Today, another performing arts company takes a first bow in this blog. On the weekend, I travelled to Kelowna, British Columbia, to see the first live-audience show since the pandemic by Ballet Kelowna.
This is a small company with just eight dancers, but under the guidance of their Artistic Director, Simone Orlando, they definitely create a large impact on their audiences.
The program consisted of three works by contemporary Canadian choreographers, although -- as it happened -- all three made at least some use of classical music in scoring their works.
The evening opened with the world premiere of Kirsten Wicklund's The Forever Part. The recorded music track made use of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (played by brass instruments), and of the Aria da capo from the same composer's Goldberg Variations on piano. A central section between these bookends used an electronic score created by Wicklund.
This dance work, with its title implying meditation on things too big for humans to personally know, made extensive use of a stage prop not often seen in dance performance -- carpets. Every time one of those carpets was rolled out, and a corner was left poking up slightly, I found myself worrying that one of the dancers would trip on a carpet and execute a graceful face-plant (which is exactly what I would do in that situation!). In any case, the carpets added visual interest to the bare stage as well as stimulating questions in the viewer's mind.
The same was true of the complex lighting plot. The performance opened with a series of brief, dramatically lit vignettes, succeeded in turn by blackouts while the dancers relocated themselves. This peculiar procedure certainly reflected the episodic character of the opening pages of Bach's Toccata and Fugue but it did nothing to help me feel that the work was actually getting under way.
Once the blackouts were over, the piece did move along more satisfactorily. On the whole, I found this first section of Wicklund's work hard to warm up to, as I felt that the choreography could have taken fuller advantage of the dramatic extremes in Bach's score.
Once the Toccata and Fugue ended, Wicklund's electronic score took over and created sounds evocative of mysterious distances in space, time, and thought. At this point, the dance brought us into the meditations that the title of the piece suggested, in choreography which became at times much more subdued and subtle. The final entry of the Aria da capo led into a lovely, evocative pas de deux which brought the piece to a suitably satisfying conclusion.
The second work was commissioned by Ballet Kelowna and originally staged in 2019. Heather Dotto's Petrushka, made use of selected fragments of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score combined with electronic soundscape effects. Rather than try to mount the story-ballet original, Dotto has chosen to merely sketch in the highlights of the story and focus instead on the loss of control inherent in becoming or being a puppet.
The eight dancers in the piece each take turns at being human or puppet, and also take turns manipulating or being manipulated by each other. One of Dotto's most evocative images was the sight of the eight puppets seated shoulder to shoulder in a row, all slouching or flopping slightly in different ways. They were sitting on the stage floor, but I could have sworn that I could see a shelf which they were perched on. This use of the physicality of puppets is one of the key requirements for the dancers in this piece.
Playfulness was the keynote of much of Dotto's choreography, as was a rubber-elastic ability to stretch and twist the body into all sorts of odd configurations. Another endearing image, used twice, was the vertical row of heads, one above another, all observing the one dancer who wasn't lined up in the stack. Several comic vignettes were created by having faces or bodies suddenly snap into freeze-frame positions.
The last one-third of Petrushka suffered from an apparent loss of direction, and from excessive sameness compared to what we had seen before. In the end, the piece ended, not with a bang but with a whimper, quietly and unexpectedly -- and that ending led me to suspect that the seeming aimlessness may have been deliberate.
This Petrushka, perhaps best described as a sideshow riff on the original, was both entertaining and involving precisely because it was like nothing else I had ever seen. Although it had its comical moments, I was left overall with a feeling of sadness at how little control any of the puppets (or us) really have in life.
The final work, after the intermission, was another world premiere: Celestial Mechanics by Robert Stephen.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST ALERT: Robert Stephen is my nephew.
This work used the entirety of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 12 in A-flat Major. Not one of the master's better-known works, this sonata certainly represents, in its four movements, a uniquely experimental approach to musical form -- an approach reflected in the dance.
Unlike the other two works, this piece made use of a classical-modern fusion of dance styles, with pointe work incorporated.
It was hard to watch this dance work without recalling George Balanchine's famous dictum: "See the music; hear the dance." Not that Stephen's work looked much like anything Balanchine did or might have done, but the flowing, seamless musicality of his choreography and the degree of integration with Beethoven's musical muse and intentions were both intense and unmistakable.
That flowing character was helped not a little by the use, in varying degrees, of costumes using long, full, flowing skirts by both male and female dancers. Nor did the un-gendering of the work end there, as numerous moments involved men lifting men, women lifting women, women lifting men, and multiple more breaks from the classical traditions of who does what on stage.
The first movement, a theme and variations, brought us a sequence of dances: a solo, a duet where the first dancer was joined by the second, a duet where the first dancer was replaced by a third, then the second replaced by a fourth, the third by a fifth, and finally another solo to round the piece out.
The second and fourth movements, both high-energy and highly rhythmic scherzos in character if not in name, were matched with equally energetic movement.
The real heartbeat of the work came in the sombre third movement funeral march. The intensity and darkness of the music found a perfect counterpart in Stephen's poignant choreography, and were increased by the use of universally dark costuming. In the final moments, the sweeping of the skirts became a positive swirling storm, presaging the final movement's emphatic discarding of sorrow. Overall, it was the sheer humanity and compassion of the dance that made the third movement such a memorable highlight of the evening.
In closing, I must praise the overall intensity and commitment as well as the skill of the dancers in the Ballet Kelowna company. All eight members were involved in the first two pieces, while the final work did let two of them have a breather. It was a terrific amount of high-intensity, high-stakes dancing for this small group of artists and they presented it magnificently. Kudos to the dancers and to Artistic Director Simone Orlando. Kelowna's dance lovers have a real treasure in this company!
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