The most chilling revelation at the third performance of Innovations by the National Ballet of Canada on Saturday night was that John Cage’s 4’33” simply cannot be realised in Toronto.
José Navas and James Kudelka, whose new works bookended the four-piece programme at the Four Seasons Centre, both used silence as part of their choreography — but the audience steadfastly refused to grant it. A particularly touching moment in Kudelka’s … black night’s bright day … was accompanied by a large chorus of coughs, concluded, as if by a little fanfare, with someone blowing their nose.
Was this the audience aggressively telling its presenters that silence may be fine when we’re trying to sleep, but not when we’re out for some Saturday-night stimulation?
Not that there wasn’t a lot of stimulation to enjoy in this programme.
Innovation, like Creativity, has been overused to the point that its waistband no longer snaps back into shape, allowing too much fabric to drift annoyingly under our skinny jeans. So the National Ballet’s guest and resident choreographers can be forgiven for dancing arabesques around the interesections between classical ballet and modern dance without jetéing the company out of the envelope.
As a music critic, what fascinated me the most about this programme — brand-new works from Kudelka, Navas (Watershed) and Unearth by young resident choreographer Robert Binet as well as the first Toronto presentation of Being and Nothingness (Part 1) by dancer-choreographer Guillaume Côté — was the relationship between the shape of the music and its translation into movement.
The translations from sound to flailing limbs ranged from the purely geometric, in Navas’ case, to deeply psychological in a literal way (Côté) and lyrically (Kudelka). (Binet and his composer, Toronto’s Owen Pallett, were too clever for their own good, creating a hodgepodge of sound and movement in Unearth that didn’t cohere.)
Greta Hodgkinson was mesmerizing in her 7 minutes of compulsive, tightly coiled repeated motions set on the fourth movement of Philip Glass’s Metamosphosis I-V (rendered on solo piano by Edward Connell). Psychological implications aside, the movement was a direct representation on Glass’s obsessive musical repetitions.
Navas’s breathtaking tableaux often used the whole company — some rendered in shadow play in James Ingalls’ striking lighting design — and revelled in the possibilities of pure abstraction, meticulously sculpted out of moving and still bodies. The movement clearly picked up on composer Benjamin Britten’s meticulously structured Four Sea Interludes., created from the entr’acte music for Peter Grimes.
Interestingly, though, Britten’s Sea Interludes are meant to evoke specific images and states of mind, so watching Watershed meant having to separate the movement from my personal associations with the opera Peter Grimes.
Even so, the power and clarity of Navas’ conception turned Watershed to be the evening’s highlight for me.
Kudelka’s piece also had a larger-scale impact. It is built on Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, a meditation on Mary’s anguish at the crucifixion of Jesus, extended by the choreographer into a much broader meditation on mortality. Kudelka consistently picks up on and makes obvious in movement a lyrical element in Pergolesi’s music that subliminally tells us that we need to celebrate life in the midst of death.
I wish I could say that the music itself was consistently performed as nicely as it might be in a concert setting. The Pergolesi, rendered in more-or-less period style on the National Ballet Orchestra’s modern instruments under music director David Briskin was clearly, uncomfortably the work of musicians completely out of their comfort zone. The singing by Dame Emma Kirkby and Daniel Taylor from the pit sounded tentative and weak, taking away from the music’s impact.
Fortunately, what was happening on stage made up for the aural deficiencies.
The National Ballet and its choreographers invited to create Innovation may not be storming the battlements of the familiar, but innovation is often overrated — and great craft never is.
You’ll find all the details on the Innovation programme here.
This is a promotional clip for … black night’s bright day … :
John Terauds