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.

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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 2 at the Queen E

For her second offering of Ballet BC's 2016/17 season, Emily Molnar has programmed a celebration of Canada's 150+ history (as she astutely re-temporalized this year's national anniversary in her curtain speech, though without an accompanying territorial acknowledgement). Even more specifically this weekend's performances are a showcase of local Vancouver choreographic talent, featuring three world premieres and the return of an audience favourite by superstar Crystal Pite.

In advance of last night's show I was most eager to see the commission by Company 605's Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin. How would their urban hip-hop aesthetic and signature transversal movement flows translate onto a ballet company, with its emphasis on verticality and readable lines? The answer, I have to say, is not so easily. Anthem begins with the Ballet BC ensemble standing upstage in a circular clump; the music (initially by Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld) begins and a couple of dancers sway their torsos, sending a similar ripple throughout the rest of the group. This relay effect continues for some time, changing direction and building in choreographic complexity, but also with individual dancers every now and then taking themselves out of the transfer of a particular movement tide to stand and watch. This was my first inkling that all was not right with these new inhabitants of 605-land. A requisite feature of b-boying is members of a posse regularly ceding the floor to their confrères to perform a showcase sequence of moves; while this also allows the folks on the so-called sidelines to catch their breath, they are still kinetically engaged to what's happening around them and in Gelley and Martin's work for their own company there is never a sense that individual dancers, even when momentarily still, aren't connected to the larger movement energy of the group. Maybe it had something to do with how long this opening upstage tableau went on, or maybe it was just my desire for this largely upright crew to drop to the floor, but whenever a Ballet BC dancer paused and took themselves out of the flow of movement it felt like they didn't know what to do with themselves, that they needed a moment to re-sync their bodies with the rhythm of the rest of the group. Of course how one identifies or aligns oneself with a group or cause is implicit in the title Anthem, and Gelley and Martin were certainly playing with this idea when, eventually dispersing the dancers across the stage, they started working with unison. However, as with the music selections that followed these sequences never built to the expected choreographic crescendo. I also found I was missing two features of 605 dancing that I always look forward to: the way in which a volley of movement begun in one body is finished in another; and the sculptural clumps they so often form in their pieces, the liquid limbs of the dancers conjoining as if in a ridiculously complex game of Twister. Paradoxically it was the distance between the dancers that I most registered in Anthem.

Wen Wei Wang's Swan was next on the program. A short and sharp six-part deconstruction of Swan Lake, complete with Sammy Chien's brilliant and loudly industrial distortion of Tchaikovsky's score, the piece was in many ways deliberately derivative: I detected references to Matthew Bourne and Black Swan in the two same-sex partnering sequences, and even to Marie Chouinard in the brilliantly gymnastic solo by Andrew Bartee (who was also excellent on point) on the parallel barres (!) in the concluding sequence. But that didn't make the work any less fun to watch, and the partnering--between Bartee and Christoph von Riedemann, Alexis Fletcher and Peter Smida, Kristen Wicklund and Gilbert Small, and Wicklund and Fletcher--was sublimely accomplished.

Following a pause we were treated to a new pas de deux choreographed by Lesley Telford and danced to a spoken word composition by Barbara Adler. If I were 2 is inspired by the Narcissus myth, which put me in mind of Norman McLaren's brilliant NFB dance film from the 1980s. But Telford and Adler are much more free in their adaptation of the myth, with Adler managing to embed a Debordian critique of the "society of the spectacle" into her text--our hero and heroine first catch a glimpse of each other via their reflections in a storefront window, their faces framed by the deer antlers on the display mannequins--and Telford playing with some of the gendered dynamics of traditional ballet partnering. Thus, while near the top of the piece there is an absolutely stunning lift of the petite Emily Chessa by Brandon Alley, most of the rest of the duet sees the two trading positions of leading and following, including during a very effective play-rewind-repeat sequence in which first one dancer steps forward and points stage right and then the other replaces him or her, each look for a returned gaze simultaneously "a slip of the hook" in Adler's rhythmic phrasing. This is not the first time Telford and Alder have collaborated together and happily it will not be the last (they have another collaboration coming up at The Dance Centre at the end of April); the way they combine text and movement is utterly symbiotic, to the point where once again it is impossible to determine who is leading and who is following. This was made all the more apparent last night by the fact that in addition to a looped recording of Adler's voice, the dancers were also responding to her live recitation of the text from the orchestra pit--and she, likewise, to their movements.

