Choreographers: James Kudelka, Emma Portner and Crystal Pite
Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada, the National Ballet of Canada’s programme at Sadler’s, showcases three works which aim to signal ‘a seismic shift in the choreographic landscape’. Passion, choreographed by former Artistic Director of the company, James Kudelka, forms the first half of the show. But it is the second half that is truly spectacular, with rising star Emma Portner’s islands and Angels’ Atlas by the internationally renowned Crystal Pite.
islands is Portner’s debut ballet, which first premiered in 2020. It’s a riveting piece. For much of it, the two female dancers work as one, seemingly welded together and rooted to the spot. But far from being a restriction, this creates a liberating playfulness in which the variation of their movements is astonishing. You feel you’ve never seen the human body move like this before as they mirror each other’s jerky, angular arm gestures and witty leg-knotting. At the beginning, the pair seems like limbs of a strange sea creature, undulating, stretching and shrinking, and the evocative lighting and sound evoke an underwater world. Later, they pull apart, stripping out of tracksuit bottoms as if breaking free from a carapace. Portner describes her ballet as a sculptural duet, the programme listing its ‘eclectic compilation of contemporary music’ which spans hip hop, dub, guitar loops and electronic sampling. Particularly notable is Lily Koningsberg’s Rock and Sin, underscoring the inseparability of the two dancers, who on Press Night are Heather Ogden and Genevieve Penn Nabity.
Crystal Pite’s work is so dazzlingly imaginative it is hard to trap it in words. Visually, Angels’ Atlas is ravishing. It’s as if illustrations from Gustave Doré’s Paradise Lost have come to life. It begins in darkness, with a spectacular floating backdrop of radiant white light morphing cloud-like against a black sky. Gradually, rows of identical bodies are revealed, prone in patterned lines, unmoving. Their monochrome costumes, fittingly for the presentation of angels, are genderless. Everything about the design by Jay Gower Taylor and lighting designer Tom Visser captivates as they manipulate light in complex, painterly ways. At one moment, a large square of white light seems to fall forward and becomes a frame on the ground, creating a radical shift of perspective.
Pite choreographs the work for the whole company, creating an ever-changing tableau. Sometimes, a single pair of dancers expresses some powerful human feeling. When the other dancers appear, they seem intuitively to respond to one or other of these roles, echoing and ultimately transforming them. These are balanced with moments of poised stasis with throb with life. There is no story as such, but Angels’ Atlas feels full of stories. At other times, the dancers seem to become part of a machine, trapped into repeating patterns of robotic moments. Owen Belton’s memorable electronic music pulses and crackles. Pite herself talks of wanting the sound to evoke ‘a fierce pulse of life’. But there is sheer beauty, too, as the dancers finally move to the glorious choral piece by Morten Lauridsen, O Magnum Mysterium, Angels’ Atlas becoming a moving evocation of transcendence.
The best that can be said for James Kudelka’s Passion is that it is a useful baseline from which to judge the way in which the National Ballet of Canada has transformed itself. It’s an over-extended illustration of the fundamental difference between classical and modern ballet. Classical ballerinas in pastel tutus twinkle around the stage or pose as if for Degas, while a modern couple weaves in and out in the age-old dance of courtship, the movements freer and more gymnastic. It’s a neat enough concept, but it’s one that is simply repeated over and over, with the same movements. Inevitably, our attention is forced on the modern couple, so the role of the classical ballerinas is reduced to a mere backdrop. It’s all sadly lacking in passion.
Runs until 6 October 2024
Pite’s and Portner’s works astonish
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