The National Ballet of Canada/Adieu: A Celebration of Guillaume Côté, choreography by Guillaume Côté, Ethan Colangelo, and Jennifer Archibald, Four Seasons Centre, closes June 5. Tickets here.
The program is supposed to be a celebration of Guillaume Côté. It is his Adieu, but it really isn’t. Quel disappointment!
After over a quarter century with the National Ballet, the dancer is leaving to head his own company, Côté Danse, and to run the annual Le Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur in Quebec. In fact, immediately after Adieu finishes its run on June 5, Côté Danse starts its run at the Bluma Appel on June 6.
But back to Adieu.
The program is bookended with Côté’s Bolero and his new swansong Grand Mirage. In the middle are two new commissions of relentless contemporary choreography to taped music from Ethan Colangelo and Jennifer Archibald, and this is where the evening goes off the rails.
Colangelo’s Reverence, inspired by the Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Archibald’s King’s Fall which explores themes of strategy and sacrifice taken from the game of chess, would be excellent choices for a mixed program of new Canadian works, but feel completely out of place on Adieu, besides making for an overlong evening.
Surely Adieu could have been filled with Côté’s own choreography, either complete pieces or excerpts, which would then make a career parade leading up to the showpiece Grand Mirage. In fact, these earlier choreographies would give context and meaning to Grand Mirage. Instead, the piece comes out of nowhere, as it were.
So, let’s talk about the two pieces that are actually by Côté.
The delightful bonbon Bolero was created for the National’s 60th Anniversary Gala in 2012. Côté has interpreted Ravel’s repeated rhythmic melody as one woman in a white body suit (Genevieve Penn Nabity) being manipulated by four men (Christopher Gerty, Ben Rudisin, Peng-Fei Jiang, and Shaakir Muhammad) in black suits.
She does get to execute some very unballetic but arresting solo moves between heart-stopping lifts, literally turning her into an aerialist. As the music becomes more agitated, the men begin to break out into showy solos or ensembles dances, all the while keeping the woman afloat in exciting fashion, until the five explode together back to the quiet beginning.
The eye-catching Bolero, played with great drama by the National’s orchestra under David Briskin, brought down the house.
Grand Mirage ended the program.
Apparently it was the National’s artistic director Hope Muir who suggested that Côté work with filmmaker Ben Shirinian, with whom he has collaborated before, and the two have come up with a work on the dark side.
Grand Mirage is an ambitious piece that mixes film, dance and scenic design in an impressive merging of art forms to portray a man caught up in memories as he transitions from one life to another.
The piece begins with a dazzling film sequence of Côté, as a man called Will is caught up in a violent storm that captures the tumult of emotions that he is undergoing.
At first there is a black and white film of a rather vicious psychiatrist, The Mystery Guest (former dancer Greta Hodgkinson) telling him to get a grip on himself, but he can’t.
We then see him in a tawdry hotel room designed by Michael Gianfrancesco who also did the costumes. The shades of brown and pink look dark and menacing.
To add to Will’s emotional confusion, the walls open and dissolve into a film set. Throughout he goes through a flashback of images, almost like a Fellini film where things are off centre and not quite real.
There are young men who could be former incarnations of himself at various stages of his career.
Some can dance up a storm like the Faun (David Preciado) and others like Arnie The Bell Boy (Albjon Gjorliaku), Fred The Film Crew (Ross Allen) and The Stunt Double (Mattieu Pagès) who exercise more controlled dance or various tasks of command while wandering throughout.
Then there are the women, The Sylph (Hannah Galway) and Renee (Arielle Miralles). The first is overly romantic, while the latter is more tempestuous.
Each sequence has its own very individual choice of music from Chopin to Frank Sinatra to Peter Gabriel to Combustible Edison, all put cunningly together by sound designer John Gzowski.
The piece is not so much dance as movement, with characters blurring into each other. There is a sort of pas de deux with The Sylph, but it is more lift and carry on the bed.
Grand Mirage represents a whirlwind of confused memories, and the result is a piece that looks back more than it looks forward, but just at the end we do get a flash of Will looking ahead.
In short, Côté has created a movie in real life images.
Now if only we could have had an all-Côté evening as a build to this climactic Grand Mirage.
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