Pite is another Vancouver-based choreographer not afraid of incorporating text into her dance compositions. And yet while Solo Echo takes inspiration from Mark Strand's poem Lines for Winter (which are excerpted in the program), the piece is actually danced to two haunting cello sonatas by Brahms. In the first movement, the seven dancers slide across the stage and orbit around each other like individual points in a rotating constellation, or isolated and pulsating pixels in a momentarily stilled and blown-up photograph. Indeed, the way that Pite has her dancers run on stage successively and then freeze mid-stride in an overlapping horizontal tableau puts one in mind of stop-motion animation, or the panels of a film storyboard (a technique she has explored elsewhere in works like Plot Point and Grace Engine). Here, in the first half of the work, the danced version of montage is used to explore how a force (including a sonic force like an echo) can reverberate from body to body, binding them into a shared resonant field (as with the gorgeous assisted walk that ends this section, with one of the women dancers launching herself from the wings into a supine position on the floor and stretching her arms above her head to capture her male partner's ankles just as he starts to put one leg in front of the other). This single force field then becomes the focus of the second half of the work as Pite exploits the connected bodily massings and domino-like chains that have become her signature in large group works. In so doing, she shows in an expressly kinetic way how the echo, as a sound launched from a singular source out into a larger environment, necessarily comes back as something more expansive, more resonant--something that, though transformed via its diffusion, nevertheless attaches us through careful listening to one another, and to our environment.

Thus for me it is this concluding work by Pite that arguably--and un-anthemically--fulfills the promise of the evening's opening.

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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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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 Program 2

Ballet BC's second performance offering during this, its 30th anniversary season, was an all Medhi Walerski program. It begins with a reworking of Prelude, which the choreographer first created for the company in February 2014, and which I wrote about here. For this version, Walerski has expanded the piece to accommodate nine additional dancers from Arts Umbrella on top of Ballet BC's full complement of 16 company members and three apprentices. It's a wonderfully crowded stage and Walerski exploits the bodily massings effectively by moving between straight lines and simple unison and chaotic swirlings of individual dancers' limbs and torsos that get distributed across the stage. At the heart of the work, however, remains a romantic pas de deux; the always elegant Rachel Meyer reprises her role and this time is partnered by Scott Fowler, who seems to grow in strength as a dancer each season. The duet unfolds in stages, a story of longing and loss as it intersects with the passage of time--something that is reinforced by the repeated pendulum-like swinging of the arms of the dancers in the corps, as well as by their encircling of the lovers in a crouched and swaying clockwise two-step. Maybe it was just a result of the extra dancers, but I was indeed struck this time by how much this piece draws from conventions of classic nineteenth-century story ballet, from the deconstructed port de bras that I read into the recurring gestural motif of the corps dancers delicately balancing one extended wrist upon the other in front of their chests to Fowler's thrashings on the floor following Meyer's slow backwards exit upstage evoking so many lovestruck male dancers driven mad by the premature deaths or general unattainability of their sylph-like objects of desire.

That Prelude and the second piece on the program, the world premiere of the new commission Natus, are meant to be read as linked somehow (at least in this staging) can be seen from the fact that the company took no bows at the end of the former. Moreover, following intermission audience members return to their seats to encounter the image of a man (Fowler, presumably) suspended above the stage, his dimly lit floating body resembling an oversized fetus. At this point the house lights are still up but a hush has slowly fallen over the audience and out of this transitional space there emerges a voice asking if we have our tickets. The voice is attached to Peter Smida, who enters from the back of the orchestra seats and wends his way to the stage, switching back and forth between genial conversation with the audience and the anxious recitation of items on a list. Having reached the front row, he selects an older female patron to accompany him in a brief waltz, before becoming distracted once again with his list; the items on it seem to be for a party, but despite the subsequent appearance of a cake it's not entirely clear that the party is celebratory. Verbal, visual, and musical references to a funeral also abound--which may be Smida's own, as at the end of his opening monologue he throws himself into the orchestra pit.

