{"id":44298,"date":"2017-04-01T17:41:10","date_gmt":"2017-04-01T21:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=44298"},"modified":"2017-04-17T12:50:23","modified_gmt":"2017-04-17T16:50:23","slug":"scrutiny-national-ballets-many-beautiful-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2017\/04\/01\/scrutiny-national-ballets-many-beautiful-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"SCRUTINY | National Ballet’s Mixed Program A Blend Of Comedy And Sober Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Evan
Evan McKie and Tanya Howard in Genus. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

National Ballet of Canada: Genus, with Tarantella & Self and Soul & The Concert. At the Four Seasons Centre. Runs through Sunday, April 2.<\/h3>\n

If there is a single choreographer in the world who never fails to attract attention, it is the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor.\u00a0 For many of us, it was a thrill when the National Ballet of Canada announced that Mr. McGregor would be returning, this time with his successful Paris Ballet commission Genus<\/em> (2007), the splendid follow-up to his sensational Chroma<\/em> (2006), performed here in 2010 and again just two years ago to unanimous acclaim.<\/p>\n

Making its North American premi\u00e8re as the entr\u00e9e to a season-ending mixed bill this weekend, Mr. McGregor’s Genus<\/em> enthralled with its complexities and multivariate movement languages, leaving audiences with much to take away from these remarkable performances.<\/p>\n

In several ways, this was the perfect made-to-order program, one which included Balanchine’s durably popular\u00a0Tarantella<\/em>, a new work Self and Soul<\/em> by the National Ballet’s resident choreographic associate Robert Binet and the whimsically silly Jerome Robbins divertissement The Concert<\/em>, set to Chopin excesses.\u00a0 Still, the opposition of types that blended comedy with sober studies in life and love suited well and made for a balanced evening of varied dance styles to complement the most eclectic palette.<\/p>\n

Returning now to Wayne McGregor, there is a pleasing unity to his development after Chroma.<\/em> At that point in his career, it became more apparent that Mr. McGregor was moving beyond Chroma<\/em>, and he had begun to glide into longer, more intense aerobic narratives, many of which could culminate with a suffused power and exploratory energy into new movement territory.\u00a0 Mr. McGregor developed his preternatural ability to grow lyrical, detailed movement out of the very small turn and flex of each body joint, morphing it into longer coherent stories.\u00a0 Additive narrative became the central means of growing a story-line organically, and in the case of Genus<\/em>, fittingly enough, it was the story of life itself seen through movement in all its power of order and classification that became his subject of intense focus.<\/p>\n

Drawing inspiration from Darwin’s landmark Origen of Species<\/em>, Genus<\/em> really doesn’t speak directly to any of the content of the book.\u00a0 Rather, Mr. McGregor’s work is a lengthy trope on biological and choreographic taxonomies constructed into diverse narratives of compelling beauty, exploring many dance aesthetics set to a broad range of cool-to-the-touch, darkly-hued chords and, at times, stretches of tender, close harmonies.\u00a0 Set to shimmering vocal and instrumental electronica with an overhead screen showing time lapse photography evocative of the popular earth biopic Baraka<\/em>, the score by Joby Talbot and Deru accompanied the wide aspect ratio video well enough to resonate with images reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s opening primordial landscape.<\/p>\n

\"Tanya
Svetlana Lunkina<\/span> (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Genus<\/em> divided into three clear movements with a life-affirming five-minute ensemble coda\/finale.\u00a0 The ensemble work itself consisted of thirteen corps dancers and five paired groupings bringing the total to twenty-three, all of whom have tremendous athletic demands placed on their performative abilities.\u00a0 But here is the point of Genus<\/em>, and many other McGregor works:\u00a0 while often limb movements seemed to evince merely mechanical display, it was the stunning realization that these were human bodies making these extraordinary motions, pushing dancers well beyond the confines of conventional balletic\/movement language into a terra incognita \u2014 an artistic thrill for performers that they could not wait to share with their audiences.\u00a0 McGregor choreographies are so infectious in their kinaesthetic drive that they make me feel I am inside the dancers’ bodies while they make those extraordinary rapid, detailed motions.<\/p>\n

What became immediately apparent at the outset of the first movement was Mr. McGregor’s creative single-mindedness clearly ordinated around taxa, classification and the development of movement at its tiniest sub-classifications.\u00a0 Close partnering featuring wraps, slides, rapid sinewy arm movements in backbone\/spinal cord and front-breastplate decorated black unitards; arms feeling new inner organs and structures, mimetic motions of swimming, flying, digging, floating, soaring: all the animal motions are quickly taxonomied into their relevant biological and movement genera.\u00a0 The range of expression is highly energetic and breathtaking, all of it seemingly birthing the emergence of life on land and sea.<\/p>\n

Mostly set to pairs of dancers, there were far fewer solos in this work, notably only three, brief, visually beautiful and stunning bridging solos and a few lone performers in the ensemble coda.\u00a0 Genus<\/em> is mainly an ensemble ballet of busiest proportions, ranging from two performers on up to full corps.\u00a0 Often, so much can take place onstage that it is difficult to follow everything.\u00a0 The eye must move about from simultaneously moving pairs or trios in order to take in the aggregate motion finale for all it has to offer.\u00a0 In other words, it can take multiple viewings for Genus<\/em> to settle into narrative intelligibility, at least so that our descriptions of this masterpiece do not devolve into vague terms often associated with Mr. McGregor’s work, such as ‘abstraction’.<\/p>\n

