Ballet BC's Program 3 at the Queen E

The concluding program of Ballet BC's 2017/18 season arrived this weekend. Two acclaimed remounts from the company's repertoire bookended a new piece by artistic director Emily Molnar. Because of time constraints this morning, I'll offer just a few brief reflections on each.

Cayetano Soto's Beginning After premiered in 2016, and is very much a showcase for Ballet BC dancers' incredible speed and technical virtuosity, not least in terms of partnering. (I wrote at greater length about that performance here.) Soto, who is also responsible for the lighting and costume design, creates evocative stage pictures with this work, and the fade ins and fade outs on different bodily configurations and lines and movements frequently have you questioning what you are seeing. Indeed, the piece's opening epigraph, about the fine line between truth and memory, applies not just to one's post-performance impression of the work, but to one's in-the-moment spectating experience. Did I just see what I think I saw? Did that male dancer just rotate that female dancer's leg around three times at the hip, like Barbie? If so, why didn't it, as my friend Kerry asked with astonishment at intermission, come off?

The world premiere of Molnar's when you left was doubly special because it was accompanied by live music from Vancouver's Phoenix Chamber Choir, led by conductor Graeme Langager. Set to an evocatively layered work of vocalise by Pēteris Vasks, Plainscapes, the piece begins with the dancers (the entire Ballet BC company, joined by several apprentices) advancing slowly from upstage in half light (the lighting design is by James Proudfoot), their bodies pulsing every now and then. Once arrived at their staggered positions, the dancers begin to cycle through a largely gestural score, a choreographic style I have not previously seen from Molnar, and one that here counterpoints the rising and falling pitches of the music most effectively. Indeed, when the dancers start to repeat their gesture bases--a reach with a hand, a collapse at the knee or hip--in canon, the syncopation of sound and movement is deeply satisfying. This, however, is only the prelude to an even more complex canon structure involving different group formations of dancers moving purposely through space, with successive cohorts breaking off and others tacking themselves on to a given trio or quartet. In the past I've sometimes felt that the frequent running and sliding sequences by which Molnar moves her dancers on and offstage are shortcuts to thinking more complexly about how to link different sections in a work. But here they are absolutely essential to the kinetic roundelay effect she creates in response to the music.

I was utterly captivated by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar's Bill when Ballet BC first introduced the work, also in 2016. So I was excited to see this remount, and it did not fail to disappoint. The combination of Ori Lichtik's house beats with Eyal and Behar's distinctive choreography (which combines the former's fascination with walking patterns with a more fluid and whimsical vocabulary inherited from Gaga) is just so enjoyable to soak in. I wrote at greater length about the company's premiere of the piece here, so I will only reiterate how taken I was by the way the piece begins, with the solo studies for three male dancers and one female dancer. In their nude body stockings, and executing with their always-in-motion limbs a crazily successful combination of balletic and cartoon-like moves, they struck me as channeling the energy and iconography of both Nijinsky's faun and an animated stick figure by Keith Haring. The entire company was excellent, but I will also single out Scott Fowler, here taking over from Gilbert Small, in the hieratic solo that is the capstone to the piece.

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Romeo and Juliet at the Queen E

Five years ago Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar did something unusual. In the midst of the company's renaissance and bold recasting of itself as a contemporary ballet company, she commissioned a new version of Giselle from then choreographer-in-residence José Navas. I say unusual because just as audiences were starting to embrace her choreographic accent on mixed programs of complex non-narrative and conceptual works of dance, here she was presenting a classic example of nineteenth-century story ballet. Then, too, her choice of Navas--a Cunningham-trained dancer and choreographer steeped in abstraction--to create the work seemed strange. The resulting production was a bold updating of the ballet's sexual and gender politics for the twenty-first century (Giselle, Albrecht and Hilarion in a homoerotic love triangle), accompanied by a striking stage design. However, I had mixed feelings about how Navas took his cue from Adolphe Adam's music in crafting his choreography, especially the extent to which the work of the ensemble overshadowed the solos and duets of the principals. (You can read my full review here.)

To be sure, the flipping of this traditional balance between displays of individual virtuosity and moments of visually and technically satisfying collective dancing is in many ways to be expected when a contemporary choreographer used to working collaboratively encounters a company with the depth of talent (and lack of hierarchy) like Ballet BC's. For, with this weekend's world premiere of the Molnar-led Ballet BC's second in-house story ballet, Medhi Walerski's updating of the Prokofiev-scored Romeo and Juliet, I experienced something similar to my appreciation of Navas' Giselle: I was absolutely spell-bound by the group scenes, and by the clean modernist lines and monochromatic palette of the stage design (the set, consisting of three giant moveable portals, was by Theun Mosk, the costumes by Walerski himself); the partnering between the two leads, however, left me a little nonplussed.

The piece opens in a visually dramatic fashion. Following Prokofiev's opening overture, the curtain rises to reveal the entire ensemble--supplemented here by several Arts Umbrella apprentices, as well as member of AU's Graduate Program in Dance--massed on stage, staring out at the audience, their rigid posture and grim faces telegraphing what Shakespeare's choral prologue tells us we already know: things aren't going to end well for our star-crossed lovers. In the midst of this bit of kinetic telepathy, one of the dancers suddenly moves. It is Romeo (Christoph von Riedemann), moving horizontally across the stage to find Juliet (Kirsten Wicklund) and take her hand. But she pushes him away, and I admit that I experienced a brief moment of narrative confusion here: was this Walerski suggesting that the young lovers, or at the very least Juliet, know from the start that their romance is doomed; or could this be, as I also wondered, an opening condensation of the backstory involving poor Romeo's rejection by Rosaline, for whom he is pining before he falls for Juliet?

The question is left unanswered as we are immediately plunged into a roiling and raucous street scene in Verona. Here is where Walerski immediately places his own choreographic stamp on this signature story and music, busying the stage with so many bodies, their movements transitioning fluidly between recognizable bits of actorly pantomime (conversation and gossip, a hearty hail hello or an unneighbourly snub), physical theatre that serves a narrative purpose (a shove between rival members of the Houses Montague and Capulet that turns into a full-scale brawl), and gorgeous dancerly unison that is as pleasing for its scale as for its skilled execution. This combined group aesthetic is especially powerful during the ball scene when Romeo and Juliet first meet, where in moving between the initial hijinks of Romeo, Benvolio (Patrick Kilbane) and Mercutio (a stellar Scott Fowler) and later the love-at-first-sight encounter between Romeo and Juliet, Walerski channels a version of cinematic montage (he has stated that his research included the famous R&J films by Zeffirelli and Luhrmann). That is, Walerski is somehow able to slow down time, giving us a glimpse of romantic interiority (as with the hand on hand duet that is the danced equivalent of Shakespeare's palmers' speech) amid what is otherwise a scene of domestic exteriority. Likewise in the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt (Gilbert Small), the former's inevitable careening and off-kilter march toward death is forestalled more than once by the juxtapositional tumult of its frenzied witnessing by the citizens of Verona--a reminder that the division between these two houses affects all members of this society.

By contrast, in the famous balcony scene Walerski doesn't really give the young lovers that much to do by way of compelling or interesting dancing. He is in a rush to bring the two together, but the lifts that result are often physically and visually awkward, and where one would hope for something surprising by way of a transition he frequently substitutes a kiss. In this scene of the play, before Romeo announces his presence, Juliet expresses her excitement at having met Romeo in vocabulary that is richly physical and kinetically alive and she is in many ways the more active and worldly of the two characters ("You kiss by the book," she tells Romeo). Yet here I found her to be mostly passive, spending more time in the air than on the ground, danced more by Romeo rather than dancing for or around him. (Contrast this with Kenneth MacMillan's famous staging of this scene with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, in which the latter spends a full minute or so in stillness on his knees as the former twirls around him.) I did respond more enthusiastically to the scene in Act II when the lovers consummate their secret marriage, Walerski's crafting of a pas de deux that is mostly floor-bound and a rolling mix of intertwined limbs nicely conveying that for these two teenagers they are as much in lust as they are in love. And in this version of the ballet Juliet is, uniquely, given a long moment of psychological interiority when, having been instructed by Friar Laurence (Peter Smida, effecting the sexiest onstage priest I've ever seen) to take the poison that will induce her family to think she is dead, she is allowed to gaze upon a tableau vivant version of these events, the witnessing of the inert body of her double perhaps giving her momentary pause as to whether this passion isn't just high stakes folly. And the way all of this plays out in the tomb when the banished and lately returned Romeo discovers what he thinks to be Juliet's dead body is a truly amazing coup-de-thèatre.

In the end, what is perhaps most surprising about this production is the extent to which a contemporary choreographer like Walerski has embraced the narrative and characterological codes of dance drama. This includes effective front of curtain bits of pantomimed action that serve as transitions between scenes. And it also includes the casting of three veteran Ballet BC dancers in non-dancing roles: the alums Sylvain Senez and Makaila Wallace as Juliet's parents; and longtime company member Alexis Fletcher as the Nurse. Fletcher, especially, proves herself up to the dramaturgical challenge of acting with her body, and her stolid and physically grounded presence as confidante, interlocutor, and witness is a reminder that no monument to these lovers' senseless deaths will absolve anyone on stage from their complicity in this tragedy. As such, when the ensemble gathers at the end over Romeo and Juliet's bodies--in a reprise of the opening diorama--it was the Nurse, in her distinctive checked skirts, whose image I first sought out.

