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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Miami City Ballet at the Queen E

In her pre-show chat last night, Lourdes Lopez, Artistic Director of the Miami City Ballet, noted that George Balanchine created more than 400 works of original choreography during his 55-year career. About 80-100 of those works remain in the active repertoires of ballet companies around the world. Those companies include the one Balanchine founded, the New York City Ballet, but also organizations like MCB, which was started by an NYCB alum in 1986, and has been led since 2012 by Lopez, herself a former principal dancer at NYCB and a director of the Balanchine Trust. MCB is in town this weekend at the invitation of Ballet BC, presenting an all-Balanchine program; it is a rare opportunity for Vancouverites to catch a glimpse of dances created by a choreographer some consider the greatest of the twentieth century, if not of all time.

I admit that I am not an ardent member of that fan club--in part because I resist the narrative that classical ballet, born in baroque France and refined in nineteenth-century Russia, reached its apotheosis when Balanchine came to America. It's a nationalist teleology that, as most recently recycled by Jennifer Homans' otherwise very informative and lucidly written Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet (2010), insists that everything culminates with Balanchine's uncanny melding of European classicism and American athleticism. Et après Monsieur B, le déluge. Indeed, ever since the master's death in 1983 critics have been opining about who will be the next great choreographic genius to save ballet and lead the form into the future: Justin Peck, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky are the latest candidates.

Then, too, it has always struck me that the New York critics' cult of worshipping Balanchine for his musicality, the speed and intricacy of his footwork, and the stunning visual tableaux he creates through his partnering and his maximal use of the corps de ballet, means that everything necessarily devolves upon technique and the virtuosity of the dancers. The work is beautiful to look at, yes, but where is the emotional depth? This was the question I was left asking at the end of the first piece on the MCB program, Ballo della Regina, which is actually the most recent of the works, dating from 1978, and set to music from the Verdi opera Don Carlos. It is light and fast, filled with dazzling leaps by the male soloist (Renato Penteado) and complex variations by the all-female corps (including featured soloist Nathalia Arja, who does have a killer arabesque). But choreographed so assiduously to the music, the work comes off as a series of highly presentational interludes more than a self-sustaining whole, with the completion of a difficult or particularly acrobatic move, punctuated as it is by the score, not just craving, but demanding appreciation. It's an older version of showmanship in ballet that seems out of place in today's world--as evidenced by the confusion of the audience about when and with what measure of enthusiasm to applaud.

I much preferred the second work on the program. Symphony in Three Movements was choreographed by Balanchine in 1972 as a tribute to Igor Stravinsky, who had died the previous year. Set to a score that the composer had written in 1945 as a commemoration of the end of WW II, the movement features striking diagonal machine-like formations and opposing windmill arm turns by the corps, recalling the wings of bomber planes (and, to be sure, the female riveters who built them). One also detects the influence of Balanchine's NYCB confrère, Jerome Robbins, especially in the Jets and Sharks-influenced jumps of the male dancers. Finally, at the centre of the piece is a beautifully spare and simple duet that the program notes indicate was influenced by traditional Balinese dance. It begins with the male dancer positioned behind his female partner; as she bobs down, he pops up, the two of them syncopating this action with corresponding arm waves, as if they are swimming.

The evening concluded with the oldest piece on the program, Serenade, choreographed (in 1934) soon after Balanchine had emigrated to the US, and set on students from his newly formed School of American Ballet. Its famous opening features more than a dozen female dancers, clad identically in blue lyotards and long white tulle skirts, standing with their rights arms stretched out in a hieratic gesture reminiscent of Martha Graham. In perfect unison the women bend their arms and bring their hands to their foreheads before adjusting their feet on cue into first position. If there's one thing I will credit Balanchine for it is his democratizing of the corps de ballet--something brought out by the diverse MCB ensemble (which numbers some 50 members). In his works the corps is never mere decorative background; its members are, rather, fully integral to, and often initiate, the movement (and it is notable that when solos and duets do occur in Balanchine ballets, the corps is frequently offstage). This is clearly on display in Serenade, composed to music by Tchaikovsky, and filled with all manner of swooping turns, dynamic group patterns, and sculptural linkages--the latter showcasing another Balanchine trademark, the dizzying arm chains his dancers frequently form and through which they assemble into his signature bodily massings.

So, notwithstanding my earlier caveats, I guess you can say I was impressed. I won't lie--the choreography definitely seems "of a period." But, as enlivened by the incredibly talented MCB dancers, that choreography can still speak to contemporary audiences.

P.

