Program 2 traverses the history of life

PROGRAM 2 A Ballet BC presentation. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Thursday, March 16. No remaining performances

There are times—not often, it’s 2

true—when snow falling in Vancouver is a benediction, not a threat. One of the prettiest instances of this took place at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre recently, with projected snowflakes descending on-screen during the entirety of Crystal Pite’s Solo Echo. Warm rather than wintry, the piece exists in a wonderland of grace.

Initially made for Nederlands Dans Theater and premiered in 2012, Solo Echo entered Ballet BC’S repertoire in 2015 and deserves to stay. As its title promises, it showcases the individual skills of dancers Brandon Alley, Andrew Bartee, Emily Chessa, Alexis Fletcher, Scott Fowler, Christoph von Riedemann, and Kirsten Wicklund, but more than that it foregrounds the immaculate unity of the current Ballet BC corps. Ensemble passages that resembled the time-lapse unfurling of a flower found the seven dancers operating as a single entity.

And all the time that sparkling snow kept falling, further linking Pite’s movement to the elegance and power of natural forces.

This viewer also saw the West Coast environment reflected in the first minute or so of the show-opening Anthem, jointly choreographed by Lisa Gelley and Josh Martin of Vancouver’s street-savvy Company 605. The overall impression left by the piece was one of constant kineticism—but its first passage found the dancers rooted to one place, swaying back and forth or doubling over and sometimes whipping their torsos sideways. They looked for all the world like kelp, rooted to a rocky substrate and dancing to the rhythms of a storm surge—but then they became human, enacted an urban haka, and transformed again into cyborg pop-and-lock monsters. The history of life—from algal to tribal to electromechanical—in three minutes!

The rest of the work was more abstract and seemingly more anarchic, although clearly some deep structure underpinned the movement of the pack as solo dancers each took their turn to shine.

After all that compressed, sprungsteel, 605-style motion, it was a shock when bright, white lights came up on Wen Wei Wang’s Swan, revealing a shirtless von Riedemann in full extension, looking like a Norse god. A gift to the true balletomanes in the audience—and a homage to Wang’s late partner, dance maven Grant Strate—this septet will be best understood by those well-versed in the symbolism of the original Swan Lake, referenced beautifully, knowingly, and touchingly throughout. But even modernists—perhaps especially modernists—will thrill to this work’s witty gender play, its erotic partnering, and Sammy Chien’s phantasmagorical music, made by combining Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s original ballet score with electronics and an obsessive tambourine.

The one orphan child in the program was Lesley Telford’s If I were 2—it was both too slight and too long for this big bill. It’s not ill-made: it would be a pleasure to see and hear at the Firehall, but it looked lost in this otherwise big, bold evening of dance. > ALEXANDER VARTY

COMPAGNIE VIRGINIE BRUNELLE

A Vancouver International Dance Festival presentation. At the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on Friday, March 17. No remaining performances

Pain, choreographer Virginie 2

Brunelle revealed during a postshow talkback session, is “the main subject” of all of her pieces. And in the case of To the pain that lingers (À la douleur que j’ai) that pain is more specifically grief, perhaps the bluntest and most enduring of emotional injuries.

The source of trauma is never explicitly identified, but the opening sequence might contain a clue. In it, Peter Trosztmer places himself in a simple wooden chair, while the other five members of Montreal’s Compagnie Virginie Brunelle arrange themselves around him with a certain air of formality. The first glimpses of pain come when the dancers gasp and stiffen as one, breaking the stillness they had initially maintained. Soon, the performers fling themselves away from Trosztmer to lie corpselike on the floor, the lights dim, and the dance proper begins.

First up are two extraordinary duets. After a second chair appears, Claudine Hébert and Milan Panetgigon each take a seat—a prim and proper couple, except that their grins are too fixed, their eyes too glassy. Hébert repeatedly edges her partner out of his chair and moves it further away until the divorce is final, and the grinning turns to quiet howling. A final attempt at reconciliation is literally upended by the rest of the cast, who slowly tip the two dancers, now sharing a single chair, onto the floor.

Trosztmer and Chi Long’s subsequent pas de deux moves even further away from the comical. He is patient and she is wild, flinging herself into increasingly violent paroxysms only to be rescued, and given a seat, at the end of each spasm. Here, madness or addiction seems the subtext.

Further interpersonal dramas unfold, broken periodically by high-speed group calisthenics that offer a strange relief from the measured darkness. It would be remiss not to mention Isabelle Arcand’s misleading delicacy; she looks like an orchid but is clearly made of carbon fibre. Equally impressive and utterly different is Sophie Breton’s rock-star androgyny, which is backed by a gymnast’s strength.

After the show, Brunelle referred to her dancers as “family”—a happier one than that shown in To the pain that lingers’s opening scene, and one that did perfect justice to her elegant choreography and theatrical sophistication. > ALEXANDER VARTY