The second movement’s three lyrical panels depicted the growth of a sinewy tenderness, but not via the sterility of the ages with every life form passing rapidly before our eyes, as in the first movement.\u00a0 Here, Evan McKie and Tanya Howard were lithe, lovely and lengthy, a beautiful proxy for the details we find in intimate love.\u00a0 Often set downstage to a chorus of choreographic detail, but then more attractively within a kind of specimen box as angled stage within a stage as though we were looking at them from the outside-in, these lush pas-de-deux were as involving for audiences as it seemed to be for the dancers.\u00a0 Here were movements consummately delivered with bracing speed and detail \u2014 Mr. McKie engulfing a contortioned, cradled Ms. Howard, or a rapid series of pivot, turn, slide and scoop-up followed by another mesmerizing sequence.\u00a0 Their performance transported us back in time to the murky dawning of earliest human interactions, intimacies and finally, love.<\/p>\n

There were also many beautiful moments where dance was co-opted into the more obvious Dance-of-Life metaphor, particularly in the ballet’s third movement in which rapid frame-by-frame changes of specimen jars and images of pinned butterflies zip by giving us a sense of the awesomeness of passing millennia, folding over into eons.\u00a0 It was a sobering break with no one on stage, the Lepidoptera flashing by as if in a rapid flickering dance video troping further on a trope seen earlier at the end of the first movement, in which dancer by dancer folded over onto each other like sedimentary layers of geological time.\u00a0 In that first movement’s concluding excerpt, several dancers ended the panel prone under haunting greenish yellow light, as if encased in amber, ready to be discovered by us many ages later, hence the representation of specimen jars, taxonomy diagrams and published papers projected onto the video screen in the third movement. \u00a0It was an effective section prior to the powerfully ecstatic finale.<\/p>\n

\"Evan
Evan McKie and Tanya Howard in Genus. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Such striking images made the performances of Genus<\/em> I saw an enthralling success.\u00a0 At times, it was as though the many paleontological layers the ballet represented could possess the power to confront audiences with crucial questions about the corresponding creative layers Mr. McGregor had applied to his project.\u00a0 His creative strata seemed to be initially concealed from us, but, much like the history of life, upon closer scrutiny, much more was being articulated.\u00a0 A second viewing found Mr. McGregor’s ballet revealed more, unearthing beneath its cool exterior a supremely turbulent series of breathtaking, confluent movement dramas, all telling their own individual story, exploring something very new about the power of ballet to represent the most complex of human narratives, namely the biological ancestry of human life.<\/p>\n

Genus<\/em> may also be seen as the logical precursor to another of Mr. McGregor’s finest ballets, his Limen<\/em> (2011) which also explored bodily proximity boundaries via fundamental organic movements, intricate limb-motion details and the different ways two bodies can interact with one another over long stretches of stage-time.\u00a0 In many ways, the multiplicity of fresh and differing articulations, novel ideas and the sheer power of narrative generativity, find common ground in both these remarkable McGregor works.<\/p>\n

After intermission we moved from butterflies to spiders and it was time for the frivolity of Balanchine’s scarcely frivolousTarantella<\/em>, a non-stop raucous event to the ebullient music of Louis Gottschalk.\u00a0 Based on the Italian spider-dance derived from the southern Italian custom of willfully being poisoned by tarantula bite to induce frenetic movements (see the finale of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony as a fine example), Balanchine turned it into a stylized dance set in the expected compound quadruple time and picked up on the faux genre’s essential folkloric nature:\u00a0 start dancing and don’t stop until the music stops, or until you’re too exhausted to keep going.<\/p>\n

Both Thursday’s and Friday’s couples, Jillian Vanstone\/Skylar Campbell, Jurgita Dronina\/ Francesco Gabriele Frola, conveyed seemingly endless energy.\u00a0 Theirs was a surfeit of tambourine-tapping \u00e9lan with smiles aplenty easily keeping up with Gottschalk’s incessant rhythms.\u00a0 It was smart programming to be sure, taking us back to a time in dance history that was as obsessed with creating ballets of unstinting energy and exuberance that pushed the boundaries of conventional ballet language every bit as much as today.\u00a0 It was an impressive seven-minute display of Neapolitan joie de vivre on both nights and all soloists impressed, whether it was Mr. Frola’s beautiful cabrioles, Ms. Vanstone’s inescapable charm, Ms. Dronina’s astonishing flexibility or Mr. Campbell’s velocity and wit.\u00a0 Balanchine’s light-heartedTarantella<\/em> served suitably well as the perfect counterpoise to Mr. McGregor’s serious-minded Genus.<\/em><\/p>\n