With Petite Cérémonie (a Ballet BC audience favourite, though I'll frankly be glad not to see it programmed again for a good long while) Walerski established that he is fond of mixing dance and physical comedy, movement and talking. And yet while I am normally a fan of text in dance, and while I have always responded to Smida as a charismatic performer, here I found the extended chatter to be gimmicky and I wanted it to stop. Especially at the end, when Smida enters wearing a jacket that seems to be covered with flower petals and starts a final long list about what he loves that builds into a screaming riot of free association, I found the device incredibly distracting and would simply have preferred to concentrate wholly on the final long sequence of explosive unison, which is performed to traditional Japanese drumming. Walerski is clearly an adept choreographer of hypnotic group patterning (an earlier sequence featured alternating gendered lines of running dancers, with one group having to duck under the arms of the other, which each time had me anticipating someone being cuffed in the head). He also knows how to balance the maximalist spectacle with the spare and simple; as in Prelude there is an effecting duet, danced by Smida and Livona Ellis, which is all the more compelling for the toning down of Smida's previous glossolalia. It is thus perplexing to me why Walerski feels the need to embellish his work unnecessarily with theatrical tricks which, in this case, seem to be about ingratiating himself to the audience (though, judging by the enthusiastic response, it seemed to work).

In her curtain speech Ballet BC Artistic Director Emily Molnar announced the line-up for the 2016-17 season. It starts in November with new work by the company's next choreographer-in-residence, Cayetano Soto. In the spring of 2017 there is an all-Canadian (and, more specifically, all Vancouver) program featuring works by Wen Wei Wang, Lesley Telford, Crystal Pite, and Company 605--my mind is already racing about how the latter's Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin will set their style on Ballet BC's dancers. Finally, the season concludes with a mixed program that, among other things, will showcase something from Batsheva's Ohad Naharin.

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Guest Post on Ballet BC's Program 1 at the Queen E

I was in Portland last weekend for a conference and so did not get to see the opening program to Ballet BC's 30th anniversary season. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed. However, a posse of my SFU Dance Aesthetics students attended and as an adjunct to our blog writing related to that course (see the course website here), I encouraged anyone who might be so inclined to contribute a guest post on what I missed.

Andrea Valentine-Lewis took me up on the offer, and what follows are her observations on the evening's three works:

Overall remarks/notes:

- The dancers are very athletic-looking.

- All acts were performed in socks.

- The company is mixed-raced.

- There are more male dancers than female dancers.

- All dancers are quite classically trained.

- The lighting was very interesting in all three movements.

- ... By interesting I mean very specific to the action. I loved it.

- The ballet was divided into three acts/movements, with two intermissions.

- The three movements were presented in a different order than the program indicated.

- The company was presented as gender-neutral. There weren't specific female/male roles. Both genders were strong and similarly dressed.

1.) The first movement was called Twenty Eight Thousand Waves. It was choreographed by Cayetano Soto (Ballet BC's new resident choreographer). Surprisingly, it was my favourite movement, because the music, lighting, and costuming was very satisfying to me. I prefer fluid, graceful movements that are strong, and that is what I saw. I had expectations that Crystal Pite's work would be my favourite.

2.) The second movement was called New Work, by Stijn Celis. The piece was accompanied by 40 male singers. Both female and male dancers wore the same clothing (button down work shirts and slacks). The women had their hair in buns to hide the appearance of long hair. This piece seemed repetitive and not dynamic enough. The choir was beautiful, but I felt the dancers were washed out by the music. There were obvious themes of religion and the life cycle, which I was thankful of; otherwise I would have gotten bored.

3.) The third movement (a crowd favourite), by Crystal Pite, was called Solo Echo. Pite's piece had a beautiful, simple set of snow falling from the backdrop, with lights that moved to either frame sections of the backdrop, or expose the entirety of it. The dancers were all dressed in black vests and black slacks... again, a gender-neutral choice. The movements were very dynamic and strong compared to the silky cello music of Johannes Brahms (played by Yo Yo Ma). It was a nice juxtaposition. Pite's choreography has changed since I've seen it last, so in that regard my expectations weren't met. But I did appreciate some sections of strong, intelligent choreography.

So there you have it. My thanks to Andrea. And more from me soon.

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Arts Umbrella Season Finale at the Playhouse

Arts Umbrella has long been the Vancouver dance community's stealth weapon. Under the legendary leadership of Artistic Director Artemis Gordon, the Granville Island dance school has trained generations of Ballet BC members and now, increasingly, major international companies are travelling to recruit from its graduating ranks. The drawing card is that while Gordon has given her dancers an unparalleled foundation in classical technique, she also encourages individual expressiveness and creativity.

