Hannah Galway in Angels’ Atlas. Photo by Karolina Kuras
(Program)
The National Ballet of Canada presented the world premiere of Crystal Pite’s Angel’s Atlas in a mixed of program that also included Chroma and Marguerite and Armand on February 29th, 2020. The program runs till March 7th at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
Angel’s Atlas
Choreography by Crystal Pite
Original music by Owen Belton
Chroma
Choreography by Wayne McGregor
Staged by Odette Hughes
Marguerite and Armand
Choreography by Frederick Ashton
Staged by Grant Coyle
A local hit, a farewell piece, and a world premiere walk into a bar, and find that what they all have in common is a preoccupation with the urgency and plasticity of life before death swallows it up. The National Ballet of Canada’s mixed programs seldom sell out like this one—a travesty, since they always contain works that foreshadow the future of the company and spotlight the stars of tomorrow…
Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, a perennial favourite, opened the program with its familiar sterile, blistering blankness of a deceptively expensive set, designed by English architect John Pawson. Bathing the audience in scrubbed white light, the first figure to move was Principal Dancer Svetlana Lunkina. With firmly planted feet she swoops like a plover in oblique inspection of her partner, Brent Parolin. A series of such swoops, articulated expertly through each of Lunkina’s vertebrae, initiates the style of movement that characterizes Chroma—somewhere between robotic and sensuous with a twisting precision that resembles the courtship rituals of tropical birds.
The gender-neutral costumes for the ten dancers are a palette of blushing greige neutrals, shades that would be indifferent and unassuming on any other background besides this glaring matte canvas. On their canvas, the dancers striking geometric shapes are like watercolour Futhark characters spelling out McGregor’s anatomical theses. Set to composer Joby Talbot’s White Stripes inspired score, the explorative gestures of the dancers never form a pattern despite their consistent style. Instead, each sequence introduces a new experiment with spine-defying flexibility and sharp speed that seem to procedurally test the limits of the human body. Though I’ve seen Chroma many times, it always remains fascinating to see dancers both unlearn and rely intensely on their decades of balletic training—McGregor’s vocabulary is familiar but inverted, with plosive gesture and daring partner work that contains all the inquisitive energy of an arctic expedition.
Both Lunkina and the ever-bendy Tanya Howard are ideal casting for these roles, both possessing the alien facility to make a joke of human joints with their extreme extensions… though not without a sense of flirtatiousness. And the beautiful second soloist Siphesihle November, heavily featured in both paper and staged programs, clearly caught Crystal Pite’s eye for a reason. Even within the choreography’s tried and tested precision, he broadcasts a smirking ease and effortless flow that manages to steal the stage from resident scene-stealer himself Skylar Campbell during a generously applauded segment. With this tease of his capabilities, I looked forward to seeing him star in the world premiere of Pite’s Angels’ Atlas later on that evening.
Artists of the Ballet in Angels’ Atlas. Photo by Karolina Kuras
But before that holy spectacle came Prima ballerina Greta Hodgkinson’s farewell to the stage in a resurrection of Marguerite and Armand, the piece made for (and made famous by) eponymous pair Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in 1963. Based on Dumas’ 1848 novel, La Dame aux camélias, and preceded by Verdi’s La Traviata, the story of a consumptive courtesan spurned by her young lover is well-known enough to be told in a brief thirty-two minutes. However, not all its elements read well in the present day; some, like set designer Cecil Beaton’s two-storey original projections of Fonteyn and Nureyev, ought to have stayed scrapped. With every reverence for their significant and storied careers, a massive image of romantically tortured Guillaume Côté mugging for the camera inspired more cringing than pathos, and a whispering skein of silk slung across the image did little to subdue its dated drama. However, though I stifled giggles a few times at elements that Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! clearly borrowed from heavily and haphazardly, the leads were miles beyond that particular reproach. Côté entered taking choreography originated by Nureyev very seriously, effecting a few flawless arabesques and à la seconde turns without a single tremor—tricky for taller male dancers with more muscle weight to contend with.
