forgets there is any other kind. So Sébastien Provencher’s Children of Chemistry, set on five gay male dancers, comes as a welcome corrective. The show, first worked on in 2015 as a site-specific piece in Montreal, contains in its theatrical version all the drama –and comedy — of a well made one-act play.

Dancers Miguel Anguiano, Jean-Benoît Labrecque, Louis-Elyan Martin, Alexandre Morin and Simon Renaud first appear on the black box stage of the Citadel as a quiet ensemble, dressed variously in white shirts or t-shirts over jeans, a skirt or underwear. Slowly, in precise in unison, they move their arms and hands, raising elbows, pointing, stretching, opening palms like a flower and repeating a hand gesture to the forehead that suggests a rooster’s comb. This first movement is like a work of synchronized sign language, floating over Hani Debbache’s electronic score, a gentle hum that builds to something like techno-funk.

Before you know it, one dancer has broken out – there’s one in every crowd, you think. And soon they’re all going freestyle, colliding with one another. One, Jean-Benoît Labrecque, has a little breakdown on stage.

Either they are highly skilled quick-change artists or there are some very good dressers back stage, because in the blink of an eye, the five have returned in colourful blazers, mincingly doing a fashion runway walk sporting camouflage army dress, swimwear (featuring a one-piece with a thong back to reveal rounded cheeks) and sports gear, culminating with a guy in a colourful windjacket doing a wobbly turn on roller-blades. Soon they are down to skin, a rubbery horse’s head and white socks being the only attire of one model.

Vamping becomes voguing in the hilarious football sequence that has them all in red leotards with matching red helmets. Soon they are in full-blown North American red-blooded form, a coach shouting orders, all marching, military style – sometimes on tiptoe.

Before you know it, one dancer has broken out – there’s one in every crowd, you think. And soon they’re all going freestyle, colliding with one another. One, Jean-Benoît Labrecque, has a little breakdown on stage.

Either they are highly skilled quick-change artists or there are some very good dressers back stage, because in the blink of an eye, the five have returned in colourful blazers, mincingly doing a fashion runway walk sporting camouflage army dress, swimwear (featuring a one-piece with a thong back to reveal rounded cheeks) and sports gear, culminating with a guy in a colourful windjacket doing a wobbly turn on roller-blades. Soon they are down to skin, a rubbery horse’s head and white socks being the only attire of one model.

Children of Chemistry comes back to quiet as the lights go down, one bare shoulder illuminated in the fading light as all five lie face-down, bums up like five children sleeping in the same bed.

In his notes, choreographer and costume designer invites us to watch this show and “queer up the world together.” He’s got a point: it’s for our own good, whoever we are.

Children of Chemistry

Choreography by Sébastien Provencher

Music by Hani Debbache

Lighting design by Nancy Bussières

Presented by Citadel Compagnie at The Citadel, Toronto, until February 22

Photo of  Jean-Benoît Labrecque, Miguel Anguiano, Alexandre Morin, Louis-Elyan Martin and Jossua Collin by Justine Latour

 

Multiple takes on the Orpheus myth

George Balanchine’s Chaconne, extracted and assembled from his choreography for the Metropolitan Opera’s Orfeo of 1936, sticks to the pure language of dance. The piece was made for Suzanne Farrell, and it premiered at the New York City Ballet in 1976. Performed for the first time by the National Ballet of Canada, Chaconne, staged by Farrell, Lindsay Fischer and Christopher Stowell, is pure bliss.

Dancing with Harrison James in the principal pas de deux, Heather Ogden was poetry in motion on opening night, as were the other leading ladies, Jordana Daumec and Miyoko Koyasu. In all its intricate variations, including the large ensemble section, extreme fleetness of foot is required, but never in this performance was it achieved at the expense of a united expression of love and festivity.

Singleness of purpose was exactly what is missing from Orpheus Alive, the sprawling dance created by National Ballet choreographic associate Robert Binet in collaboration with New York composer Missy Mazzoli and Toronto writer and dramaturge Rosamund Small. Five years in the making, Orpheus Alive is a reworking, perhaps an overworking, of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in which Orpheus is the female – alive in contrast with so many leading women in story ballets who are either not human, asleep or ghosts.

Jenna Savella, in a bright yellow skirt that makes her Orpheus always the spotlight, takes charge of her own story, breaking the fourth wall to appeal to the audience, microphone in hand, as the gods of the underworld. As in the myth, Orpheus, the musician offspring of Apollo, can only retrieve Eurydice, captive in Hades, through the persuasive power of art.