Part of that creativity emerges from the company's incredibly varied repertoire, which includes lots of contemporary work, and which also, to Gordon's great credit, makes a point of showcasing the diverse choreographic talents of local Vancouver artists. Both of these aspects were on display at this weekend's AU Dance Season Finale, held at the Playhouse from Thursday through Saturday. I attended yesterday's matinee performance, and the program featured works choreographed by two former Ballet BCers, as well as one current company member. (Ballet BC AD Emily Molnar was also in the audience, no doubt casting a watchful eye on possible future apprentices.) Alyson Fretz's Cuore, choreographed on the apprentice company, began with a charming extended sequence in which the dancers, seated on the floor and backlit, move their arms above their heads in gracefully silhouetted arcs. Peter Smida's even just hello, also set on the apprentice company and featuring an eclectic musical score (including Jimmy Durante singing Make Someone Happy), was a witty comment on both the dailiness of dance class and the social anxieties of adolescence, with the two male members of the company at one point interfering with their female counterparts' arm and leg extensions at an imaginary barre, and later dragging two other girls from the corps to partner them (willingly or not) stage right. Finally, Simone Orlando's En Avant, which closed the program, provided a fitting bookend to the excerpt from her former Ballet BC boss John Alleyne's Four Seasons that began the afternoon; the requisite leaps, turns, lifts and dextrous footwork appropriately (if somewhat ho-humedly) highlighted the senior company's technical command and musicality.

For me the standout pieces on yesterday's program were by Crystal Pite and Amber Funk Barton. Four women from the senior company (Ria Girard, Misa Lucyshyn, Brooke Williamson and Sabine Raskin) performed an excerpt from Pite's A Picture of You Flying (part of The You Show); in collapsing joint by joint to the floor and then floating back up as if pulled by invisible strings, and in inserting themselves into and serving as ballast for Pite's trademark bodily chains, the dancers proved themselves more than equal to both the work's distinctive choreography and Owen Belton's challenging electronic score. Finally, Barton's Factory was a revelation; set on the women of the apprentice company (though, I have to say, I mistook them for the senior company until I read the program notes), it begins in silence with the dancers preening and posing like bathing suit models or Andy Warhol superstars, albeit ones who look like they've just stepped out of a Francis Bacon painting, with the dancers pulling their arms in at the elbows, bending at the hips and baring their teeth in a fierce grimace. They do all of this before a line of men from the senior company, who sit cross-legged downstage, with their backs to the audience. Then suddenly an African bass drum tucked in the downstage left corner of the stage is struck, and this is the cue for the piece to move (quite literally) into a whole other register, with Barton using the driving beat of the drumming (and, periodically, the men's accompanying clapping) to structure a series of solos and unison sequences that emanate from the dancers' pelvic cores and that build upon the plie as a recurring motif.

One of the more interesting aspects of such year-end showcases is the audience. It's filled with parents and extended family members and friends, who embody a range of ages (and attention spans), and who, refreshingly, don't necessarily respect the usual protocols of spectating decorum. One rambunctious toddler in the row in front of me kept up a running commentary throughout the afternoon, asking her mother why none of the dancers were in tutus, why there was no music, how come it was so dark, why the dancers kept running on and off the stage like that? It was hilarious, but also encouraging: for here was someone who was fully engaged with the art. Which is, after all, what we wish from all performance.

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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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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.

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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.

P.

Ballet BC's UN/A

April really is the cruelest month if you're an academic--a perfect storm of marking, meetings, and manuscripts for essays and conference papers that can't any longer be ignored. Which doesn't leave much time for blogging. And which explains why this post on Ballet BC's final program for the 2013/14 season--a mix of three stunning world-premieres--is briefer than I'd like it to be.

Although very different in scale, tone, and choreography, the three works that make up UN/A (and I must ask Emily where she comes up with her program titles) all feature distinctive musical scores and lighting designs. The latter is perhaps to be expected from Cayetano Soto, whose Twenty Eight Thousand Waves was first up, and which at one point featured the same full-on upstage rock star white-paneled heat that he employed in the piece for Ballets Jazz de Montréal that played here two years ago. However, the work actually starts with three tracks of overhead spots having been lowered to just above the stage. A quartet of female dancers, wearing simple button-down shirts, moves in precise unison among them as an a cappella chorus from The Little Match Girl Passion rises in pitch and intensity. The lighting tracks do eventually rise, clearing room for some of the most complex, technical, and yet absolutely fluid partnering I've seen from the company this or any other season. There was one lift, in particular, that left me breathless and in awe of how--both mechanically and in terms of its split-second timing--it was accomplished. That, during these sections, the dancers were additionally moving in perfect synchronization with a fiercely compelling string quartet by Bryce Dessner (commissioned and played by the Kronos Quartet) only added to the overall effect of the piece. The jury was still out for me on Soto following the BJM performance, but after last night I'm definitely a convert.

