The last time The National Ballet of Canada visited Sadler’s Wells was in 2013, so a repeat visit is long overdue. Last time it was Romeo and Juliet; this time it is three short pieces by contemporary choreographers, “an all-Canadian triple bill” under Hope Muir’s artistic direction.
One half-hour piece, Passion, from the company’s former dancer and artistic director James Kudelka; a fifteen-minute number, islands, from twenty-something Emma Portner; and one, the half-hour Angels’ Atlas, from the renowned Crystal Pite, whose many works have been seen here and at the Royal Opera House, make for an interesting programme, but it doesn't sweep me away.
Fascinating visions, concepts and music that keep one’s attention when not distracted by the curse of the modern age, mobile phones, classical and contemporary in juxtaposition reveal the strength of each discipline and how one feeds the other.
Kudelka’s Passion (2013) blatantly mixes the two. A couple in contemporary dress (McGee Maddox and Heather Ogden), though she is still on pointes, seems to have wandered into a classical tutu ballet—five corps, three courtly couples, correct, almost emotion free. But like Romeo and Juliet with eyes only for each other across a crowded ballroom scene, the trespassing couple does not seem to see the ballet going on around them, as they weave through it.
Is the classical ballet the feelings in their hearts? Or are they expressing more volubly the passion in the clinical classical marionettes? Or are they two different sides of a coin? For me it’s the music, Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano in D, Op. 61a played live by Zhenya Vitort, that provides the emotional drama. As always, it is lovely to have a live orchestra, tonight (second night) under the baton of David Briskin.
Portner’s islands is something else. It premièred at Norwegian National Ballet in 2020, but she has been around for a while, choreographing for the musical Bat Out of Hell amongst others. I’ve not come across her before, but she’s on my radar now. What a fabulous and intriguing new voice.
Fifteen tight minutes, but what an impact: to a soundscape that incorporates electronica, dub and more (the list of music is long), under lighting by Paul Vidar Saevarang (very Michael Hulls, Russell Maliphant’s—in the audience tonight—frequent collaborator), two female dancers, clones, perform an intricate intimate duet.
Conjoined twins, perhaps, or AI still under construction, in a pair of trousers with four legs, joined at the waist, Heather Ogden and Genevieve Penn Nabity, intertwine and weave their limbs into impossible configurations. I’m reminded of Wayne McGregor both in body language and subject matter.
Trousers come off—a shedding of snakeskin or coming out of a chrysalis—they still cling to each other, though with greater freedom of movement. Music is apocalyptic, storms and blips, the creation of a new world? Or is Portner thinking of metaphysical poet John Donne?
Which brings us to Pite’s Angels’ Atlas (2020)—a guide to passing from this life to the next? Some thirty dancers moving as one in Pite’s familiar shoal style, all dressed in black split trousers and bare torsos (females in flesh-coloured tops), follow the light, and the gaps in the divine dazzling fractured light (astonishing light backdrop design by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser).
The late Bill Viola comes to mind. And Dante’s Divine Comedy. The music rather spells it out: Tchaikovsky’s “Liturgy of St John Chrysostom” (deep Russian basses), Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium”, woven with original music by Owen Belton.
Prostrate figures rise and search for the way. It is not easy to navigate. The music becomes troubling tinnitus noise, scary. Is this the birth of time or the end? Dramatic, Blakean: worship, death throes, and a rite. Couples (five) seek expiation (Hannah Galway and Siphesihle November are outstanding—Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld?) and find grief.
Which level of the Inferno are they in? It doesn't look like Paradise, maybe Purgatory—that’s life. Pite likes to command a large group, the larger the better she once said. So much grief in the world at the moment makes Angels’ Atlas a difficult if visually captivating watch.