National Ballet of Canada Welcomes Live Audiences Back with Chords of Mysticism

 When Dance and Spirituality Go Hand in Hand

from national.ballet.ca

When you witness NBOC's first live ballet performance in 20 months and hear the striking intros to two ethereal Tchaikovsky numbers, you know that spiritual power will be talking to you in this opening program.

And it does. George Balanchine's Serenade, Jera Wolfe's Soul, and Crystal Pite's Angel's Atlas are all transformative ballets that touch on our mortality, impermanence, and microscopic size in relation to the vast universe. There's a subdued mournfulness standing right beside passion and perfection in each of the works. Moreso, there's deep honesty and humility running right through the whole National Ballet of Canada November 2021 program.

Dance has never seemed to perfectly express its era better than right now - or, at least, during the past century. You can see it just by observing how dancers' arm movements have changed over time, regardless of whether it's a classical or contemporary technique that the work is set in. While dancers in Serenade, choreographed in 1935 just after the Depression, confidently spread their wings in arms that perpetually point up to the sky, in Angel's Atlas, choreographed in 2020, they collect and draw the vast energy around them towards themselves using their elbows, in a lostness. And in Soul, choreographed during the pandemic in 2021, the dancers' arms intertwine with each other in the depth of love and all of its complex subjectivity. 

Angel's Atlas

The first time I saw Crystal Pite's Angel's Atlas with a friend, I was a busy, tired commuter and the experience was apocalyptic and jarring. It was February 2020, literally a month before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Now, seeing it again as part of the National Ballet of Canada's Welcome Back season, it seems reverent, humble, and overwhelmingly eye-opening. 

Tchaikovsky's sacred Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Opus 41, No 6 Cherubic Hymn sets the tone of the ballet before any of the dancers start to move. Together with Tom Visser's lighting design and Jay Gower Taylor's reflective light backdrop concept, Owen Belton's music affects the audience in a very profound way. The hymn's words speak to humanity laying aside all cares of life to receive the King of All, invisibly upborne by the angelic host. While the words are sung in Old Church Slavonic, the feeling of one's own soul opening up is evoked from a combination of things. It's both the music and the mystical wall of light that displays the slow discovery of a vast and unknowable universe. 

The dancers are barefoot and dressed identically in loose black pants. Slowly they start to move in unison from their crouched positions where they were spread like shells across the stage. As they get up, they seem to be discovering their world and who they are in relation to everything else.

There is both joy and anguish in the movement throughout Angel's Atlas. A couple discovers each other and lives a form of life, then they part. Movement is repetitive and elbows seem to lead, where humans eke out a more primitive existence. The music evolves into flowing, abstract harmonies with bells, the black pants become long skirts swishing freely, and graceful, fluid movements start to form a visual culture onstage. At points, there are two groups who each move exclusively in unison, and sometimes the groups are divided by gender. This made me think of Pite's earlier work, Emergence.

Serenade

Sourced from national.ballet.ca

A circle is closed. The storm has passed. A song resolves in its final chord. Everything is OK. Powers greater than us are in place, and we feel them. Resolution. 

This is what screams out at you when the curtain opens after the first couple of bars of Serenade for Strings. 17 female dancers in blue hold their hands up to the moonlight, both signaling it and shielding themselves from it. You feel the abstract power of human resilience.

When Balanchine choreographed Serenade and it was performed in 1934 by the School of American Ballet students, he had no idea that almost 100 years later it would become a lasting, emblematic piece of inner power featured at post-pandemic theatrical re-openings. Its lasting quality is in its balance of surprise and inevitability. 

Serenade still looks modern and is known for its technical difficulty to execute. Most of the movement and jumps are executed "en arabesque" (with the back leg stretched up high), requiring a lot of back strength. The intricate pointe work includes turns of the whole body executed on the toes with a sudden lift of one foot up to "retire" (pointed down at the other ankle) when the dancer faces front, and then down again to the top of the toes for yet another turn. And it's all done fast, to music that flies along quickly.

Balanchine's difficult technique was danced flawlessly this week by the National Ballet's Sonia Rodriguez, Jurgita Dronina, and Calley Skalnik in the principal roles. The choreography expresses harmony, goodwill, and togetherness. Serenade is Balanchine's elegy to women, but the ballet ends sadly and mystically. One of its themes is mortality yet it also suggests collective strength.

The Welcome Back Performance Touched Audiences Collectively

As we searched for the patterns in dance movements that were executed quickly and collectively on stage, the performance had already tapped into our subconscious. Controlled chaos. Resolution of forces. Connection to a wild beyond. 

These are the common themes of all the pieces billed as NBOC's Angel's Atlas in this season's opening program. I still have Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings going through my head every morning when I wake up. It feels like a good thing.

"Made in Canada" Choreography for National Ballet Transcends the Classics

Mesmerizing Ode to Lawren Harris

Image via https://www.instagram.com/nationalballet/

Lawren Harris, Robert Binet, Lubomyr Melnyk, and dancers of the National Ballet of Canada, will the dreamers ever leave you? 

The Company's final performance of Made in Canada yesterday at The Four Seasons Centre in Toronto was a testament to the power of nature in the Canadian psyche. Canadian choreographers, composers, lighting designers, set designers, costume designers and dancers came together to celebrate a bond that we Canadians innately feel but rarely articulate. 