Notwithstanding the caveats outlined above, I look forward to encountering the Nurse and all of her fellow Veronese when this ambitious production is next revived in repertoire.

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Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E

Because Richard and I were attending the world premiere of Marie Clements' and Brian Current's new opera, Missing, last night, we had to trade our usual Friday night Ballet BC tickets for replacement seats on Saturday. It was the final performance of the season-opening Program 1 for the company, and for it Artistic Director Emily Molnar featured the return of two familiar Ballet BC choreographers: resident choreographer Cayetano Soto; and Johan Inger, whose Walking Mad (the piece with the big wall), was a crowd-pleaser back in 2012. In style and tone the works could not have been more different. Nor my reaction to them.

Soto's Eight Years of Silence was first on the program. A dark and moody piece set to a mournfully elegiac musical composition by Peter Gregson, it opens with Brandon Alley (I think) standing alone and centre stage. He (and the rest of the company, as we shall soon discover) wears a shiny, leather-like leotard that hugs his body, almost like an exoskeleton one would see on a lizard or a turtle. From this position of stillness he moves suddenly into a sharp and contained solo, kicking out one leg and then raising it into the air while windmilling his arms around his head and about his torso. Midway through this another male dancer appears upstage and falls effortlessly into unison with the movements being performed by Alley, who eventually cuts short his dancing and walks off stage. This pattern of a new dancer falling into step with and then almost erasing away the movement of a previous one continues with the entrance of the first female dancer, and for a time I was quite taken with the conceit.

But, as with everything in this ponderous and bloated work, it goes on far too long. Soto has structured the piece episodically as variations on a theme, which means there is a lot of starting and stopping, with dancers--at first individually and then in duos and trios--spending a lot of time walking on and off stage in a kind of slouchy zombie mode before they hit their marks and launch into a new movement pattern (for all of their extraordinary talents as virtuosic movers, Ballet BC dancers are among the worst walkers I have ever seen). Occasionally Soto mixes things up by throwing in a blackout and surprising us with the apparition of an unexpected group formation, and as the piece progressed the partnering became more complicated and visually interesting. However, dramaturgically there is frankly no accounting for the decision to bring down the curtain half way through the piece; first of all, if you are going to do so while two of your dancers are still moving in unison, and thus focalizing our attention on their lower limbs and feet, then you had better ensure that they are in sync (last night they were not). Then there is the fact that, per force, most in the audience will assume that the piece is over. Unfortunately, it was not. Nor was there a radical shift in scenographic design or kinetic composition when it came up again: just the same wash of chiaroscuro lighting and the same washed out movement. Consequently, I was even more bored during the second half than the first.

By contrast, I was fully engaged from the get go by Inger's B.R.I.S.A. First created for Nederlands Dans Theater's Company 2, the piece has two things going for it from the very outset: a musical score set to the songs of the great Nina Simone; and an arresting design feature in the form of a shaggy brown carpet that covers the stage. Indeed, these two design elements combined to suggest to me a cross between Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs and Pina Bausch's famous Rite of Spring, with its dirt-strewn stage floor. The latter reference may not be so far off; for, whereas Bausch's work culminates in a sacrificial death, Inger's B.R.I.S.A. opens with a symbolic image of rebirth. As the curtain rises and the lights come up, we see two or three dancers shuffling their feet back and forth along the carpet, motoring from side to side like blown up ants in the sand revealed through the lens of a telescope. But we also notice that there is a large bump in the carpet in the middle of its upstage lip, and sure enough one of the dancers soon drags the body of another out from underneath it. This act of rescue seems to send a new current of libidinal energy throughout the ensemble, and one of the pleasures of the piece is to watch the dancers successively release their hips and sway their pelvises to the contagious rhythms of Simone's songs, often falling into simple but infectiously joyous bits of group unison.

However, just as the heat on and off stage starts to ignite, Inger decides to cool things down, with one of the female dancers moving downstage right to catch the cooling breezes of an offstage fan. Curious, the other dancers soon join her. But then the fan suddenly cuts out, which leads to some conceptual hilarity as the various members of the ensemble compete for the use of a red hand fan that Peter Smida somehow magically produces from about his person. From there, things ramp up as first rival hair driers and then leaf blowers are retrieved from offstage. All of this might have devolved into mere shtick had the accompanying movement not also been so effective, the various wind producing devices, when directed at different nether regions of the body especially, helping to initiate some surprising currents of movement--as when, for example, Smida and Christoph von Riedemann, lying on their backs on the carpet, lift their pelvises and begin a lively routine of Cossack-style air kicks. Eventually the carpet gets rolled up, and with it one of the female dancers.

But this is not her, nor our, ending. There is a final danced coda that, fittingly, concludes by shooting the breezes on stage out into the audience. And on the warmth of this particular zephyr Richard and I exited contentedly into the cool night.

P.

Ballet BC's Program 3 at the Queen E

Ballet BC concluded its 2016/17 season with a mixed program of three works that I was hoping would challenge and engage me more than they did. For reasons of time and general polemicizing I will concentrate mostly on the first piece in this response.

The evening opened with the world premiere of Israeli-born and Paris-based Emmanuel Gat's LOCK. Like compatriot Ohad Naharin (also on the program), Gat started dancing relatively late (at age 23), but seems to have been similarly (and preternaturally) gifted, soon founding his own company in Tel Aviv before decamping for France and accruing a steady wave of major international commissions. Also like many contemporary Israeli choreographers (including Sharon Eyal and her partner Gai Behar, whose Bill, we learned, will be receiving a Ballet BC remount next season), Gat exercises full creative control over the composition and design of his work, in this case providing the music and lighting for LOCK in addition to the choreography. That said, the piece's first section begins in silence. On a square of white Marley Andrew Bartee, distinguished from the rest of the grey shorts and t-shirts clad company by his green pants and black top, accompanies Kristen Wicklund (I think) in an extended floor sequence. The two dancers crab-crawl backwards and forwards, extend their legs horizontally over each other's supine torsos, and variously step into, over and on each other's limbs as the rest of the performers watch from either side of the stage. Eventually, as the music is haltingly introduced--a screech of horns here, a droning guitar lick there, some intermittent bass--so too do the other dancers make their way onto the Marley, each seeming to improvise a personal repertoire of moves: from the tiny beating of a breast to a whole body sway and shimmy to the floor. It is clear, especially in moments when the dancers come to stillness, pause to look at each other, and then launch into another sequence of gestures and movement phrases, that there is a score that's being followed. However, I confess that it often felt like I was watching a rehearsal warm-up or an improv class, and I longed for a clearer conceptual and kinetic through-line to connect what I was seeing. That came, briefly, after a faux blackout when the dancers formed into two groups and began a counterpoint of unison movement, one group rounder and lope-ier in the swaying of their torsos and weighting of their lower bodies, the other's leg extensions more precise and angular. But this didn't last for long and soon it was back to trying to make sense of the central muddle into which Gat very literally thrusts his dancers. In this respect I hazard to say that my frustrations with LOCK are one of the potential pitfalls of a company like Ballet BC chasing after star international choreographers for new commissions to add to their repertoire. With only a limited time to create the work, and perhaps over-extended in terms of ideas for a new work, the default starting point becomes the dancers and their process--as Gat himself acknowledges in his program note. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, especially if the company is as talented as Ballet BC; however, I question the wisdom of making process the product in the context of a full company piece for a ballet company (even one as adventurously contemporary as this one) without a rigorous embedding within the work of the reasons for this. Otherwise it feels, as has been the case with other recent Ballet BC commissions from jet-setting international choreographers, that I am watching a bunch of talented dancers show me some interesting moves rather than a dance that is interesting because of how those moves cohere in a meaningful way. Here I come back to the figure of Bartee, around whom the other dancers are apparently pivoting, but who never gets his expected solo--except, arguably, in a brief flourish and then hasty retreat at the end.

The second piece on the program was Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar's newest work, Keep Driving, I'm Dreaming. A commission from the National Arts Centre (where it premiered last month) as part of their ENCOUNT3RS project, which paired three Canadian choreographers with three Canadian composers to create new works set to original music, Molnar's piece features a big, bold and lushly jazzy score by Nicole Lizée. It also has a fantastic, Hollywood-style lighting design by Jock Munro, with six follow spots combining and dividing over the course of the work in a way that suggested the glamorously over-the-top illumination of a 1940s studio soundstage. Into these spots run and slide a succession of eight dancers, the momentary catching of themselves in the floodlights prompting a vision of who or where else they might be through brief bursts of movement. In this, there is a way in which the choreography, together with the music, the lighting design, and the costumes by Kate Burrows, suggests a romantic dreamworld that incorporates both a fantasy future and a nostalgic past, much in the vein of the recent La La Land. I will admit, however, that this trope, along with all the running more generally, started to wear on me. I much preferred when Molnar slowed things down a bit and made the movement more contained and precise, as with a pair of mirrored duets in which, for example, the time lag of non-unison unison succinctly telegraphed the idea of watching your life unfold before you like a movie. Also successful was the closing image of the piece, in which the dancers, staggered horizontally, take turns running toward the lip of the stage and leap into the air--and, it almost seems, out over the first rows of the audience--before retreating back upstage and starting over again. As a representation of the work's dialectical backwards-forwards temporality and the desire to break through the artificial frame separating spectator and performer this closing tableau played out beautifully.