Stretching the metaphor of creation and the redemptive power of art in a story always commenting on itself makes Orpheus’s journey into the River Styx to reclaim her lost Eurydice a hard one to follow. Orpheus can only regain Eurydice, performed with grace by Spencer Hack, if she does not look back on her return to earth. This she does: with a removal of her black blindfold. And so is condemned to tell her story over and over again.

Hyemi Shin’s set and costume design creates a Hieronymus Bosch-like Hades, with a trio of yappy switchboard operators – an update of the three-headed dog Cerberus – as gatekeepers at the entrance to hell. A huge crowd of dancers serve as furies, apparitions and zombies, harried into action by Mazzoli’s thundering, ominous score. But the appearance of subway workers (the underground is depicted as the Osgoode station) in neon orange lifejackets certainly blurred the line between parody and serious intent. There are many layers to this reinterpretation of the Orpheus story but in the end, only one theme remains clear: It’s hard to lose the one you love.

Chaconne

Choreography by George Balanchine,

Music by Christoph Willibald Gluck

Orpheus Alive

Choreography by Robert Binet

Composer Missy Mazzoli

A National Ballet of Canada program at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, until November 21

Spencer Hack and Jenna Savella with Artists of the National Ballet. Photo by Karolina Kura

 

Dancing Beethoven’s 9th symphony

I have no argument with the word “monumental” to describe Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor. Setting a dance to such a masterpiece is hugely ambitious, and ProArteDanza artistic director Roberto Campanella seems well aware of the challenge. He and co-choreographer Robert Glumbek spent nearly a decade putting together The 9th.

And now that it’s on stage, at the Fleck Theatre at Harbourfront Centre through Saturday November 9, we can see whether they matched the monumentality of the music with equally awesome set, lighting, video and performance. For this viewer, the answer is, not really.

The 70-minute piece is divided into five movements, corresponding to passages from the symphony, followed by the choral section based on Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy”. Why the choreographers chose different recordings for each movement and the choral finale is a question that comes to mind, but as each movement presents only a slice of the symphony, perhaps it doesn’t matter.

The symbolism of the chairs, which lie tipped over across the front of the stage before the curtain comes up raises another question. If you read the program beforehand, you’d find that they represent how “separation is built between us. Chairs are the metaphor that impedes the connection between us.” Fine, but aren’t chairs more often seen as a means for people to get together, around a dining table for instance? More likely they are a prop chosen for ease in carrying around the stage, placing in a row to play musical chairs, or for standing on before they overbalance.

To the dancing then. Taylor Bojanowski, Sasha Ludavicius, Ryan Lee, Daniel McArthur, Connor Mitton, Jake Poloz, Kelly Shaw and Kurumi Yoshimoto, despite their varied levels of experience, show equal mastery of the highly physical manoueuvres assigned them. They wear drab street clothes. Loneliness and struggle dominate the opening scenes, cleverly depicted in simultaneous video on a scrim upstage, the work of Digital Graphic Design’s director David Dexter. Things take on a West Side Story vibe as the well coordinated dancers move in synch, in duos, trios and quartets and opposing each other like gangs meeting in the parking lot.

With each movement, togetherness increases, but there is lots of push and pull, coming together and pulling apart in vigorous variations that never seem to carry a consistent theme.

Finally, with the choral section, all stand together (Alle menschen werden Brüder/All people will be brothers), against a video backdrop of dozens of chairs piled up like a barricade, individual chairs slowly slipping away to leave an open space.

The song is called an Ode to Joy, but if you didn’t understand the German, you’d never know what was meant from the sombre faces of the dancers. And for a climax, having all the dancers stand and deliver the lyrics of the song was a letdown, more like a moment from a singalong movie musical than the transcendence achieved in the final bars of Beethoven’s symphony.

The 9th

Choreography by Roberto Campanella and Robert Glumbek

Lighting design by Arun Srinivasan

Costumes by Krista Dowson-Spiker

At the Fleck Dance Theatre, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, through November 9

Photo by Alexander Antonijevic

Crowd-pleasing, artistically satisfying

It was a beautiful 20-year-old Italian dancer named Carlotta Grisi who inspired the creation of Giselle, the romantic story ballet that premiered in Paris in 1841 and has stood as a highpoint in the careers of leading ballerinas ever since.

Artistic director Karen Kain, this season celebrating 50 years with the National Ballet of Canada, recalls Giselle as the first ballet she saw and the work that inspired her to dance. “Giselle demands everything from a classical ballerina, from stamina to technical precision, drama and musicality.” Kain first performed it in 1973, partnered with Frank Augustyn.