A pre-performance announcement by Artistic Director Karen Kain expressed gratitude towards the indigenous people of yesteryear on whose land the ballet company now operates at the Lake Ontario waterfront. When you look south across the lake from where the company's astounding artistry is now created, you can almost see Lewiston, NY beyond what is a relatively new border. After you've seen "Made in Canada" choreography however, you'll probably agree that our bond with the land emerges as a much more primal force than nationalism. What you see is the connectedness of land to water over time, not different countries. The dreamers are alive and well.

Opening to choreography by Binet in Dreamers Ever Leave You, the flowing, continuously meandering music of Melnyk takes centre stage while cool shades of blue envelope pondering dancers. As if on a kinetic moon walk, their outstretched arms yearn toward something beyond themselves. Stark sets of smooth ice chunks slowly move across time and space, and dancers become individualistic silhouettes on symbolic Harris ice mountains. 

With porte de bras marked by hands inverted outward at the wrist, dancers enact and seek majestic heights in a reverence. Seldom in unison, individual dancers intertwine within space and with each other, pursuing inner heights of the Harris mountains. As the dramatic, soaring cadences of the music reflect both dancer and our collective knowledge of Harris, we follow a river flowing emotionally into turns of minor keys and peaks. 

Kudelka Freshens the Baroque with a Timeless Story

Image via https://www.instagram.com/nationalballet/

Second on the program was James Kudelka's The Four Seasons, set to Vivaldi's well known score of the same name. Kudelka's genius never lets you down, and there are few ballets as consistently satisfying as this resident choreographer's creations always are. With full integration of musicality, sets, costumes, lighting and movement, Kudelka is all about the staging. His dancers fill the stage in wonderfully balanced compositions that incorporate all artistic elements in equal measure.  A duality exists in the soloists' expressionism and corps de ballet's commentary that resembles a Greek chorus, each level telling their story simultaneously. Few other choreographers achieve such theatrical balance, and you can see it in Kudelka's "czarist" style Nutcracker too.

The Four Seasons' story is about aging, and in the Spring concerto the dancers are Venetian courtiers in taupe silk crossed with Alberta youths who could be freely riding around the prairies in a borrowed pickup truck. With hopeful expectation, their arms jut upright like waiters with no trays, and they tumble around on stage energetically in a hopefulness. In the Summer concerto, passionate love is strikingly choreographed in signature movements that fly by quickly; one reemerging motif has a woman commanding her lover in a sweeping downward arm movement that later reappears as she commands herself with that same move. It's like Kudelka captures the subconscious at times. 

Everything works in concert: the taupe-themed Baroque-inspired costume has now become a romantic sheer, and Monet-like sets have transformed from subtle green lilies to passionate reds and maple leaf oranges of November. The Autumn concerto brings a panicked kind of energy as dancers fly through the air doing grand jetés - and you cannot help but know what's ahead in this trajectory. In the Winter concerto the Venetian courtiers are back, the grand jetés are gone and no one is flying through the air anymore. One female dancer wears a hat like the Queen wears, and you almost expect to see her start waving. A formalized, ancient tiredness pervades everyone's movement and death takes centre stage.

Amphibian Humans

Image via https://www.instagram.com/nationalballet/

Humans are mammals, but in Crystal Pite's Emergence it's never been clearer that we strongly resemble amphibians in social ways. Pite is an Associate Choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater, and as anyone who has seen that company can attest, her last minute decision in rehearsal to add dancers' whispering to the staging of her choreography here marks her style with a distinctly European trademark. 

Emergence constructs abstract modern choreography within balletic structures. When Pite's female dancers prance like grasshoppers across the stage en masse, they are "en pointe", and when her shirtless male dancers show their backs marked by identical spider tatoos crawling across their shoulders, they literally look like the shells of bugs crouching in collective impulse. In this ballet instinct not only rules, it reveals all - and groups are divided by the sexes like separate lines within wolf packs. 

In one scene a long line of women strung from upstage to downstage moves across the stage, hypnotically whispering uneven bars of  music to counts of 6 and 11. Individual males regularly "impregnate" females by ejecting a movement and then withdrawing. In what may be a subtle comment on sexual politics at one point, one of the males tries to run through the long line of women in attempted escape, only to be prevented from breaking through the female chain by their unassailable solidarity. 

This brilliantly visceral performance of Emergence was flawlessly executed by dancers of the National Ballet, while abstract cricket sounds in the score composed by Owen Belton droned in the music. 

As with any artist's oeuvre, Pite's beliefs can be seen in what she has created through subtlety and subtext. Although Emergence is abstract and its music primal and raw, the work nonetheless reassures you with an undercurrent of natural rules that prevent our self-destructiveness. 

In Pite's vision, everything will be OK. Her women protect the species with a bond stronger than anything else, and her men believe in each other and the life and society they've created. They may be figuring it out as they go, bug-like and collective, but it's correct as long as it remains instinctual.

Millennials we spoke to after the performance were blown away by Emergence. Well, droning music and abstract dance explorations have been part of the baby boomers' genres since before the 80's, so we were not surprised. Yet the superb performance of this amazing choreography by the highest quality classically-trained dancers from around the world, assembled by the National Ballet of Canada, definitely left us speechless. 

Read about Crystal Pite's 2020 work, Angel's Atlas.

Made in Canada is compelling in its display of the National Ballet's virtuosity and diversity. This program should be toured to schools and universities as a fundraising strategy to build a millennial donor base to replace the current senior one.