The evening concluded with the company's presentation of Minus 16, a kind of greatest hits of excerpts from some of Batsheva choreographer Naharin's most celebrated works. These include the driving and explosive chair canon set to the traditional Israeli folksong Echad Mi Yodea; the gorgeous duet from Mabul (1992), set to Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus and featuring the male dancer entering bent at the waist, his arms extended in supplication or prayer, gently nudging the female dancer across the stage, until she grabs his hands and places his arms about her waist; and the audience participation favourite in which the dancers invite spectators up onto to the stage to dance with them. It was a lot of fun and I can see why dance companies the world over are anxious to have something by Mr. Gaga in their repertoires. But the fact that I'd seen versions of most of these works in 2009 as part of DanceHouse's presentation of Batsheva in another Naharin touring compilation, Deca Dance, meant that I largely knew what was coming. No complaints on that front, but in terms of the rousing, crowd-pleasing finish that this work--and the evening as a whole--builds to, it does seem like Ballet BC, in this instance, is a little late to the party.

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Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E

In the pre-show chat that preceded last night's performance of Ballet BC's season-opening Program 1, choreographer-in-residence Cayetano Soto talked in glowing terms about his admiration for the company, its dancers, Emily Molnar as artistic director, and about how, following the premiere of his acclaimed Twenty Eight Thousand Waves in 2014, he didn't have to think twice about Molnar's invitation to accept his current appointment. Soto, who not only choreographs but also designs the lighting and costumes for his pieces, is unusually adept at creating provocative and sensorially arresting atmospheres in and through his dances. That talent was on abundant display last night, as in an evening devoted to four of his works the mood shifted gradually from darker to lighter.

Beginning After, the first piece on the program and a world premiere, begins with a projected title about the fine line between truth and the illusion of memory. The dancers emerge singly and in pairs from the upstage darkness in shiny black singlets that resemble exoskeletons. There is rarely ever more than two dancers on stage, but such is the shutter-like effect that Soto creates with his lighting (which in addition to the general dim half-light throughout includes brief blackouts and later strobe-like flashes) and the slow fade ins and fade outs that accompany the dancers' entrances and exits that the whole piece has the look and feel of time-lapse photography or stop-motion cinema. Certainly we are meant to question what we are seeing, which extends to the extraordinary partnering that Soto builds to at the conclusion of the piece. I had thought that the lifts in Twenty Eight Thousand Waves were the most complicated I had ever seen, but here Soto takes things to a whole other level, and it is impossible not to marvel at how the dancers--who often put me in mind of baroque versions of pairs figure skaters (the music is by Handel)--combine the speed, fluidity and angularity required to accomplish the partnering for this piece. As my colleague Judith Garay put it at intermission, it's the tangled lines Soto creates in this work that are so captivating.

There followed two short pieces created by Soto in 2007 and 2013 respectively, but here receiving their Canadian premieres. The first, Fugaz, is a meditation on the death of Soto's father, but it unfolds in such a way that it is impossible not to meditate on the gender politics embedded--whether consciously or not--in the piece. Emily Chessa, Racheal Prince, Nicole Ward and Livona Ellis form a feminine quartet whose spatial interactions are interrupted by successive appearances of masculine ghost-like presences, these figures in black emerging from stairs at the lip of the stage and then disappearing into the darkness upstage. However, on one such pass towards the end of the piece, first Christoph von Riedemann and then Peter Smida partners with Chessa and Ellis respectively, the latter pairing turning into a violent scene that almost resembles a rape, and that left me a little confused as to how to read the piece. The gender dynamics that necessarily accrue to traditional dance partnering are less obviously on display in Sortijas, an affecting duet for Scott Fowler and Alexis Fletcher performed to the music of Lhasa de Sela. This is partly because of the nude jersey that Fletcher wears on her torso, that next to Fowler's bare chest and when combined with their matching black pants, has the effect of making her appear androgynous. To be sure, it is the powerful and technically superb Fowler who is still doing the lifting throughout but elsewhere in the piece one has the sense that the two dancers are equal halves of the same striving soul. This is nowhere more apparent than at the end of the piece when, after the music cuts out, the movement continues for a moment longer, the dancers' breathing synchronizing into its own lush and immersive soundscape as the curtain drops (a similar conceit ends Beginning After).

The evening concluded with the second world premiere of the program. Schachmatt, which is German for check-mate, and which Soto has developed and expanded from an earlier piece called Conrazoncorazon. Tapping into the ribald energy of Weimar-era cabaret (think Marlene Dietrich's Blue Angel crossed with Fosse's Kit Kat girls, referenced not least in the short shorts worn by both the male and female dancers), this exuberant ensemble piece showcases lots of quick shuffle toe and ball change unison footwork, swivelling hips, and even jazz hands. But it's by no means a parody and the virtuosity of the dancers is utterly compelling. It was a great way to finish the evening and to punctuate the start of the company's new season.

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AUDC's Season Finale at The Playhouse

All through Thursday evening's premiere program of Arts Umbrella Dance Company's Season Finale at the Vancouver Playhouse AUDC Artistic Director Artemis Gordon sat in the back row of the orchestra section in tight conclave with Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar. This of course makes sense given the close ties between the two organizations, with AUDC's pre-professional program now officially serving as the training/feeder school for Ballet BC's apprentice program. Still, what was most interesting to me last night was to see how Molnar's programming choices and her determination to position Ballet BC aesthetically as a contemporary ballet company have clearly had a reciprocal influence on Gordon's repertory choices for this year's AUDC spring graduation program.

How else to explain Ballet BC Resident Choreographer Cayetano Soto leading off the evening with his PAU CLARIS, which puts the male and female members of AUDC's Senior Company in matching black jockey shorts and has them wag their fingers and thrust their hips cheekily to the strains of a Bach concerto? Or, following the second intermission (and continuing the Bach theme), the excerpts from Simone Orlando's Doppeling, first performed by Ballet BC in 2009, and which also features a pan-company costuming conceit in the dancers' matching bobbed wigs? Orlando's deconstructive approach to the gendered dimensions of classical ballet is echoed in the excerpts from Marie Chouinard's bODY_rEMIX/the gOLDBERG vARIATIONS that were performed following the first intermission. Gordon didn't send the women dancers out on stage topless, as Chouinard did in her original staging of the piece; nevertheless, judging by some of the reactions around me it was clear that the iconoclastic Montreal choreographer's approach to point shoes in this piece came as a bit of a shock to some of the ballet moms and dads in the audience. Indeed, in so far as classical steps were part of this mixed bill, they mostly came in the two pieces performed by the apprentice company: Andrew Bartee's Ballet Dance #6 and Monique Proença's Alone in the bright lights of a shattered life.

It wasn't an all Bach evening last night. Aszure Barton's BUSK is set to a pounding Israeli folk-rock score and featured relentlessly physical hip-hop inspired choreography, as well as an amazing concluding solo for stand-out dancer Zander Constant, whose incredibly fluid torso and longing arm reach combined to breathtaking effect at several points. The fact that Barton's piece reminded me a bit of the work of Hofesh Schecter and Ohad Naharin is notable given that another Israeli choreographer, Sharon Eyal, is included in the Friday and Saturday programming. That incredible get no doubt had much to do with Molnar's inclusion of Eyal's Bill on Ballet BC's season-ending Program 3 earlier this month.

I also very much enjoyed the senior dancers in James Kudelka's salsa-drenched (and self-reflexively titled) choreography, David Raymond's gothic Murmuration, and excerpts from Crystal Pite's Emergence, which notably focused on that piece's solo studies and duets rather than its large group unison sections--and, in so doing, allowed one to see Pite's remarkable attention to detail in, for example, a dancer's arachnid-like spread of her arms behind her bent back. Likely the choice of excerpts from Emergence had something to do with Pite's concluding contribution to Season Finale, The Paris Sessions, which together with Lesley Telford's Only who is left, was the highlight of the evening for me.

Continuing the method she employed with her award-winning Polaris, which she workshopped with Arts Umbrella, Modus Operandi and SFU student dancers before taking the piece to Sadler's Wells, Pite has been working with AUDC's Senior Company on studies for a commission from the Paris Opera Ballet. And judging from what we saw last night, this new work will also continue Polaris' experiments with scale, using upwards of forty dancers to redefine what group dancing looks like on stage. In Pite's hands, individual bodies don't blur into invisibility through homogenous unison; instead, they become part of a collective bodily unit, each contributing through precise spatial massings and intricately timed sequential micro-movements and ripples, tableaux and shapes that are visually arresting. Last night I saw a tidal wave, a whale spine, and so much more. And all, again like Polaris, undertaken with incredible sensitivity to the music--in this case a version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons (by Max Richter) unlike any I've heard.