On Wednesday night, Svetlana Lunkina, who came to the National Ballet from the Bolshoi Ballet, raised everyone from their seats with a moving interpretation of the role that was so technically proficient she made it look effortless. Giselle is the German peasant girl who lives with her mother Berthe in a village surrounded by vineyards. She is wooed by a mysterious stranger named Loys, who poses as a farmer, but is actually Count Albrecht, son of the Duke of Silesia and the fiancé of Countess Bathilde.

Giselle’s intended is Hilarion, a forester who takes note of Loys’ bearing and suspects him of treachery. He tries to warn Giselle, as does Berthe, but this innocent beauty is captivated. Her joy, expressed in playful and artful dancing with Loys, is unbounded. Drama mounts when Bathilde (an august Tanya Howard), in the company of the Duke and a royal hunting party, arrives. She takes an interest in Giselle and gives her a necklace.

Piotr Stanczyk gets our sympathy as the perfectly worthy, robust suitor, who reveals Loys’ identity and status. Giselle’s ecstasy spins into madness and, her humiliation and betrayal on display for all to see, takes Albrecht’s sword and plunges it into her heart, dying in her mother’s arms. Harrison James’s performance as the disguised Albrecht hits just the right note, between cad and true love.

Giselle is a ballet that literally hit new heights; it’s all about lightness and elevation. This aspect of the show is evident throughout: the peasant pas de deux in Act I were brilliantly executed by Siphesihle November, Jeannine Haller, Skylar Campbell and Miyoko Koyasu.

As enduring as the ballet and Adolph Adam’s straightforward, evocative score is Desmond Heeley’s set, created in 1970. The sunny, earthly world of peasants, vineyards and royal hunting parties is sharply delineated from the dark forested spirit habitat of Act II, in which the gauzy, sylph-like Wilis appear, as substantial as willow-‘o-the-wisps and just as mysterious.

Here we find Hilarion beside Giselle’s grave, keeping vigil as the poor girl has been buried in unhallowed ground. The Wilis, the ghosts of betrothed women who were betrayed before they could be married, harry a brave-hearted Hilarion to his death, under the direction of a strikingly powerful Heather Ogden as Myrtha, Queen of the Wilis and lead Wilis Tina Pereira and Jordana Daumec. The full assembly of 18 Wilis make a stirring spectacle. Not a sound is heard over the music as they perform their ghostly ensemble sliding on single feet across the stage.

The applause for Lunkina’s lofty, delicate dancing as a Wili began well before the end of the show. The pas de deux with James made plausible the power of love and forgiveness that saves Albrecht from the vengeful ghosts. Five other principal dancers take their turns as Giselle before the end of the run, including Greta Hodgkinson, who dances the role in her final season with the National Ballet on Saturday night.

Giselle

Choreography and production by Sir Peter Wright, after Jean Coralli, Jules Perrot and Marius Petipa

A production of the National Ballet of Canada, at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, through November 10

Photo of Svetlana Lunkina and Harrison James with artists of the National Ballet of Canada by Aleksandar Antonijevic.

 

 

 

Dancing on the edge of the abyss

The many parts of In the Abyss, presented in Citadel + Compagnie’s Bright Nights series, don’t quite add up to a satisfying whole, but the four performers never lose our attention. Choreographer and Political Movement artistic director Aria Evans was inspired in the show’s creation by the “scientific fact and beautiful metaphor that we are all made of stardust.” Driven to ask questions about the nature of the universe, the fragility of human connection and hope for healing in a time of threats to our existence, Evans commissioned text from Ximena Huizi and assembled dancers Irvin Chow, Ana Claudette Groppler, Syreeta Hector and David Norsworthy to express in words and movement her chosen themes.

An equal role in the piece is played by Rachel Forbes’s set design, which consists of movable parts, two ramps and a tall box with an opening that looks like the maw of a mineshaft and also serves to frame scenes such as a couple meeting at a bar.

The dancers come out of the box on to a darkened set, as if emerging after a storm, or coming into a new form of life. Dressed in black and white, moving slowly to the low hum of Babak Taghinia’s electronic score, they spread out, as one of the women speaks of “an astronomical event,” a star that “collapses into itself” and “a soft landing.” These and other disconnected statements and phrases, are uttered by each of the performers as they perform trios, duets and solos, and, moving the big ramps to shape their environment, create little vignettes, of lovers embracing or children at play together.

Rather than reinforcing one another, the language of dance seems at odds with the spoken text, not much of it profound, the words used in repeated refrains like musical phrases, as if divorced from their meaning. It’s a lot to ask of a dancer engaged in difficult partnering to keep up a running soliloquy and it’s distracting. We don’t ask our poets to do cartwheels.