And Greta Hodgkinson was deeply, tragically touching with every fluttering gesture, conveying both despair and defiance in just the articulation of her wrist. Like Bergman and Garbo, her capacity to ground melodrama in true depth of feeling pierces the slightly campy tone of the piece. Hodgkinson is at her best when introducing small details of her character’s illness that gather opacity over the ballet’s course: a small quaver in her locked knees, the hapless drooping of her porcelain hands as Côté turns her carefully, the anguish her face expresses seeping down into the slope of her shoulders as she refuses to clarify why she left Armand… she was the very portrait of beauty in decline. From florid Belle Époque scenes where men fawn over her to icy spectacles of the final, isolated days of consumption, Hodgkinson’s Marguerite is ever heartfelt in her pleas for understanding and longing for love.
In early scenes the two become quite intimate in the ballroom, suggesting a passionate relationship for all to side-eye, and are as equally open with their drama when Armand picks a very public fight later in the piece after Marguerite is forced to find a new patron in her weakening state. This was when the choreography became too aggressive to keep me invested in Marguerite’s love for Armand: he yanks her around through she’s clearly unwell, throws money on her after slinging her to the floor, then feels bad about it for about four seconds before continuing to degrade her in front of onlookers. This was a jarring turn-off in a derivative like Moulin Rouge! and reads no better here; it left me wondering how much choreography and character may need to be massaged over the years as societal tolerance of abusive behaviour continues to fade.
Though I felt no sympathy for Côté’s Armand as he lopes remorsefully to her bedside, cape and cravat flopping picturesquely, a silky turn of Marguerite’s wrist somehow forgives it all. Their final pas was excruciating in its tenderness, prompting an understanding in the moment as to why Hodgkinson may have chosen this piece. Originally created in tribute to the creative chemistry of two of ballet’s greatest stars and certainly its most famous partnership, the flowing trust between herself and Guillaume Côté made all the alienating elements of the piece work. A few years ago, Hodgkinson entrusted newly appointed Choreographic Associate Côté with her desire for a solo piece and the resulting Being and Nothingness looms large even in a career overloaded with memorable roles (plus a Gap campaign). That intimate ease and mutual esteem showed in how they tackled characters I would otherwise never root for.
I felt particularly fortunate to be sitting behind a small girl who asked her father quiet questions throughout the wordless piece, decoding the story as it unfolded. When Marguerite finally expires and is laid to rest after an elegiac pas-de-deux, the girl asked “is she dead?” in hushed horror. Though I ruefully found myself past the age of blind romanticism, clocking anachronistic set elements and suppressing a few eye-rolls, it was humbling to see a legend in her time through the eyes of a child and be reminded of the weighty legacy that Greta Hodgkinson leaves behind, ushered onwards by many encores.
But the theatre’s energy changed as the orchestra went dark for the third and final part of the night’s mixed program, sizzling with an electricity that transcended your usual World Premiere static. Since her first piece for the National Ballet of Canada, Emergence, premiered in 2009, Crystal Pite has become globally renown and sought after. Other astonishing works like Revisor have been staged locally by Canadian Stage, a seemingly impossible marriage of concept and choreography that staggered critics with its originality. I’ve never closed my notebook while on assignment, but knew that there’s no room for scribbling with Pite—she works with the moment as a medium, letting it decay while burning new life through the previous moment’s unsettled dust. Looking away or accessing primary motor functions are options available only to the most soulless Philistines in the audience.
True to her track record, my jaw dropped within the first few seconds of the curtain rising and never managed to close until the curtain call. Pite’s program notes had alluded to her partner Jay Gower Taylor’s “system that allows him to manipulate reflected light”, an analog concept rendered into reality by lighting designer Tom Visser. But even her intricate description of this technique couldn’t prepare me for the million-watt moonlight fractured through a kaleidoscope of broken glass: a breathing prism, protean and dimensional. I quit my current religion and transferred all faith to this new lighting technology, able to speculate afterwards why this piece was vaguely dubbed “New Work by Crystal Pite” for many months after the 19/20 program was announced. I can easily imagine how summarizing in a mere title how this heavenly apparition descends and delivers veins of glowing light in rivulets and fractals down towards dancers to amplify their expression must have felt daunting at best, and almost profane.