Telford also knows how to mass dancers' bodies on stage. But if Pite's work here is about harmonious flow, Telford leans (quite literally) toward the off-axis. In Only who is left, she sends her dancers out in matching shimmery shifts and has them strut and preen and pose in a horizontal line like so many Atlases come to life from a Greek frieze. Later she'll clump the dancers together and have them jerk and stutter step their heels noisily into the floor as they move as a unit across the stage, the thoroughly ungraceful and off-beat movements providing a compelling counter-image to how dancers are expected to move and sound. The corralling or herding of bodies in Telford's work is compounded even further by the fact that at one point Constant appears with a bull horn; he mostly just whistles into it whimsically. But the device's appearance, especially when read alongside the epigraph Telford includes in the program, reminds one that as is so often the case these days when bodies gather together in public--and often in protest--there is almost always someone who wants to disperse them.

For now, however, lets just celebrate the fact that Telford and Pite have both decided to make Vancouver their dance homes, and that these two talented home-grown choreographers are sharing their gifts with the city's next generation of dancers.

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Ballet BC's Program 3 at the Queen E

Ballet BC's 30th anniversary season comes to a close this weekend with its third and final repertory offering of 2015/16--aptly titled Program 3 (the utilitarian and self-evident evening descriptors are apparently an innovation that will carry over to next year). Paired together once again were Finnish choreographer Jorma Elo's I am I am You and Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar's 16+ a room, both of which audiences were first introduced to back in October 2013.

I previously wrote about both pieces here, so I won't go into too much added detail this time around, except to say that the works complement each other not just because they share a lighting designer (Jordan Tuinman) and a similar muted costume palette (by Kate Burrows). Each choreographer's choice of music also sets up an instructive contrast. Elo builds his piece around music by Bach, whereas Molnar opts for a contemporary electronic score by Dirk P. Haubrich. This, in turn, contributes to how the dancers are massed on stage in each work. Elo uses fluid transitions and elegant partnering to create vertical lines and tableaux. Molnar shoots her dancers like darts across the stage, purposefully missing each other and eschewing unison in favour of their different singular rhythms. Indeed, where Elo's piece ends with the dancers forming a perfect circle and extending their arms and torsos outward into space, Molnar has the curtain come down on a riot of individual and non-synchronous movement patterns, the visual chaos nevertheless deeply satisfying on a kinetic level.

The highlight last night was the company (and Canadian) premiere of red-hot Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal's Bill. As she did in Corps de Walk, for the Norwegian group Carte Blanche (which DanceHouse brought to town in 2013), Eyal--working with her partner Gai Behar--sends the dancers out on stage in flesh-coloured full-body lyotards, their hair painted white-blond, and presumably with their individual irises also camouflaged behind similar ice-blue contact lenses (though from where I was sitting I couldn't confirm this last detail). The piece begins with four solo etudes, the first three by male company members, and the fourth and final one by a female dancer. In each, Eyal combines an assortment of recognizably balletic moves (including a series of battements and jetés) with the Batsheva alumna's quixotic, Gaga-esque and thoroughly compelling vocabulary: strange flexions; hips thrusts and swivels that both invite and dissuade a sensual response; double-time foot shuffles and animatronic ambulation.

These are Ballet BC's dancers unlike we have seen them before, other-worldly creatures who, when the full company finally comes together, yelp and cry out strange commands to each other, dispersing outward in long lunges in one moment and then hopping back into a clump like little pixies in the next. Eventually Gilbert Small emerges from the group, arms raised in the air, body swaying this way and that as he makes his way downstage. Behind him a quartet of female dancers follows, raising and lowering their arms and heads, perhaps in obeisance. Meanwhile the rest of the company keeps up their patterns of robotic walking upstage. The combined effect, supplemented by the hypnotic music of frequent collaborator Ori Lichtik, was utterly entrancing, even if the casting of Small in the lead (is he supposed to be Bill?) did make me question the performative neutrality of the costuming in this piece more than in Corps de Walk.

What is certain, however, is that Bill is an amazing addition to the company's repertoire and a piece that will further distinguish the dancers' technical versatility as they take it, along with Molnar's 16 + a room and Crystal Pite's Solo Echo, out on tour later this month.

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Ballet BC's RITE at the Queen E

Were it possible to transport yourself back in time to the premiere performance of a once scandalous and now iconic work of art, what would you choose to see? Perhaps it would be Ibsen's A Doll's House, waiting for the outraged reaction of the proper Copenhagen audience to the reverberatory thunderclap of Nora's slammed door? Or maybe you would have preferred to be on hand for any of the versions of Salome--by Wilde, or Strauss, or Maude Allan--soaking in the catcalls and faints during the "Dance of the Seven Veils"? If pressed to choose, however, a great many of us would likely pick the May 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring. Staged in Paris by the scandal-courting Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev, and with choreography by the sexually mercurial Vaslav Nijinsky, the work is most famous for introducing the world to the legendarily dissonant score by Igor Stravinsky, music that has since entered the modernist canon, but that at the time apparently sent audience members screaming into the streets covering their ears.

There have been countless danced "Rites" since then, with an updating of the sexual and gender politics of the original (in which a sacrificial female dances herself to death) almost becoming its own rite of passage for a choreographer and/or ballet company. One thinks especially in this regard of Pina Bausch's game-chaging take on the piece, in which she bridged Stravinsky's music and libretto with the influence of Mary Wigman's expressionistic choreography and thereafter altered the course of Tanztheater Wuppertal's compositional and thematic focus (for better or worse, depending on how one views Bausch's subsequent explorations of gendered violence and the trope of the female victim).

Now it is the turn of Ballet BC, with this weekend's final instalment in the company's 2014-15 season showcasing not one but two new interpretations of this classic work. The first, RITE, comes from Artistic Director Emily Molnar who, working with scenic designer Omer Arbel (the furniture and lighting designer of Bocci fame) and experimental composer Jeremy Schmidt, picks up from where the 1913 work left off, giving us a post-sacrificial gloss on the original movement and design. Or at least what we know of both. While Nijinsky's choreography was reconstructed in 1987 for the Joffrey Ballet based on the scraps of notation that remained, press reviews of the eight premiere performances, and some eyewitness testimony, no one can be sure if it is historically accurate. Nicholas Roerich's original sets were also destroyed (on the orders of Diaghilev), although there are interviews with him discussing his vision for the piece. And, judging from her program note, Molnar has certainly done her research, reading up not just on The Rite of Spring, but also on various major and minor artistic currents swirling about it. Her movement deliberately references Nijinsky's. The dancers' hands and arms are frequently splayed at their sides, and their knees bent inward: from this position they jump vertically in the air, or else fall to and then rise in waves from the ground. Clad in their shimmery black body suits (the costumes are by Kate Burrows) and set against Abel's white, rune-like set, the dancers reminded me of walking hieroglyphs, with their largely improvised and often highly gestural movement vocabulary, when paired with the strobe lighting effects programmed by James Proudfoot, spelling out a language of the body that is simultaneously unique to them and rhythmically entraining of the group. (That the dancers, especially Connor Gnam as the headdress-wearing  lead "Shadow," wouldn't look out of place on a club floor during fetish night surely contributes to this--the man seated next to me leaned over near the start of the piece and asked if I was reminded of Madonna's "Erotica.") Schmidt's atmospheric industrial score is a key and maximally entrancing element in all of this, its droning synth sounds just as sensorily jarring in their way as Stravinsky's percussiveness. There is much I still need to reflect upon with this piece, which is why I hope it becomes a mainstay of Ballet BC's repertoire; but one of the things I responded to most enthusiastically last night was Molnar's use of stillness, letting her dancers--and us--absorb the changes in dynamic range and pitch and tempo in Schmidt's music, before releasing what has been incorporated by the body in successive explosions of kinetic energy.

Paired with Molnar's RITE is Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's Consagracion, which he choreographs to the original Stravinsky score, adding a new set design by Luis Crespo (a series of brown woven and inverted conical structures that descend from and rise up to the rafters, evoking a magical forest). The dancers, forming a horizontal tableau downstage at the start of the piece are all clad in similar androgynous white shifts--the kind that children of both sexes from Victorian-era photographs might have been posed in. And, indeed, Ramirez Sansano takes as his inspiration for the piece that fraught ritual of puberty when we transition from at once innocently sexless and polymorphously perverse erotic beings into sexually aware young adults whose desires and behaviour must apparently conform to prescribed gender binaries. Except that Ramirez Sansano, thematically and choreographically, sets out to trouble and resist this expectation--in dance and life. As the dancers form different duos and trios, helping each other to remove the top part of their shifts while exploring some deeply sensual partnering, it is a male-male couple that emerges as the pulsating sexual life force of the piece. They sniff and nuzzle at each other's necks, wrap their torsos around one another, roll above and underneath each other across the floor and--here was an unexpectedly delightful kinetic sight--kiss for an extended period of time.

Just when I thought the Rite couldn't produce any more surprises, there is this: a glorious springtime celebration of the right to sexual freedom.

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Ballet BC at the Queen E

Ballet BC's Trace program is on at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre this weekend. The coup of the evening is artistic director Emily Molnar landing William Forsythe's "workwithinwork" for the company. One other Forsythe piece, the witty "Herman Schmerman," is already part of the Ballet BC repertoire, but "workwithinwork" is Forsythe at his most rigorously deconstructive and technically complex. First premiering in 1998, and here receiving its Canadian debut, the piece is set to a violin duet by Luciano Berio and clocks in at a demanding 35 minutes or more. Part of what makes watching Forsythe--and this work, in particular--at once so challenging and rewarding is that he gives his audiences neither a narrative nor a movement through-line; instead, he creates a series of synchronous tableaux in which he shows us with precise accumulation the extraordinary physicality and athletic training that goes into the execution of a signature pose or a seemingly effortless bit of partnering. Forsythe is less interested in completion and dancers in this piece will frequently break off (or out of) a movement pattern before it is "finished" to walk nonchalantly offstage. In this way, Forsythe takes apart ballet's set structures and exposes the work that goes into making the work.