In complete contrast was Mr. Binet’s ernest Self and Soul<\/em>, a beautiful exploration of relationship dynamics, with one central caveat:\u00a0 the extended pas-de-deux at times appeared to convey, in starkest physical terms, an expos\u00e9 of the male dancer’s feelings.\u00a0 The male personified Self, while the female, his embodying soul, was the one who seemed to inhabit him.\u00a0 <\/em>Ambitious, always interesting and with lots to say in its every detail, I was impressed yet again with Mr. Binet’s creative voice finding form in a work that best situated itself as a kind of sequel to his Orpheus Becomes Euridice <\/em>which workshopped at Banff Centre in the summer of 2015.\u00a0 Orpheus<\/em> sought to clarify relationships and rescues in a complex series of interchanging dance dialogues. Self and Soul<\/em> creatively continued that dynamic critically well.<\/p>\n

\"Jurgita
Jurgita Dronina and Robert Stephen in Genus. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Self and Soul<\/em> dancers Emma Hawes and Brendan Saye (Thursday cast) and Calley Skalnik and F\u00e9lix Paquet (Friday cast) \u2014 three of whom had held the stage at Banff for Orpheus <\/em>(except Mr. Saye)\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/em>were each the beneficiaries once again of Mr. Binet’s working methods, namely to allow each dancer’s musico-movement language to shine forth with respect to their body types.\u00a0 Mr. Binet choreographs vulnerability acutely well, and both performances covered a different species of the male role therein with poignancy; Mr. Saye was internally traumatized, and Mr. Paquet was volatile and torn apart.\u00a0 Here, each dancer communicated an exquisite emotional availability that was very captivating on both nights I saw this work, even moving several of us to tears on Friday night.<\/p>\n

Set to a score taken from Winged Victory for the Sullen by the ambient music duo Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, the work was instantly involving, even to long stretches of resonant, mostly unmodulated F major electronica passages that perfectly piqued pathos from the dancers, each enfolding the other, stretching, occasionally contorting, working to phrased climaxes with well-timed lifts that were often followed by physical\/emotional dissolution and collapse upon the stage, as though representing separation of Soul from Self.\u00a0 The female dancer (Soul) would comfort, re-inhabit the male dancer (Self) and another cycle would begin.\u00a0 Often the re-integration of self and soul could be an uneasy one as demonstrated by strained positions of muscular tensions, freezing for a split second and then moving on to an attempted resolution, one which only comes at the end when the male self, crouched on the ground, disappears into the shadow of the female soul who is seated gazing upward, a perfect and beautiful close.<\/p>\n

There have been many such studies of unspecified love over the past decades, however in Mr. Binet’s work, there is little room for excess.\u00a0 All movements are necessary and there is no room for gratuitousness.\u00a0 Mr. Binet is at once as efficient as he is lucid in how he allows a ballet to unfold.\u00a0 As he continues his work, these choreographic virtues, already strengths he possesses, will only grow with time into brilliance.<\/p>\n

Had Mr. Binet omitted his program description, and had he only merely mentioned his inspiration taken from Israeli artist Noa Sadka, there would likely have been more transparency in the ballet’s conveyance.\u00a0 I believe that not reading what the pas de deux was about worked better, leaving the spectator potentially open to many interpretations of what this work can mean.\u00a0 When I saw the work a second time on Friday (by which point I had forgotten what Mr. Binet had written in the program), I found that I was more able to engage with the work in front of me just by working with its title and less so the ballet’s stated ambitions.\u00a0 As a result, I felt there was a greater depth of communication between the personas Mr. Binet was hoping to convey through his performers.<\/p>\n

While it had been said that Mr. Binet’s new work was too short to capture all that was intended by his description of it in the program, try telling that to the audiences, particularly the enrapt Friday night viewers, many of whom stood for Mr. Binet’s new work and were overheard to say how moving it was.\u00a0 Sometimes an epigrammatic nine-minute approach to a love undefined is all one needs, and in this case, Self and Soul<\/em> is a perfect successor to his previous studies in transcendent agap\u00e9.\u00a0 More please, Mr. Binet.<\/p>\n

The evening concluded with the once popular Robbins romp The Concert<\/em>, an audience pleaser with sizeably outdated humour but considerable dance self-mockery to make it a worthwhile re-visit.\u00a0 Recalling an age of caustic satire in the arts from the mid 1950s onward, this balletic Chopiniana, featured as its true first star a technically indomitable\u00a0Andrei Streliaev\u00a0<\/span>seated stage right at the piano, playing as best he could in defiance of normative rubato instinct by instead keeping rhythmic timing as regular as possible for his dancers.\u00a0 They in turn, often obliged with generous amounts of schtick and silliness, messing up balletic symmetry as well as they could to the garrulous amusement of nearly everyone.\u00a0 It was a pleasant thirty-minute insouciant close to a superb evening which proved all in all to be one of the more cleverly constructed mixed bills I’ll remember for a very long time.<\/p>\n

Correction: April 17, 2017. A previous version incorrectly stated\u00a0Andrei <\/em>Streliaev’s name as\u00a0Alexei Streliaev.<\/em><\/p>\n

For more REVIEWS, click HERE<\/u><\/a><\/span>.<\/h3>\n

#LUDWIGVAN<\/i><\/b><\/h3>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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