The soundtrack to Gustavo Ramirez Sansano's Lost and Seek is all Bach, including such well-known (and dare I say clichéd) classics as the The Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier. This is not to say that the accompanying movement was equally shopworn--merely that after Soto's piece, Sansano's work read as quieter, more contemplative. To that end, the work begins with a solo by Alexander Burton, dressed like a young boy in grey shorts, shirt and socks, his movement contained and largely gestural, almost as if he's seeking a way outside of the square of light to which he's been consigned stage left. Release does come in the second section of the piece, a sextet that explores the geometry of the stage and the geometry of bodily relationships in some startlingly original ways. The work concludes with a duet by Gilbert Small and Rachel Meyer, who ascends to the stage on a staircase jutting out into the audience and then proceeds, en pointe, to stalk Small (who is seated on the floor with his legs extended) upstage. With Meyer doing various pirouettes and arabesques in Small's arms, this section felt like it was trying to approximate some of the traditions of classical ballet; at the same time, some of the lifts looked awkward and perhaps even under-rehearsed, suggesting to me that Sansano hadn't quite figured out the effect he was going for in this final section. He has, however, come up with a beautiful closing image, with Small recreating his seated pose from the opening, only this time on Meyer's lap.

The evening concluded with Toronto-born Gioconda Barbuto's immix, a full-company work set to a selection of electronic remixes of the music of contemporary classical composers Gabriel Prokofiev (no mention in his bio if he's related to that other Prokofiev) and Peter Gregson. The piece begins with a single follow spot seeking out various members of the audience, before settling downstage to await the first dancer's entrance (the lighting design for immix and Lost and Seek was by James Proudfoot). As successive dancers stealthily slip in and out of this sliver of light, the music builds to a crescendo and we're off on a glorious ride of bodily tableaux and choreographic montage. There is so much going on in this work, but what struck me most were the tiny moments in which Barbuto, focusing on different pairs of dancers, is able to arrest and break down the movement, showing us in simple ways how a body travels through space: as when an arm or torso sequences from bent to vertical in syncopated time to the music; or when, at different points over the course of the piece, a dancer would shimmy his or her entire body like a genie being released from a bottle. Gorgeous stuff, which will no doubt become a highlight of the company's traveling repertoire.

Looking forward to next season.

P.

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.

P.

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.

P.

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.

P.

PuSh 2013: Ballet BC

Although Richard and I are subscribers to Ballet BC, and although we had seen all of the pieces that make up this weekend's Encore program before, last night still felt special, as for the first time this year the company is pairing up with the PuSh Festival. It was great to see all the PuSh program guides being perused by audience members, and I took the opportunity to make several recommendations.

Having earlier that morning talked about William Forsythe's Improvisation Technologies with my SFU Contemporary Arts students in the Dance-Theatre class I'm teaching this semester, I was newly attuned to how his Herman Schmerman, the first piece on the program, was put together in terms of shapes and phrasings and tempo. I detected a few stumbles among the dancers in the opening quintet, Forsythe's steps being notoriously difficult, and the pacing of this piece particularly brutal. However, Alexis Fletcher and Connor Gnam were on fire in the signature duet that follows.

Jorma Elo's 1st Flash is choreographed to Sibelius' stunning Violin Concerto in D minor, and features equally spectacular lighting. But the dancing more than holds its own, beginning and ending not just in half-light, but in silence, as if to say, which is more virtuosic: the music or the movement? With newer company members Alexander Burton and Livona Ellis (who emerged as the star of last night's program) joining veterans Maggie Forgeron, Alyson Fretz, Gnam, and Gilbert Small in realizing Elo's intensely physical but slightly quirky movement patterns (lush arabesques and lifts followed by squats and hops), the answer to that question in my mind was very clear.

Petite Cérémonie, created especially for Ballet BC in 2011 by Medhi Walerski, concluded the program,   a showcase for the full company's athleticism and witty theatricality (I had forgotten about Dario Dinuzzi's juggling and spoken word bit). Beginning with the exterior rear wall of the stage exposed, the dancers enter in turn from the wings, but also the audience, eventually joining each other in a quasi-chorus line, the only movement a simple shifting from one foot to the other. Things get decidedly more dynamic from there, especially when Vivaldi's Four Seasons starts blaring. I still think the piece, overall, is more style than substance, but one of the things I did notice this time in ruminating on Walerski's somewhat too-obvious metaphor of "life-in-a-box," was how (in addition to gender and the black box of the theatre) it could be applied to the choreographic box of unison vs. non-unison in movement.

P.