If "workwithinwork" is dance stripped down to its bare essentials--bodies moving in space--then the second piece on the program, the world premiere of Walter Matteini's Lascia ch'io pianga, shows what can happen when a concept becomes overdressed in theatrical embellishment. From the weighty choice of music (from Verdi and Vivaldi to Bach and Handel), to the evocative lighting by James Proudfoot, and the mixed register costume design by Ina Broeckx (the men in tux tails, the women divided between masculine slacks and shapeless shifts), everything about the piece screams "pay attention, this is meaningful." Except that I found the choreography anything but, and apart from a final mournful procession of company members to an upstage recess, all that I have retained is Emily Chessa's opening and closing gesture of wiping off her arms and the gimmick of suspending two of the women dancers on swings.

The evening closed with the audience favourite Petite Cérémonie, by Medhi Walerski. First set on the company in 2011, the piece is based on Walerski's interviews with company members about the concept of "life in a box," and appropriately features a series of white cubes--which get a vigorous workout, especially during a riotous closing sequence set to the allegro movement of Vivaldi's "Winter" section of The Four Seasons. Despite the undeniably pleasurable and infectious energy derived from the ending, and also the humour of an earlier bit in which Peter Smida (taking over from much lamented former company member Dario Dinuzzi) addresses the audience about the differences between men's and women's brains while juggling, for my money nothing can beat the simple elegance of the opening. With the wings and back walls of the stage exposed, the dancers, beginning with Gilbert Small, enter noiselessly one by one (including from the audience), joining each other in a simple metronomic two-step in which they shift their weight from foot to foot. Here is corps de ballet as chorus line that despite the lack of Broadway-style razzmatazz still conveys a palpably singular sensation of what it feels like to watch a group of individuals move as one.

Speaking of Walerski, Ballet BC has announced its line-up for its 2015-16 season, which will also be its 30th anniversary. It features a new evening-length work by Walerski, who will be joining the company for a three-year stint as choreographer-in-residence. Also on tap are Canadian premieres by Crystal Pite and Sharon Eyal, new work by Cayetano Soto and Jorma Elo, and the return of Molnar's own 16 + a room.

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Ballet BC's No. 29

As Artistic Director Emily Molnar explained in her curtain speech, the title of Ballet BC's 2014-15 season opener, No. 29, is doubly significant. Not only is this the twenty-ninth year of the company's existence, but the pieces being premiered on the evening's program bring to a total of 29 the number of new works added to the company's repertoire since Molnar took over in 2009.

It is the latter number that it is most significant and it is a testament to how fresh and forward-looking Molnar has kept things since she took over that the one repeat presentation last night, Jacopo Godani's opening A.U.R.A., felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Or maybe it was the fact that fully half of Ballet BC's dancers this season are new. While I am sad to see some favourites go (Thibault and Alex, I'll miss you!), clearly Molnar has a rich pool of talent to draw from, much of it local (thank you Arts Umbrella). The fifteen dancers handled Godani's off-centre choreography and lightning quick transitions with deft aplomb, forming and deforming a series of increasingly complex grid patterns that, as I wrote upon the work's premiere two years ago, evoke comparisons to video animation.

Fernando Hernando Magadan's White Act is a world premiere that harkens back to the classic era of Romantic ballet, and in particular La Sylphide. In the first part, the men hurtle across the stage en masse while the women float past them on point, individual columns of chimerical beauty that can be reached for but never fully grasped. That this was performed to Schubert's decidedly post-Romantic Death and the Maiden made for an odd juxtaposition. Much more successful, to my mind, was the duet anchoring the second half, which was preceded by a neat video trick by collaborating artist Harmen Straatman.

The evening concluded with Vancouver-born, and until recently Madrid-based Lesley Telford's An Instant. Set to the driving, swirling strings of Michael Gordon's Weather One, and with Wislawa Szyborska's poem "Could Have" spoken in voice-over, the piece is an exhilarating, intensely physical exploration of chance as it intersects with time. What does it mean to arrive too early, or too late? To spin off axis, or lean just a bit too far to the side and risk falling? To throw oneself backwards and trust someone is there to catch you? Telford explores these questions in partnerings built on a logic of abandon and generative risk, on the split-secondness of moving one way instead of another--and the equally accidental anticipating of and/or catching up to such a move. Just when we think Emily Chessa, in leaping to the left or right, is going to plunge to the floor, Christoph von Riedemann is there to forestall gravity, and it is one of the highlights of the piece to see these two graduates of Arts Umbrella (where Telford first built an earlier version of the work two years ago) move together in such "uncontrolled" sync. Then, too, I enjoyed how Telford probed ideas of unpredictability and kinetic impulse at the muscular level, with Rachel Meyer, in particular, playing with a complex repertoire of gestural patterns throughout.

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Dance Centre Season Launch

Yesterday evening The Dance Centre launched its 2014-15 season with a cocktail party and showing of DC artist-in-residence Shay Kuebler's work-in-progress, Glory. I counted it as a good sign that on the way to the event we ran in to both Lesley Telford and Emily Molnar, the former in town to create a new piece for the latter's company members at Ballet BC--which will have its premiere in November.

The showing of Glory began with a POV film clip of a drunken man stumbling along a dimly lit road late at night. He falls to the ground and when he looks up he (and we) see a hooded figure staring at him off in the distance. But when he looks again the figure is gone. So begins a cat and mouse game that ends with our protagonist taking shelter in an abandoned building, using a flashlight to navigate its warren of rooms and every now and then catching his pursuer staring at him through a window. It is at this moment that we notice another beam of light being directed across the stage, this one attached to a live body, presumably the reverse avatar of our onscreen hero. As he flails about in the dark, we soon detect that he is being shadowed by four or five others, who emerge silently and stealthily from the wings to encircle the terrified torch bearer, menacing him with an assault of kinetic energy he can sense but not see.

The sequence, which is accompanied by creepy Psycho-esque music, is a suitably vertiginous and sensorily disorienting opening to a work that, as Kuebler subsequently told us, explores the glorification of violence in various forms of media such as films, television, and video games. Kuebler, who grew up practicing martial arts and watching kung fu and action movies, is interested in investigating through movement those moments when violence is spotlighted and amplified on screen: whether it be the slow motion impact of a bullet to a body; a prolonged death scene; a four-on-one fight that just won't quit; or the self that is subject to violent manipulation by external forces. The paradox is that these scenes, as enacted by Kuebler and his amazingly talented dancers (many of them cohorts from the 605 Collective), at once break down as "stunts" the various components we take to be "real" in action films and re-aestheticize them through the dancers' hypnotic virtuosity.

Which is also to say that embedded in Kuebler's title there is both critique and homage. I look forward to witnessing the final working through of this dialectic when the piece premieres at the Chutzpah! Festival next February.

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Ballet BC's Grace Symmetry

The current mixed program by Ballet BC, on through this evening at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, is the second collaboration between the company and the Turning Point Ensemble, following their "double anniversary" celebrations in April 2011.

Back from that original program is Wen Wei Wang's In Motion, his danced meditation on Turning Point conductor and Co-Artistic Director Owen Underhill's original composition, "The Geometry of Harmony." The conceit of the piece is that the musicians are on stage with the dancers, performing upstage, behind a scrim. The scrim is raised twice to allow for more focused explorations of the relationships between sound and movement. The first time flautist Brenda Fedoruk steps forward to accompany Emily Chessa in a graceful solo. The second time violinist Mary Sokol Brown is in the spotlight, guiding Gilbert Small and Peter Smida in an affecting duet that is notable for its horizontal floor work and almost contact-improv-like structures of support. The piece has definitely grown on me since its premiere, and it's a treat to see musicians and dancers responding to each other so immediately and intimately.

Next up was Prelude, a world premiere by Medhi Walerski, whose Petite Cérémonie has become a staple of Ballet BC's repertoire. This new work is set to music by Lera Auerbach, whose austere and conceptually elegant preludes for piano and violin lead to a meditation in movement on time as measure: of dance steps, as well as the imagination more generally. It begins with Darren Devaney poised on a rung of stairs below the stage at audience left; he holds one hand aloft. As a few lonely piano bars are played offstage (by the amazing Jane Hayes), the curtain rises on the rest of the Ballet BC ensemble, who are already moving. And they continue to do so even after the piano accompaniment fades out, with Walerski beautifully exploiting the spatial dimensions of silence in the same way that Auerbach had played with resonance between each of her notes. However, at a certain point Peter Kyrsa's violin comes crashing in, and this is the cue for the otherwise disparately moving dancers to form into a unified corps around Devaney and Rachel Meyer. A series of flowing yet intensely athletic duets for these two dancers (featuring lots of complex and body-hugging lifts) are accompanied by the more gestural language given to the rest of the dancers, who often frame the couple on either wing or, as at the end, along the upstage curtain, repeating a series of synchronized arm movements. The piece closes with that upstage line of bodies collapsing like an accordion to the floor as Devaney, now alone centre-stage, begins a convulsive, twitching solo, the curtain slowly descending as we see Meyer emerge as if from thin air to observe her abandoned partner from his former place on the downstage stairs.

