The return to live performances continues to accelerate for me. After hearing a choral concert, and viewing a dance programme, during a 5-day period last week, I now have experienced both a live dance performance and a live orchestral concert in one day (Saturday, November 13).
In this case, both organizations (the National Ballet and the Toronto Symphony) planned to follow a cautious path, at first selling less than the full capacity of the house, and opting for a 70-80 minute long programme with no intermission.
The National Ballet of Canada presents its first live performances in its home venue, the Four Seasons Centre for the Arts, with a return of one of the works presented in the last complete run of performances before the pandemic shutdown occurred, a work created especially for video presentation during the shutdown, and a beloved, timeless classic from the company's standing repertoire.
Keywords for the first work on the programme, George Balanchine's classic Serenade (created in 1934): "poise" and "grace." It's ironic that many people think of those qualities in relation to classical ballet, yet many of the most loved classical masterworks are largely designed as stunning demonstrations of the athletic skill of the dancers. Serenade is different indeed, and it's the difference that gives this work its timeless quality.
Balanchine was famed for his desire to bring his dance into full communion with the music on which he set it, and in this he was worlds apart from the great choreographers of the past -- who tended to treat the music as so many yards of interchangeable carpeting on which to mount their showpieces.
The curtain rises on a stage awash in blue light, with seventeen women standing in ordered diagonal lines, each one raising her right hand with the palm turned out. That moment of pure order and beauty presages the entire piece to follow. Even though many passages in Serenade call for very intricate footwork indeed, it's always poised and graceful, never as aware of its own cleverness as the great showstoppers of the past tend to be. In this, the ballet is completely at one with its music, the gentle, courtly Serenade for Strings by Tchaikovsky, a musical work best described (in painting terms) as gentle, subdued watercolours or pastels rather than vigorous, vibrant colours in oils.
While the company rose magnificently to the more high-speed technical challenges of the third movement (actually Tchaikovsky's finale), it was the slower, more lyrical work in the other sections that captured my imagination and defined the performance. Serenade is definitely a company piece, and it's as a company that dancers make this work happen. It wasn't hard to see the corporate unanimity of the dancers in making the entire piece glow as vibrantly as they did. Never have the final moments of Serenade seemed at once so mournful yet so uplifting (not intended as a pun, by the way).
In lieu of an intermission, the company opted to present the one of the video dance works designed expressly for online presentation during the pandemic, Jera Wolfe's Soul. I'd seen Soul on line when it was first presented last year, and was looking forward to seeing it on the big screen as opposed to my rather unambitious little laptop. I was certainly not disappointed as the screen was big enough to fill the entire proscenium of the Four Seasons Centre, and the piece definitely stood to gain in impact and beauty from the enlargement of the visual image.
However...
A patron sitting just in front of me and a few seats to the right began coughing right during the opening moments of the film, when the dancers are discovered by the camera even before the music begins. And coughed again. And again. And kept right on coughing, for almost the entire film before finally getting the sense to get up and leave to get a bottle of water. By which time the film was ending. "Mad enough to spit nails" about sums up my reaction. That thoughtless person totally ruined that piece for me. Sigh. It's a pity because the dance work and the videography are both intense and evocative in equal measures. But just try to maintain concentration on the screen with that storm of coughing going on not 3 metres in front of you.
At the time of its first presentation, March 2020, Crystal Pite's Angels' Atlas already impressed as a stunning example of dance fused with extraordinary visual components. Today, it remains all of that -- and then some -- but strikes me even more as a fitting metaphor for our gradual emergence out of the darkness of the last year and a half.
Like Pite's previous work for the company, Emergence (but for very different reasons), Angels' Atlas is very much more than just another dance work. I'm sure that I am far from being the only person in the audience who responded to this extraordinary vision at an intense, gut-level of emotional impact.
The impact of Angels' Atlas is a tripartite collaboration -- the dance, the lighting design (including the extraordinary light show on the backcloth), and the music.
Pite's choreography retains many of the signature touches familiar from Emergence -- the short, choppy movements, the repeated pulsations as single body parts moves over and over in the same cycle, the entire company moving in unison and then breaking off into subgroups. Also notable is the quick yet smooth transitions from the whole company to a pas de deux, which then morphs into pas de trois or pas de quatre, and so on. In Pite's own words, "I'm trying to create something...that evokes a fierce pulse of life."
At first, it seems that the serenely evocative choral music of Tchaikovsky (Cherubic Hymn) and Lauridsen (O magnum mysterium) is ill-suited to this kind of dance language. But as the dance and the music proceed together, the long-held vocal notes and sharp, repeated movements fuse together into a continuum whose ends are clearly marked, but whose central remainder has yet to be clearly seen or felt. Owen Belton's original score for the second section of the ballet creates a more mysterious and haunting sense of space, time, and eternity, freeing itself from the strictures of place and culture which the more Christian ethos of the religious works invariably imposes.
The third and most striking element of the trifecta is the lighting plot, and the backdrop light show. For anyone old enough to remember the impact of witnessing Stanley Kubrick's landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen when it was new (1968), the same awesome sense of infinity attends Jay Gower Taylor's design and concept for the backdrop. Although this light show unfolds in pure white rather than colours, it draws the entire work with it into a timeless realm of glowing power, almost a literal equivalent of Shelley's "white radiance of Eternity."
Since both the title and Pite's own notes about the work make clear that she was also intrigued by the contrast of our limited here-and-now with the limitless possibilities of the eternal, it seems plain to me that Angels' Atlas has succeeded beyond all measure in taking the audience into that exact place, the place where certainty gives way to speculation, and limitation becomes possibility. I dare say this may sound very pompous to some people, but this most definitely is not your common or garden variety of modern dance, no matter how you approach it.
In this work, the company displayed extraordinary unanimity in meeting Pite's need for the entire group to "pulsate" as one, with hands, faces, shoulders, or whatever all moving right together. Also very evocative, particularly so, was the first pas de deux which emerges out of the first full company section.
Although Serenade and Angels' Atlas couldn't be more different in their essential natures, there are still some significant connections between them. Both are company pieces, both demand of the company a strong sense of moving together and standing together, and both make use of light as a key structural and emotional component of the entire work. You can add Soul to the list, too, because of the striking and evocative use of light and shadows in the filmography of the work.
In the strength of the company's responses to both main works, it was easy to see that this return to the light was as significant and life-enhancing for the dancers as for the audience. I think this performance will linger long in the memories of those fortunate enough to see it.
Serenade and Angels' Atlas with Soul remains on stage at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto until November 27.
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