PRAIRIE TRIBUTE
Balletlujah opens season
I think it was somewhere during the vibrant Act I pas de deux setting of k.d. lang’s Wash Me Clean, that I began to understand Jean Grand-Maitre’s Balletlujah! for what it really expresses.
Dancing under an enormous projection of a full moon, set with much interactive close work for both Hayna Gutierrez (She) and Serena Sandford (First Love), the song’s lyrics of renewal and restoration within a love that was free, that could “mend my seams, cleanse my tarnished dreams” became the first critical pillar of the ballet’s message, conveyed so conspicuously directly through the most lyrical forms of popular dance style.
Balletlujah! is a luscious prairie tribute to land and people.
And it opened Alberta Ballet’s 49th season at the Jubilee Auditorium Thursday night before an approving and elated audience, gladdened all the more so by the presence of a very moved, Consort, Alta., native k.d. lang, in attendance.
After that moment, the rest unfolded naturally. Open skies, wide prairies, northern lights evincing a subtle but tremendous freedom through which love is the lens (as is often the case in any ballet) — it all quilted the story of k.d. lang’s music with an articulate passion that is difficult to arrange, particularly in the pop ballet genre where it is tougher to tell such a story without reducing it to kitsch.
But Grand-Maitre’s work tells a compelling yarn about a country girl turned to city life, who loses herself in urban banality and alienation, only to rediscover the prairie roots that could make her love the way she ought.
The work divides more easily as a dual prologue about prairie inspiration and first love in the first act, but saves the best of its narrative for the second act, the heart of the work.
The seat of Balletlujah! lies not in the love story itself, but in our paying close attention to lang’s lyrics. The words tell it all through her lovely harmonies and perfect instrumentation, visualized sumptuously via Adam Larsen’s awesome video design projections and Grand-Maitre’s scaffolded thematic choreography.
When you go, savour each of lang’s words, especially in the second act’s Constant Craving or when it all truly comes together during her cover of Neil Young’s Helpless. There, sharply defined choreographic leitmotifs of tension and loneliness return yet again to underscore the inner messages of personal struggle.
We’ve all been there: dumped for another love interest because we perceived depth in a relationship when there was only shallow. Grand-Maitre tells it well through a rich vocabulary of jagged-edged arm moves, aggressive thrusts and extensions, all playing on the existential but unique re-telling of the alienating aloneness story, so subtly portrayed by Gutierrez.
And it only amplified in Acquiesce and Hain’t it Funny, great songs about the seamier underside of L.A. nightclub life and its deleterious ruination of She’s relationship.
Soon, we can begin to feel the ballet as a collective conscious meditation on one of lang’s best quotes, that “the fuel of our oppression is the fuel of our freedom too” and in response, the ballet transcends itself in Hungry Bird and Love is Everything with some glorious dancing and starkly moving harmonies.
This is a somewhat different Balletlujah! from the original that premiered two years ago.
The level of artistic polish is higher, not only in dance but in video presentation. Experience helps, this being the second time the corps has performed the work. Furthermore, Grand-Maitre has changed some of the transitions, re-choreographing them into a smoother, more organic narrative identity. The result is a supremely cleaner production.
And with square dancers and prairie people moving in fused production-number style merged with classical technique, the language of Grand-Maitre’s dance reaches out to us with greater immediacy. The corps truly took us to both the most important places in our hearts and in Alberta’s rich geography. Balletlujah! is the perfect anthem for Alberta.
When we see the prairies projected so beautifully up there on stage, we see ourselves revelling in it all, just as the dancers do. Grand-Maitre has given us a Prairie Hymn of Praise that leaves us with no doubt about a first love we all share — a ballet about our common geographical heritage and our chosen home we love so well.
The corps truly took us to both the most important places in our hearts and in Alberta’s rich geography.