The evening concluded with a co-commission by Ballet BC and Turning Point. In Here on End, Kevin O'Day has choreographed a full company work to new music by longtime collaborator John King. The score issues forth from the orchestra pit (where the TPE musicians are now ensconced) in blasts of strings and brass and percussion. Similarly, the dancers race on and off the stage to perform increasingly physical movement patterns in various bodily combinations: duos and trios and quartets. Both musically and in terms of the at-times Jerome Robbins-like choreography, I was put in mind of the Sharks and Jets sequences from West Side Story. In this respect, the piece is also notable for the intensely atmospheric lighting by James Proudfoot (the lighting designer for all three pieces). Overhead specials keep lowering closer and closer to the stage as the piece wears on, enclosing the dancers into ever tighter massings, until at the end of the piece we see the entire ensemble encircling, somewhat menacingly, an unsuspecting Small--who nevertheless dances on until we get a perfectly timed blackout.

Three more world premieres conclude the 2013/14 Ballet BC season in April. And already the line-up for next year has been announced. It features lots more new and boundary-pushing contemporary work, but also some classics: a re-imagined and collaboratively interdisciplinary Rite of Spring, with choreography by Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar and Gustavo Ramirez Sansano; and an evening of Balanchine works courtesy of the Miami City Ballet.

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Ballet BC's Tilt

Last night Ballet BC's season opening program, Tilt, debuted at the Queen Elizabeth. I regret that an imminent dash to the airport means I cannot do the three works that make it up full justice. But suffice to say that in conception and execution the program definitely shows the company has reached a higher level. As a colleague from UBC exclaimed to me during the second intermission, "these dancers are fantastic!"

The evening begins with a world premiere from Finnish choreographer, Jorma Elo, whose 1st Flash--set to Sibelius' Violin Concerto in D Minor--has become a staple of the Ballet BC repertoire. I and I am You once again displays Elo's amazing musicality, built as it is around several familiar pieces by Bach (and one Schumann fugue). It features some stunning ensemble work from the men, punctuated by beautiful duets.

Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar also debuted a new work. 16 + a room, featuring the full company and three apprentices, also has a distinctive score, only this time it is an electronic one by Dirk P. Haubrich. Drawing on an eclectic range of source "texts" for the piece, the work features some of Molnar's most inspired choreography, with the men again working very tightly as a group. Solos by favourites Livona Ellis and Rachel Meyer also stood out. I do wish, however, Molnar would find a way other than running and sliding to get her dancers on and off the stage.

Finally, the evening ended with a reprise of Johan Inger's Walking Mad, set to Ravel's Bolero and featuring a moveable wall. It was interesting to experience the reaction of audience members who weren't expecting the coda, a quiet and deeply affecting duet between Gilbert Small and Makaila Wallace that is danced to the music of Arvo Pärt. Whipped into a frenzy by Ravel's crescendoing orchestral score and Inger's fast and furious unison movement, one is jolted suddenly into another emotional register with the lone piano and the slow, mournful movement that follows. A fitting final act for Wallace, who I understand is retiring after this program.

Tilt is on through Saturday.

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Ballet BC's Giselle

This weekend's world premiere of Ballet BC's new Giselle at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is the culmination of four years of painstaking restructuring and determined reinvention for the company under the inspired leadership of Artistic Director Emily Molnar. Pushing the company's repertoire in ever more innovative, contemporary, and international directions in a succession of bold and distinctive mixed programs that showcased the depth of talent and individual personalities of its dancers, in many ways Molnar's next logical step was to revisit the classical repertoire and find a story ballet that the company could make all its own. Hence resident choreographer José Navas's commission to update Giselle for the twenty-first century. After last night's performance I can say that, conceptually, Navas has accomplished this task brilliantly. I just wish there was more dance.

Navas has commented extensively in print in the lead-up to the premiere about the paradox of him, Cunningham-trained and steeped in abstraction, tackling one of the iconic tutu ballets and dealing with pantomime. At the same time, he has admitted how the process has, among other things, given him a new admiration for the pointe shoe and the elongated silhouette of the ballerina that comes with it. Which made it all the more surprising last night that apart from the opening sequences of the piece, Giselle (Maggie Forgeron) and the corps of female dancers were in socks, despite spending much of their time in relevé. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that one of Navas's conceptual innovations was to have the men in the corps join the women to make up the Wilis in Act 2. Or maybe this was his natural deconstructive aesthetic meeting classical technique half-way, literally on demi-pointe. Elsewhere, there were conscious allusions to the preparation-execution-release sequencing of ballet's signature moves, as when, for example, Albrecht (Alexander Burton) lifts Giselle at the waist in Act 1 and her feet remain turned out, in first position, or when, in Act 2, the Wilis hoist their leader, Myrtha (Makaila Wallace), aloft while she remains in a deep plié. Indeed, all four of the principals, even Hilarion (Gilbert Small), are lifted in similarly iconic poses throughout both acts, at once isolating them as representative ballet types (the doomed romantic heroine, the glib and oblivious hero, the mysterious stranger/villain, the magical priestess) and as characters subservient to this particular plot.

And it is in terms of the love triangle at the core of Giselle that Navas makes his most interesting changes to the ballet's story, writing in his very comprehensive and intellectually compelling choreographer's note that "in our day, class or status functions less persuasively as an obstacle to love than sexuality does." To this end, rather than Giselle having to choose between the unattainable nobleman Albrecht whom she desperately loves and the peasant Hilarion whom she does not, Navas makes Albrecht and Navas gay lovers and Giselle the woman who threatens to come between them. Again, I think this absolutely works on a conceptual level, and Forgeron, Burton, and Small are all dramatically compelling in their roles. But in terms of the movement they share (at least in Act 1), I was frankly surprised at how little there was and, when it did happen, how pedestrian it seemed. As Giselle, Forgeron spends a lot of time breaking up the hand-holding of Albrecht and Hilarion and generally stumbling around on stage uncomprehendingly. Burton and Small separately and together have moments where they demonstrate their proficient jetés and entrechats. But Forgeron, sans pointe shoes, gets narry an arabesque, let alone the series of dramatic fouettés that in the original staging one might expect would accompany her frenzied dancing of herself to death. To be sure, this relates to another of Navas's changes to the plot, namely that Giselle kills herself (with a knife she finds in Albrecht's coat, and given to him at the top of the piece by Hilarion) rather than dying from a weak--and presumably broken--heart. But the fact that this action takes place while Forgeron is seated on a chair was one more frustration for me.

I get that in stillness there might yet be an abundance of movement (physical and emotional), and that the broken lines of Forgeron's steps reflect not just her character's fragile psychological state, but also a whole history of formal conventions for the female dancer that Navas is subjecting to critique. And, along those lines, it did surprise me the extent to which, last night, I craved adherence to those conventions. The reason for this, I think, is the one element to which Navas, in his program note and in publicity for the piece, claims he felt he owed absolute fidelity: Adolphe Adam's music. When, at different points in the score, there is a crescendo of strings signifying a moment of dramatic intensity, we are cued to expect a similar virtuosic display of movement. Over and over again in Navas's staging--most notably during Giselle's death at the end of Act 1--that doesn't happen. Indeed, the most satisfying moments for me in Act 1 were when the principals were off stage, with Navas providing members of the corps an opportunity to display some amazing physical pyrotechnics. Relatedly, the moment in Act 2 I found the most moving was the duet between Forgeron's Giselle and Wallace's Myrtha that was performed in silence.

Let me be clear: there is so much in this production to admire, including its overall design, which includes stunning video projections and set design by Lino, gorgeous costumes by Linda Chow, and lighting by Marc Parent. And Navas has clearly thought deeply not just about his Giselle's relationship to the original, but also to the entire history of dance since. For example, in the choice of a member of the corps to "play" Giselle at the beginning of the piece--and in her symbolic disrobing--we witness an allusion to Pina Bausch's chosen sacrificial victim in her Rite of Spring. This reference was additionally reinforced for me at the end when the simple white shift Forgeron is wearing is removed to reveal her naked torso, sinewy and muscled like one of Bausch's female dancers, but also like that of the young boy whom she would become were she able, and were it to mean she could then keep her Albrecht.

Moments like these, when the politics of gender and sexuality combined with the poetry of dance, were many last night, and always kept me engaged. I look forward to grappling with the work's layers and complexities even further as it is remounted in the coming years.

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Back in the Groove with Ballet BC

Ballet BC's 2012-13 season opened in bravura style on Thursday, introducing audiences to some bright new faces on stage, as well as behind the scenes. I had a chance to speak with recently hired Executive Director Branislav Henselmann following last night's show, and was very impressed by his already considerable knowledge of the local performing arts scene, not least the PuSh Festival.

