My June culturefest is finally winding to a temporary pause, with this afternoon's summer mixed programme from the National Ballet of Canada. The first and last works on the programme were both wonderful in their very, very different ways. The middle one, alas, did not work at all for me although many others were greatly taken with it.
But, start at the beginning. Kenneth Macmillan's Elite Syncopations is a crowd pleaser if ever there was one. With music drawn from the rags of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries, an onstage band dressed in costumes and straw boaters, and the entire dancing cast done up in outrageously coloured hand-painted tights, it's impossible not to smile right from the get-go. And once Elite Syncopations gets going, it's hard not to laugh outright. Fortunately, no one expects a Toronto audience to try!
The dancers depict the conventions of a public dance hall of the late 19th century, and each one has a distinct individual character to create. There's the shy guy, who wants to ask every girl to dance but doesn't know how, the two wallflowers who inevitably end up together, the flirtatious sexy girl who has to get every guy in sight onto the dance floor, the short guy who ends up partnered with the tallest girl in the room, and so on. Macmillan's choreography is a perfect visual primer on how to create hilarious stage pictures with ridiculous poses. Not only that, but the comedy artfully conceals the sheer virtuosity of the piece. Only in the penultimate number, a flashy flying solo danced on this occasion by Keichi Hirano, does the technical flair of the dancing draw attention to itself -- and even then, it is very stylish in keeping with the occasion.
It was also great to see the former music director of the National Ballet Orchestra, Ormsby Wilkins, back on stage as the conductor and pianist of the dance band -- alternating between the beautifully tuned modern concert grand and a nasally twangy old honky-tonk upright.
The second piece was Maurice Bejart's Song of a Wayfarer, a brooding, intense duet for two men, one of whom acts as a kind of shadow double of the other. Beautifully as it was danced, I couldn't enjoy it because of the music. I'm very familiar with Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, and the very clear and specific images the poetry conjures up. When the choreography seems to bear no relationship whatsoever to the poetic and musical imagery, the result for me is a kind of disconnection, in which the two seem to belong in two different performances. That's one of the perils of coming to the ballet with an extensive background in classical music.
The final work was Wayne McGregor's Chroma, the piece that introduced McGregor to National Ballet audiences -- hard to believe that is still less than two years ago! My first exposure to Chroma created a sense of shock and awe at the sheer dynamism, power, and energy of both music and dance. Now, with the lapse of time, and with knowing what to expect, I can pick up more of the subtleties of detail -- and there is a lot of detail flying by very quickly! While one or two sections have gentler, more lyrical music, there is nothing lyrical about the choreography. It's spiky, dangerous, dynamic, and bizarre to the nth degree. Not only do the dancers move with incredible speed and power, but they continually twist their bodies into positions that you aren't even sure you saw right, so impossible do they appear. More than almost any other contemporary work the National Ballet has done, this one truly stretches dancers beyond the limits, and shows off just what this company is capable of doing, in spades!
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