Without the spoken word In the Abyss might have made a more coherent piece. The four dancers are expressive and impressive movers and it’s easy to follow the drama, presented in fragments, of attempts at connection, whether working cooperatively, grasping each other in passion, meeting socially or playing together like innocents – as a ramp becomes a playground slide. The repeated formation of dancers grasping each others’ hands or arms to make a circle conveys Evans’s message of strength in unity and love as the tie that binds.

In the Abyss

Choreographed by Aria Evans

A Political Movement production presented by Citadel + Compagnie

At The Citadel / Ross Centre for Dance, 304 Parliament St. Toronto through November 2

 

 

A monologue in dance disturbs

Toronto actor Simon Bracken has the only speaking role in The Particulars. He’s Gordon, a very twitchy, quite off-putting fellow suffering from insomnia complicated by a bad case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He’s dressed in a loose satin robe sashed over oft-revealed underpants.

In the vein of monologists Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian, Bracken tells Gordon’s story as he enacts it. Gordon, a single man, has a set routine that involves tending his garden, which has become infested with aphids, watering his orchid, daily buying a bouquet of fresh flowers and performing his clerical duties in an office job where he fears ostracization.

Accompanying Gordon as if they were ghosts are seven dancers, draped head to toe in sheer veils, like dead brides (except one is a man). Matthew MacKenzie, creator of the very successful show Bears, wrote and directed The Particulars as a fusion of dance and theatre. Alida Kendell choreographed the movement. The fusion is less than complete, in that one can focus on Gordon’s increasing agony – and it’s hard not to – or on the active ensemble of dancers, but the two performances never really meld. Mostly the dancers’ movements, especially when they’re balled up on the floor scratching themselves, merely illustrate a story we can easily imagine from Gordon’s words.

Gordon seems made for bullying and a figure to make fun of. For the first 30 minutes or so, we laugh at his desperate manoeuvres, such as studying hockey statistics so he can sound knowledgeable about the game among his male colleagues. The reason for Gordon’s insomnia and neurosis is not immediately made known. Once his tragedy is understood, laughing at him becomes a problem.

Dancers Amber Borotsik, Lara Ebata, Bridget Jessome, Richard Lee Hai, Krista Lin, Rebecca Sadowski, Kate Stashko and Raena Waddell, cast as “mourners”, are competent enough, but because their faces are veiled, it’s hard to engage in their expressive movements.

This show needs more of the inventiveness displayed when the dancers form a human tower, illustrating Gordon’s fear that the scratching that awakes him every night might come from a squirrel trapped in his chimney.

The Particulars

Written and directed by Matthew MacKenzie

Choreography by Alida Kendell

A Punctuate! Theatre production presented by the Theatre Centre

At the Theatre Centre until October 26; in Edmonton Nov. 1-2

Photo of Simon Bracken as Gordon by Dahlia Katz

Visibly talented minorities

A delightfully meandering show, Minorities is a multi-media production celebrating the 55 ethnicities that make up, along with the majority Han peoples, the population of China. Alternately instructive, comic and slightly controversial, Minorities is the third work in choreographer Yang Zhen’s Revolution Game trilogy.

A little background: Yang Zhen creates interactive, entertaining works for Red Virgo, a theatre and dance company based in Beijing and active since 2014. Red Virgo’s works always stem from traditional Chinese dances from different ethnic groups. The Canadian Stage presentation of Minorities marks the performers’ first time in Canada. The two previous shows in the trilogy, Just Go Forward (2014) and In the Field of Hope (2015) have been seen in Europe and Asia.

The red standing microphones and red X’s on the tables in the theatre lobby carry out a visual theme that threads through the show. A backstage video scrim of multicultural faces with a Mao-like figure in the centre gradually lights up in colours as the show begins. As heavy metal-like rock music plays, five female dancers spring up among the audience, shaking their booty and swinging their arms in the aisles and between the seats.

They are Lou Hio Mei, Ma Xiao Ling, Aodonggaowa, Gan Luyangzi and Guzhanuer Yusufu. Acting as emcee, an engaging Lou Hio Mei takes to the red microphone to introduce the show and the performers by background, and in turn asking audience members for their names and origins. The first part of the show concerns the ethnicities represented, their cultural dances and songs and the dancers’ feelings about their own cultures. At times we feel we’re in the classroom as documentary footage of dance demonstrations screens behind the mannequins wearing ethnic dress and the shape-shifting performers.