In/verse opens with the North American premiere of Jacopo Godani's A.U.R.A (Anarchist Unit Related to Art). An independent artist who is a self-described polymath, Godani is responsible not just for the choreography, but for the costumes, lighting design, and overall dramaturgical concept of the piece. It shows, as the moveable florescent lighting tubes, together with the TRON-like body suits worn by the dancers, lend the work the feel of a three-dimensional, animated video game. Set to a pulsating electro-acoustic score by the experimental German duo 48nord, the choreography is--as the work's title suggests--at once physically anarchic and conceptually integrated. The 15 dancers (including apprentices Emily Chessa and Scott Fowler, and standout guest artist Thibaut Eiferman) whirl about the stage with controlled abandon, breaking apart in patterns that defy any logical bodily line or grid, and coming back together in tableaux that are always off-centre, cores rooted but limbs splayed.

Next up was the world premiere of American choreographer Nicolo Fonte's Muse, which opens with a lone female dancer on point in a vertical shaft of light emanating from an open doorway upstage right. Over the course of the piece's opening movements, the men in the company interact with her and other of the women who occupy this space, but only from either side of it. They themselves never jump into the light, only over it. Until, that is, the light starts to get rolled up, and we realize what we have been observing is a clever trompe l'oeil effect created by the careful placement of some white stage matting, and its even more subtle illumination by lighting designer James Proudfoot. Rearranged horizontally along the stage, the mat then occasions the central movement of the piece, a duet between Dario Dinuzzi and the excellent new company member Darren Devaney. As technically complex as it is tender, the sequence features the men traveling the length of the mat and back again, guiding each other by the ankles, willing themselves to walk together, though only one of them will walk away.

Finally, the evening concludes with Artistic Director Emily Molnar's own world premiere, Aniel, a crowd-pleasing, eye-popping feast of danced whimsy set to the klezmer-inspired music of John Zorn. Into an empty, all-white box set the full company of 17 dancers race out, wearing Linda Chow's neon-coloured costumes, a riot of oranges and pinks and yellows and blues and greens. From this literally dazzling opening, which was greeted by instant applause, to Gilbert Small's closing kiss to the audience, this is a dual valentine from Molnar, one directed not just to her patrons, but also to her dancers. And those dancers are clearly having a lot of fun, bobbing and shuffling and grooving on and off stage in ways that telegraph their own personal kinesthetic responses to the music, but also coming together as a company for some highly structured choreography, especially with respect to Molnar's rhythmically complex hand and arm movements.

From beginning to end this was a program that announced: we're back.

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MusicFest, Ballet BC, and PuSh

As reported in today's Vancouver Sun, the fickle cultural landscape in BC has claimed another victim. MusicFest, Vancouver's annual August celebration of classical, jazz, and world music, has suspended operations after announcing an accumulated deficit of $160,000 over the past two years. There will be no 2013 festival, although the Board hasn't ruled out reconstituting in the future should a solution to its financial problems be found.

That's likely little comfort to outgoing program director Matthew Baird, who took over from founding director George Laverock only last year. Despite his best efforts to streamline this past summer's line-up without sacrificing quality or talent (something I believe he accomplished admirably based on the two shows we attended), ticket sales were apparently very soft.

I hope Richard and I weren't the jinx. After a hiatus of several years, we made an effort to seek out two challenging but immensely rewarding classical concerts this year. And we were looking forward to attending again next August. Let's hope the festival's hiatus is not as long as ours was.

Meanwhile, an article in today's Globe by Marsha Lederman on the resurgent Ballet BC, newly confident under the leadership of Emily Molnar, who has pushed the company in a boldly contemporary direction, and who has attracted leading choreographic talents from around the world to create new work on her dancers. The first show in the company's 2013/14 season, In/verse, opens tonight. Richard and I will be there tomorrow evening, and in even better seats this year thanks to the wizardry of Audience Services Manager Ashley Holm.

Of course, I'm equally excited about the fact that Ballet BC is also collaborating this year with the PuSh Festival on a remount of Encore, its wildly popular mixed program from two seasons ago. Indeed, there is lots of dance (from France and Belgium and Seattle and Japan) on offer as part of this year's PuSh Festival. Program guides have been out for a couple of weeks now, and discounted four and six-show PuSh passes are available until December 6th. To get yours, or to buy individual tickets, visit pushfestival.ca.

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Blissed Out

Ballet BC Resident Choreographer José Navas' the bliss from their limbs all movement takes was the breakout hit of the company's 2010-11 season. And of course it just happened to be on the program the one fall weekend Richard and I were away. Mercifully, Artistic Director Emily Molnar convinced Navas to expand the work into a full evening of dance, with the overall title of Bliss; last night at the Queen E we finally got to see what all the fuss was about.

The fuss almost certainly has to start with Navas' amazing musicality. The three distinct sections that comprise Bliss are each set to equally distinct musical selections. In the first, Annunciations, excerpts from Mozart's piano trios structure its three sections, and like the music the dancers move through space in ever more complex patterns, all the while appearing buoyant and serene. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the transition to the third movement, when with the full company assembled on stage, their backs to the audience, the women begin to float up en pointe one by one. The final Allegretto from Mozart's Trio in B Flat (K. 502) has not yet begun, and all we hear is the tap-tap-tap of the women's pointe shoes on the stage. "Sound's perpetual roundabout," as the poem by Edwin Muir reprinted in the program states, and from which Navas takes the titles for the first and third sections of his ballet. And, indeed, by the end of this first section, with a lone female dancer whirling about on stage en pointe, we are convinced that the dimensions of space are acoustic as much as they are visual.

The piece's second section, A Thousand Ways to Meet You Tenderly, is altogether different in tone. Set to the haunting strings of Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, from his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, it begins with four male and four female dancers entering the stage in shafts of horizontal light, each holding a chair. The men move stage left, the women stage right, setting down their chairs and then sitting down opposite each other. With quiet deliberateness, they begin removing their shoes. Then one of the men (Gilbert Small) stands up and begins walking towards the woman opposite him (Alexis Fletcher). She meets him halfway, at which point he collapses his head into her stomach and she eases him down to the floor, resting his weight against her thighs, and laying a gentle hand across his back. This signature move is then repeated by each of the other couples (Makaila Wallance and Peter Smida; Alyson Fretz and Connor Gnam; and Maggie Forgeron and Dario Dinuzzi), and it encapsulates in miniature the overall thematic structure of this middle section of Navas' ballet, what for want of a better term we might call the weight of grief. For the men's downward collapsings into the bellies of the women is counterpointed by the women's successive leapings into the arms of the men, wrapping their legs so lightly, so delicately, around the men's waists, as if in apology for the burdensome need of their embrace. Or perhaps the move references the inherent fragility and ephemerality of the return of such an embrace. For every meeting of the dancers centre stage is balanced by a sometimes reluctant, a sometimes willed, and always emotionally devastating return to their respective chairs. It's Orpheus and Eurydice X 4, and played over and over again, the only thing worse than the repetition of loss the anticipation of its return.

Finally, in the third section we get the famous original work from 2010 that set all of the above in motion. And what a whirling, twirling feast of motion it is, with the dancers spinning on and off the stage, and into duos and trios and quartets, to the increasingly frenetic tempo of Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar's Offering and Meeting Along the Edge. (That being said, the opening of the bliss..., like the third movement of Annunciations, begins in silence, confirming Navas' belief, as revealed in a recent Georgia Straight interview, that the true test of a dance's structure comes when it is performed without music.) The razor-sharp edge of both Navas' choreographic artistry and the dancers' commanding technique is fully on display in this section, as the number of bodies on stage expands so exponentially, and the literal changes in direction of those bodies come so quickly, that any missed cue would almost surely result in a huge pile-up. Kinesthetically one can't help but be swept up into the action, and as an exhilarating high-point on which to end the evening it really does leave one feeling a kind of blissful rapture.

Kudos to all at the reinvigorated Ballet BC on another inspired season. I look forward to next year, including Navas' new take on Giselle and, in January, a partnership with PuSh.

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Madly Inspired Dancing by Ballet BC

Another stellar program of dance last night by Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar, one that especially showed the depth and range of the company, and one that was also notable for the memorable music that inspired each of the three featured works.

Leading off was Molnar's own between disappearing and becoming, the piece that was most obviously indebted to classical principles. Set to selections from Hildur Gudnadóttir's haunting cello suite Without Sinking, the choreography placed the women mostly on point, entering and exiting the stage like fluttering birds, but also showing their collective strength when massed as a corps. There were also impressive moments of partnering that showcased the women's extensions and turns, and the men's powerful lifting. Yet alongside this, Molnar also threw in more contemporary movement, often done in unison, with limbs collapsing and twisting at elbows and knees in ways that showed her familiarity with Forsythe's improvisation techniques. Bonnie Beecher's inspired lighting design featured multiple fades and blackouts that, alongside the music, contributed to the sense of ephemerality and in-betweenness structuring the piece, with the dancers often caught in the middle of a movement phrase--"the space where," as Molnar writes in her program notes, "disappearing and becoming are one."

Next up was Aszure Barton's Vitulare, another world premiere, and set to a range of choral and folk music from around the globe. Her choreography likewise drew mostly on folk traditions, with traces of everything from Celtic line- and step-dancing, to Russian knee-bends, and the familiar circle of the Jewish hora. To see the full company lined up horizontally downstage and raise there arms en masse to place behind each other's backs as a prelude to the quick-quick-slow step sequence that is the basic grammar of so many of these traditions slapped a giddy smile on my face that didn't leave until the final curtain call. But it was Alexander Burton (a stand-out in all three pieces of the evening) breaking ranks and teaching his fellow company members to bust a few hip hop-inspired moves (nothing if not the measure of its own folk tradition) that really got this party started. Barton's work couldn't have been more different from Molnar's in style and tone, and yet both pieces were equally captivating to watch--not least for how fully and transportingly the entire company embodied the aesthetic of each.