Artists of the Ballet in Angels’ Atlas. Photo by Karolina Kuras
An ensemble thirty-seven members strong rose in unison under this celestial phenomenon, costumed in flowing hakama pants and nude tops affecting the appearance of monks locked into a devotional practice. Their limbs sweep and contort in a ritualistic unity underscored by Owen Belton’s original music interspersed with hymns by Tchaikovsky and Morten Lauridsen. The effect is deeply spiritual as torsos carve outwards into the space followed by orbiting arms, constructing the cavernous sense of enormity one can feel under an open sky or in a cathedral, punctuated by nerve twitches that seem to explore the neurological sensations of ecstatic rapture. They pulse their palms in front of their foreheads and hearts, mimicking the frenzied thrum of life impossible to hold onto longer than a heartbeat. This choral movement functioned like sonar, charting darkened depths of the mind through broad, expansive gestures. Pite has said she hopes to capture something eternal through an ephemeral tool like the body, and her ensemble grapples with their own plasticity and impermanence until they leave only Siphesihle November alone on stage.
Making good on a signature style teased earlier, Siphesihle’s sinuous leaps and twists read like questions posed to the empty space. He shares his featured role with Corps de Ballet member Hannah Galway, who smiles unselfconsciously in her company portrait like the archetypal little sister we can all wish well in a role that puts her on the map. Possibly cast for their unusual physical idiolects that are subtly distinct from the rest of the ensemble, both young dancers indulge in Pite’s encouragement to access a personal inner voice. November described her process as “empowering”, and it shows in how the pair embrace the unformed, mercurial impulses of movers still developing their craft.
Artists of the Ballet in Angels’ Atlas. Photo by Karolina Kuras
Perhaps the most stirring moment of the piece came after Galway follows an unwinding snare of light along the back of the stage while November curls and unfurls centre-stage. The pristine clarity of a ringing of a bell seems to possess her, channelling through her undulating limbs as November cradles her skull and watches helplessly as the sound moves through her. But the moment of ecstatic possession seems to be fatal: the ensemble files back in as her once tense and twisting body seizes and expires in his hands. Internally, I echoed the little girl who had been taken home to bed before this final piece, stricken with unexpected grief as November lays Galway’s head on the stage under angelic lights. Another woman kneels by him, restfully placing a hand on his chest as if giving him permission to let go and laying him back while all ensemble members are connected in this moment of loss. The following sequence is fiercely defiant of the death and darkness that waits at the edges of the refracted light, ending on an unexpected note of ferocious intensity.
Crystal Pite said in her program notes that she likes working in a form like dance that is “always in a state of disappearing,” much like the dancing bodies that in themselves defy their inevitable decay. As we saw new stars begin to rise while established greats like Greta Hodgekinson move on, it was curious to see the beauty of this transition explored in three distinct ways on opening night: Chroma’s stark, confrontational style pushed the limits of physical exploration while Marguerite and Armand slowly layered longing and regret over the last days of a life not ready to end. But don’t miss this mixed program if only for Angels’ Atlas and its pulsing attempts to capture and cry back at life’s impermanence; it will ignite the body and spirit to exist fully in the gleaming, passing moment.
Emily Trace is a Toronto-based writer of plays, articles, fiction, personal essays and reviews of the performing arts, currently developing a screenplay that will explore queer resiliency and trauma recovery through classic horror tropes. An alumnus of the National Ballet of Canada’s Emerging Arts Critics Programme, Emily works in media with Inside Out LGBT Film Festival and Against the Grain Theatre. She is also an actress and creative associate with White Mills Theatre Company, presently in rehearsals for an immersive production of Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' to be staged this holiday season at Spadina House.