TAKING A PEEK
Centre offers ‘ extraordinary’ pieces
What do castanets echoing off the side of a mountain sound like?
That was one of the mysteries of nature that was answered Friday night at The Banff Centre, when Rolston Hall was engulfed by the clackety- clacking of a legendary dancer and choreographer, Mark Morris, who revealed himself to have a surprise talent.
Morris was at Banff Centre as part of a weeklong residency, in which he curated and conducted music students, including the Rolston String Quartet, demonstrating a degree of musical virtuosity that matched his choreographic chops.
He also sat down long enough for an in- depth conversation with former New York Times dance critic John Rockwell on Wednesday night, when he talked about his lengthy and illustrious career in dance and music, which has spanned four decades and includes choreographing more than 100 dance pieces, ballet and opera.
If you had to boil Morris’s artistic philosophy down to a sound bite, it would be — to paraphrase an old TV commercial — live, not Memorex.
Morris is an old- school performing arts traditionalist who travels ( about six months of each year) with a dance company that includes musicians for every performance and rehearsal.
“Live music is music, as far as I’m concerned,” he says, sitting down Friday afternoon with the Herald in the beautiful MacLab Bistro.
“For me, that’s the whole reason to choreograph,” he adds. “And so I want everybody alive. Otherwise, it’s karaoke, which is fun — but not a performing medium.”
Those comments might nicely sum up summer nights at The Banff Centre, which last week was stacked with an embarrassment of artistic riches that make it a kind of ground zero of the performing arts every single summer.
If Morris electrically wielding castanets while performing Hummel’s Septet No. 2 Military, Op. 114 wasn’t enough for you on Friday night, there were other possibilities.
Over at the Eric Harvie Theatre, Crystal Pite’s Kidd Pivot Dance Company, working with Jonathon Young’s Electric Company, unveiled Betroffenheit, their new dance- theatre interdisciplinary piece that has its world premiere at the Pan American Games later this week.
Vancouver- based Pite is one of the world’s top choreographers, which probably explains why a huge contingent of the Calgary arts community made the trek up the mountains to catch Betroffenheit before it travels east.
“Betroffenheit kind of indicates shock, or trauma,” says Pite, “and our show is really about that. It’s about trying to express in words what can’t be expressed in words, and trying to find alternate ways of expressing something that is really beyond language.”
Jean Grand Maitre of the Alberta Ballet, Kimberly Cooper of Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, One Yellow Rabbit’s Blake Brooker and Ann Connors, playwright Karen Hines, Calgary Folk Festival artistic director Kerry Clarke, Canada 150 honcho Colin Jackson, WordFest founder Anne Green, former Mo Mo Dance artistic director Mark Ikeda, Cloud creators Caitlind r. c. Brown and Wayne Garrett were just a few faces in the crowd spotted taking in sneak peeks on both Thursday and Friday night, following a reception hosted by Banff Centre’s new president and CEO, Janice Price, who introduced herself to many of Calgary’s arts leaders.
Late Friday evening, The Club, a subterranean 80- seat bar tucked downstairs, was transformed into an opera venue, where Crush, a new opera by James Rolfe and Anna Chatterton debuted as a workshop production.
Crush was commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company in 2007, following the success of Swoon, another Chatterton and Rolfe one- act opera the COC commissioned and produced in 2006.
It started out as a full- sized opera headed for a big room, but now — one global financial crisis and new era of smaller, site- specific operas later — Rolfe says the idea of presenting Crush in an intimate space appeals to him.
“Having it in The Club,” Rolfe says, “which is 80, maybe 90 people, is actually kind of an ideal venue for it. You’re very much in the action ( that way). You’re close to it.”
That’s also a good way to describe the experience of the Banff Centre in the summer, when the performing arts are clicking on every cylinder.
That was on full display late Friday night at Maclab Bistro, which didn’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight — it transformed into an arts incubator of epic proportions, as a crowd of 200 or so, including Morris, Pite, members of the Rolston String Quartet and other classical music students Morris conducted, the Kidd Pivot dance company and the cast of Crush all enjoyed a drink while they noshed on post- performance nachos and decompressed with various Banff Centre staff members, patrons and a few lucky media members about a memorable summer week’s worth of live performance.
Call them sneak peeks, workshop productions or dress rehearsals — call them whatever you want, says Banff Centre vice- president of arts, Carolyn Warren — but don’t miss them.
“What an opportunity,” says Warren, “to see these extraordinary, world- class original pieces, right here in our backyard.
“To be able to see work at that point,” she says, “where it all comes together, and is ready to go, is really the magic of Banff.”