Swedish choreographer Johan Inger's Walking Mad closed out the evening, and was the work with the most obvious musical and choreographic pedigree. A hit ever since its premiere in the Netherlands in 2001, the piece is set to Ravel's Boléro, but in a way that is more send-up than homage of that composition's romantic clichés. It begins with dancer Gilbert Small, clad in a trench coat and top hat mounting a set of stairs from the orchestra pit and "lifting" the curtain to reveal a stage strewn with several pieces of clothing, a large wall looming upstage. Rachel Meyer appears and starts picking up the clothing. Small removes his coat and offers it to her. She refuses to take it, exiting with a bemused smile. Small then peers around one end of the wall, which is the cue for Maggie Forgeron to emerge from the other side and then mime grabbing his top hat, placing it upon her own head. The madness has begun. Indeed, when Forgeron places her head against Small's chest as the first strains of the famous snare drum and trilling flute that open Ravel's music are heard, and they begin an athletic pas de deux around the wall, you know this isn't going to be what we've come to expect from this composition.

The wall is a key prop throughout the piece. It moves forwards and backward, up and down; people pop out of doors that line it, get enclosed within its wings, slam against it, jump onto or even over it. It's certainly the impetus for some witty sleights, but also for some dextrous dancing, particularly by the three women, Meyer and Forgeron being joined by a superb Alyson Fretz on this particular evening. But the wall also marks a tonal division in the piece, as after most of the dancers disappear behind it (leaving behind their trench coats) and the Ravel music ends, Small and Meyer are back where they started. Only this time they dance a moving pas de deux to Arvo Part's Für Alina, music that in its stark minimalism couldn't be further from Ravel's. Small and Meyer are gorgeous together, but I'm not sure the juxtaposition entirely works.

What I am sure of is that Ballet BC keeps moving from strength to strength. The 2012-13 season has just been announced, and it includes a partnership with PuSh (yay!), not to mention a new Giselle by resident choreographer José Navas. In the meantime, I look forward to the last offering of this season, a full-length version of Navas' Bliss, the hit of last year.

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3 Cheers for 3 Fold

I do believe that 3 Fold, Ballet BC's latest offering (on at the Queen E through through this evening), is the most inspired programming of new choreography for the company since Artistic Director Emily Molnar took over in 2009. To be fair, I missed what was by all accounts last year's stand-out hit, José Navas' Bliss--but mercifully that will be reprised in the spring along with what I understand will be Navas' new take on Giselle. Nevertheless, last night I was riveted by the dancing, and judging by the rest of the audience's reaction, most everyone else was as well.

The evening began with what for me was the most compelling work, the world premiere of Polish-Canadian Robert Glumbek's Diversion. Such complex choreography danced with such compelling emotion by the Ballet BC company, who have never looked better. And so many surprising moments that had one leaning forward or jolting back in one's seat in kinesthetic empathy. So it was when Gilbert Small, exiting stage right in a long arc of rectangular light provided by designer James Proudfoot (whose contributions are perfectly in tune with Glumbek's choreography), is suddenly barraged by a succession of leaping ballerinas from the wings, whose weight and velocity he must attempt to receive as delicately as possibly. I had thought that would be the end of the piece, but there follows a gorgeous concluding pas de deux by Conor Gnam (at least I think it was Conor) and newcomer Rachel Meyer, whose arm and leg extensions in the lifts were alone worth the price of admission.

Meyer, who graces the program cover and advertising posters for 3 Fold, is one of several new faces in the company this year (another is Daniel Marshalsay, ably filling the shoes--or socks--of the departed Leon Feizo-Gas, especially in a wonderful trio with Peter Smida and Small), and she is an outstanding addition; I could not take my eyes off of her the whole evening. I was also pleased to see that Livonia Ellis has been promoted from apprentice to full company member this year. She is a wonderful dancer, at once athletic and subtly expressive, combining power and grace.

Next up was Italian choreographer Walter Matteini's Parole Sospese, his take on sixteenth-century poet Ludovico Ariosto's fabulist world. The piece is wonderfully theatrical, beginning with a dumbshow in front of the curtain, and making use of all kinds of stage effects, including books suspended from the rafters, a series of moving flies, backdrops, and scrims, and--most compellingly--rows of lightbulbs on wires that descend to the floor at on point, and through which the dancers must carefully move. I wasn't sure if Jed Duifhuis' impresario/master of ceremonies always worked as a conceit (especially in the waltz with Gnam), but I did appreciate Matteini's decision to resist a linear narrative in favour of the particular demands (technical and emotional) of successive movement sequences--a highlight in this regard was a wonderful solo near the end by Alyson Fretz. I was also pleasantly surprised by how willing Matteini was to mix up his styles and steps, throwing in the odd breakdance move amid all the turnout and extension.

Simone Orlando's Doppeling concluded the program. Since its premiere at Surfacing, Molnar's pared down reintroduction of the transformed company at The Dance Centre in 2009, the work has gotten bigger and bolder, the steps more complex, and the body suits worn by the dancers even tighter! What I especially appreciated watching Orlando's take on Coppélia-like conformity this time was her musicality, with all the dancers in precise lockstep with Bach's Concerto in d minor. Except of course when they weren't--as when, with a syncopated hip thrust and a grand removal of her bobbed wig and shaking out of her long tresses, Makaila Wallace decided to dance to her own beat.

Adding to the good feeling of the evening was Molnar's announcement, during her curtain speech, that the company had secured multi-year corporate sponsorship from Fasken Martineau. This will allow Ballet BC to continue to commission new work while also working to rebuild and grow its audiences, which, judging by the size of last night's crowd, it still needs to work on.

Here's hoping that after you all vote today, you fill the seats at the Queen E this evening.

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Ballet BC at the Queen E

You have to hand it to Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar. She is really working her international dance connections during this make-or-break 25th anniversary season for the company. And she's also piling on the new commissions.

This weekend's program, Volo, on at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre through this evening, featured a heavy Netherlands Dance Theatre connection: there was an excerpt from former legendary company leader Jirí Kylián's Toss of a Dice, an affecting pas de deux featuring guest artists Medhi Walerski and Lesley Telford; Jorma Elo's 1st Flash, which premiered at NDT in 2003; and a new work, Petite Cérémonie, set on the full Ballet BC company (including apprentices Alexander Burton and Livona Ellis, who made wonderful impression in her solo) by Walerski, a former NDT principal dancer and now a freelance choreographer. Throw in another world premiere, sweet, by Canadian Shawn Hounsell (whose new full-length work, Wonderland, created for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and based on Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, arrives in town soon), and it was quite a jam-packed evening.

Would that the house itself was also bursting at the seams. There were a lot of empty orchestra seats last night, and but for the Financial Divas (some sort of group corporate outing by female business executives) taking up most of the mezzanine, the audience might have been smaller still. To be sure, the company lost a lot of core supporters during its recent financial troubles; and its subsequent rebranding as a "contemporary" ballet troupe under Molnar's direction is not without risks in terms of finding the right balance between those traditional types who want to see their dancers en pointe and a younger generation raised on So You Think You Can Dance? and whose only exposure to classical ballet has likely come via the recent psychodrama of Black Swan.

Frankly, last night could have used more drama. The dancing, as always, was technically accomplished, and threading through the first three works was some very interesting partnering, much of it walking (often en pointe) a tightrope between classical elements of line and unison, and their deliberate deconstruction. However, the emotion of these works seemed to be displaced almost wholly onto the music and the lighting design/scenography. The audience responded with enthusiasm to Walerski's Petite Cérémonie, and it was great to see the full company having heaps of fun in this playful take on what was pitched, on the one hand, as a "boxed" meditation on gender difference, but which I read as a more interesting commentary on the ritual processes associated with the "black box" of theatre. Still, the work was not without its cliches, including a somewhat trite musical selection, and the insertion of spoken text (uttered by new company member Dario Dinuzzi, who also juggles) that seemed entirely random.

Our seatmates (my Pilates instructors Sarah and Natasha) told us that last November's mixed program was, overall, much better. Unfortunately, we had to miss that offering, as we were away in Seattle. But I have no regrets about signing up as a mini-pack subscriber for the remainder of this season, which includes a visit by the Alvin Ailey Company in March, and a "double anniversary" celebration with Turning Point Ensemble (featuring live music and more world premieres) in April. Plus next season we have recently appointed resident choreographer José Navas' reinterpretation of Giselle to look forward to. I predict that will be Ballet BC's own "turning point"--a new story ballet by a rising choreographic star who proved with The bliss that from their limbs all movement takes he knows what it means to stamp this company as classically contemporary.

Now all we have to do is ensure Molnar and her troupe make it to that moment. She announced in her curtain speech that they are in the midst of a $300,000 fundraising campaign, almost half of which has been raised. That's great news, but there's a ways to go yet. I urge all dance lovers in BC to do their bit.

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