Lou Hio Mei is from Macao, once a Portuguese colony at the mouth of the Pearl River. She identifies as Han, the majority Chinese ethnicity. She introduces Uyghur dancer Guzhanuer Yusufu, Mongolian Aodonggaowa, Tibetan Gan Luyangzi and Korean Ma Xiao Ling. Even before they don their traditional dress, these performers express their identities through dance and song. It’s not hard to see how distinct their cultural differences are. Yusufu’s Uyghur dance shows elements of Indian classical dance. The Tibetan drum dance Gan Luyangzi performs employs a round skin drum similar to that used in indigenous dance and song in North America.

But Minorities is no earnest exercise in identity politics. It’s high-spirited, a little self-mocking and ultimately a patriotic ode to the joy of “56 brothers and sisters” that make up the Chinese mosaic. Lou Hio Mei’s topless, hula hoop hip rotations soon inspire  her fellow performers to return to leotards, their red running shoes signifying a common purpose. A song performed by Huang Ping in traditional style spans past and present, and suggests the continuity of an inclusive Chinese culture.

Minorities

Concept and choreography by Yang Zhen

Music and photography by Qi Ray

A Red Virgo production presented by Canadian Stage

At Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto, until October 27

Photo (from left) of Gan Luyangzi, Guzhanuer Yusufu, Lou Hio Mei, Ma Xiao Ling and Aodonggaowa by Dahlia Katz

 

Bravura dancing spanning the centuries

There’s nothing quite like Apollo to give an audience the experience of the sublime in dance. George Balanchine was only 24 when he choreographed the ballet to Igor Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète. Apollo was first performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on June 12, 1928 and the performance gave Balanchine his first international recognition as the artist who would take 19th-century classicism into the 20th-century with a stripped-down modernist approach. The dance was first performed by the National Ballet of Canada in February 1999 and last night was not the first time Guillaume Côté, celebrating his 20th anniversary with the company, has performed the lead role.

Côté very much epitomizes the allegory of the young god of music, achieving ascendancy through art, in his instruction from the three muses, Calliope, with her tablet, the muse of poetry; Polyhymnia, muse of mime, bearing a mask; and Terpsichore, muse of dance and song, carrying a lyre. The stark set, bathed in dark azure, suggests the platform for a ritual in which the dancers, in pure white costumes, are like statues from an ancient classical frieze come to life in the moonlight.

Great strength and restraint are called for in the execution of the mesmerizing choreography. But also playfulness, as Heather Ogden’s Terpsichore, particularly nimble and expressive, Jeannine Haller’s Polyhymnia and Miyoko Koyasu’s Calliope lead the young Apollo to his destiny. There is a tension between symmetry and asymmetry, poise and disjuncture, that builds in unity with the music to the closing moment when all four ascends the steps to Parnassus and we breathe a sigh of fulfilment.

The danger in opening a mixed program with Apollo is that it will overshadow all that follows. But Night, the second piece in the program, succeeds by being something completely different. The choreographer of this 25-minute ensemble piece, Julia Adam, trained with Canada’s National Ballet School and performed in the corps de ballet with NBoC until she left in 1988 for a long career with the San Francisco Ballet, where she was a principal dancer, developing into a choreographer of note. Night, inspired by the dreamier paintings of Marc Chagall, is sustained mainly by Matthew Pierce’s inventive and soaring score, moving bodies in rather busy mythic-animal costumes, through space in acrobatic ways. Holding it all together is the dreamer, in this instance, Skylar Campbell, always thrilling to behold, effortlessly aloft or transiting the stage.

Night is followed by The Sea Above, The Sky Below, choreographed in 2017 by Robert Binet in celebration of Xiao Nan Yu’s 20th anniversary with the ballet, and remounted in this farewell season for Xiao. Performed to the Adagietto movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, The Sea Above, featured Heather Ogden, dancing with great elegance and grace, both with and for Harrison James and Félix Paquet, in a short piece meant to highlight the integrity, sensitivity and directness Xiao Nan Yu brings to the creation of each role she performs.

As if to bookend the evening with more bravura dancing, going back to the pure classicism of 19th-century Russian ballet, the mixed program ends with Paquita, newly adapted by NBoC associate artistic director Christopher Stowell, after the 1881 version by Marius Petipa. A grand spectacle in stiff orange tutus embellished with a Spanish Moorish aesthetic, Paquita can’t help but present as something of a competition. But that sense in no way spoiled the excitement of watching an electrifying Jillian Vanstone and Francesco Gabriele Frola performing at peak levels.

Apollo, with Night, The Sea Above, The Sky Below and Paquita

Performed by the National Ballet of Canada

At the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, March 1 to 21, 2019

Photo of Heather Ogden and Guillaume Côté in Apollo by Cylla von Tiedemann