Siminovitch and Stravinsky

In the Globe and Mail yesterday an announcement of the three directors nominated for the latest installment of the Siminovitch Prize in Canadian Theatre. The prize, the most lucrative of its kind in the country, and which uniquely requires the winner to bestow a quarter of the $100,000 award upon a protégé of his or her choice, had been doling out the kudos to playwrights, directors, and designers on a rotating basis since 2001. However, after last year's award it was announced the prize would be suspended due to a lack of sufficient funds in its endowment. Fortunately, over the summer the University of Toronto and the Royal Bank of Canada Foundation stepped in to shore up the finances, and the award is back on track.

Among this year's nominees, I know Chris Abraham's work best. The Artistic Director of Crows Theatre in Toronto, he directed the original Toronto production of Eternal Hydra, which Touchstone staged in Vancouver last fall. And he also refereed the James Long and Marcus Youssef's Winners and Losers, which played the PuSh Festival this past January and arrives at Canadian Stage in Toronto this November following an acclaimed international tour. Ironically (or not), Abraham was the first Siminovitch protégé back in 2001, chosen by winner Daniel Brooks.

Also yesterday I got to my second--and likely last--VIFF film. Autumn's Spring, directed by Denis Sneguriev and Philippe Chevalier, is a moving documentary about choreographer Thierry Thieû Niang's seven-year collaboration with a group of elderly men and women from Marseilles, most of whom had never danced before, and several of whom had severe mobility issues. However, under Niang's tutelage, they produced a version of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that ended up playing to acclaim at the Avignon Festival and, eventually, at the hallowed Théâtre de Châtelet in Paris.

Every year there are usually one or two dance documentaries at VIFF--this year, for instance, there is also Toa Fraser's film capturing the New Zealand Royal Ballet's version of Giselle. Two years ago the stand-out was Bess Kargman's First Position, about six young dancers preparing for the Youth American Grand Prix competition in New York. That film, which I briefly blogged about here, was as much about the personal sacrifices as the professional talent of its young, classically trained, subjects. Autumn's Spring, in forcing us to question, among other things, what counts as dance and who counts as a dancer, shows us the joy that movement brings regardless of age--and ability.

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Turning Point On Fire at the Cultch

Proving that their stunning 2009 collaborative re-interpretation of Erik Satie's Relâche was not a one-off, the Turning Point Ensemble, Simone Orlando, and Josh Beamish's MOVE: the company, have done it once again, giving us a brand new Firebird 100 years after its Paris premiere.

Winner of the 2011 Rio Tinto Alcan Performing Arts Award for Music, Turning Point's Artistic Director and resident conductor, Owen Underhill, has commissioned a new chamber arrangement of Stravinsky's original score by Michael Bushnell. This comprises the first 35-minute half of the evening's program, and this lighter, more delicate version, featuring wind instruments, harp, and timpani and percussion to wonderful effect, was received rapturously by last night's audience at The Cultch.

After a 30-minute intermission, the audience returns to discover a cleared stage and the Turning Point musicians arranged on different levels of upstage scaffolding, part of Alan Storey's amazing set, complete with spiraling staircase and moveable ledges. MOVE Artistic Director and principal dancer Josh Beamish sits at the foot of the stairs, dressed in grey, and methodically folding innumerable paper cranes, which litter the floor at his feet. As the musicians warm up and tune their instruments, MOVE company members Cai Glover, Heather Dotto, and Gavin Stewart take turns improvising movement sequences as audience members file to their seats. When the house lights dim and Underhill assumes his position in the tech box behind the orchestra seating, from whence he will conduct Jocelyn Morlock's original score, we are ready for the start of Luft, Orlando's bold and beautiful choreographic take on the quest motif in the Firebird story.

As the Prince Ivan figure, I don't think I have ever seen Beamish dance as gorgeously, his amazing technique perfectly matched to Orlando's delicate and precise (and classically influenced) movement vocabulary. The amount of muscle control alone that it takes to flutter one's arms and hands the way Beamish effortlessly appears to do is astounding. Natalie Portman, eat your heart out! (And, yes, there is a Black Swan/White Swan motif at play here.) Expertly paired with Beamish as the Firebird is Alison Denham, and their pas de deux (particularly the floorwork) was especially captivating. The other dancers provide graceful accompaniment throughout, and, indeed, one of the most pleasing aspects of Luft is how thoroughly the MOVE dancers embody the musicality of Orlando's choreography, which in turn helps to highlight Morlock's lush score.

In short, this is a cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration that I hope goes far into the future, yielding still more bold reinterpretations of the classics. I personally vote for The Rite of Spring next! We have, dare I say, in Owen Underhill Vancouver's very own version of Diaghilev. And Turning Point, in its commissioning of and collaboration with other artists, is fast becoming a Ballets Russes for the 21st century.

Firebird is on at the Cultch through this Saturday.

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