INSPIRED BY LEONARD COHEN
Inspired by the songwriter’s music, three choreographers find their voices in ‘Dance Me’
How do you embody an enigma? That was the challenge facing Andonis Foniadakis, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and Ihsan Rustem.
Last spring, the three internationally renowned choreographers were commissioned by BJM — Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal — to collaborate on “Dance Me,” the company’s new globe-trotting 14-dancer work inspired by the ruminative songs of legendary Canadian artist Leonard Cohen.
“Dance Me,” the title derived from one of Cohen’s most beloved songs and fresh from its Montreal première, comes to the Sony Centre Friday.
“There are so many layers to his songs,” the Greek-born Foniadakis says, who recalls listening to Cohen as a teenager growing up in Crete. “I’m trying to illuminate layers that perhaps are not immediately evident, embodying his music but not in a literal or decorative way. Ultimately, it’s each choreographer’s personal point of view but, always, it’s about going beyond the steps to something deeper.”
Rustem grew up in Britain also listening to Cohen — his mother was a huge fan of his music — but this familiarity didn’t make choreographing to the songs any easier.
“Cohen was a poet,” Rustem says. “The words are the backbone of his songs, but they can be enigmatic and elusive in meaning, and people interpret them in different ways. For me, the challenge was to find my own voice within that while always trying to respect his vision.”
Of the three choreographers, Ochoa entered the project with the least preexposure to Cohen but made up for it by researching his life thoroughly to understand the imagery he used in his poetry.
“I was struck by its profundity,” Ochoa says, “and was inspired to create a physical poem to his music.”
Usually, choreographers are pretty much given a free hand when a company commissions them but, in the case of “Dance Me,” they agreed to work within someone else’s concept.
“Dance Me” is the brainchild of Louis Robitaille, the former Canadian ballet star who has been BJM’s artistic director since 1998.
“I can’t even remember how young I was when I first heard his music,” the almost 60-year-old Robitaille says, “but I’d say it was in the early 1980s that I became a real fan.”
A few years ago Robitaille got a call from the organizers of Montreal’s 375th anniversary celebrations. Was BJM interested in being included?
“They wanted an integral evening, not a typical Ballets Jazz mixed program,” Robitaille explains.
“The music of Leonard Cohen came into my mind immediately as the perfect vehicle. Although he was deeply rooted in Montreal, he has touched so many people around the world, young and old, as much today as ever.” The next challenge was to get Cohen’s approval. Robitaille never met with the famously reclusive poet, singer and songwriter, but through his manager, Robert Kory, Cohen made clear he did not want the ballet to be biographical or just a collection of his greatest hits. Nor, as it happened, had Robitaille ever envisioned it as such, so he was allowed to proceed. “He gave us his blessing,” Robitaille says. “It was a great gift.” From the start, Robitaille wanted “Dance Me” to be an artistic milestone for BJM.
“I wanted to go further in mixing disciplines to make this different from anything we’ve done before.”
The concept of “Dance Me” was to undergo multiple changes from idea to reality. To give it some structure, Robitaille had originally planned to shape the ballet around the cyclical human theme of the five seasons, the fifth being what he describes as that “distinctly Canadian” warm weather of early autumn, emblematic of a passage between life and death. It was an approach that acquired particular poignancy when Cohen died in November 2016.
Robitaille considered assigning each season to a different choreographer then pondered going with just one. He finally settled on three. Then there was the issue of what songs to use.
“Mr. Cohen had made clear he wanted a range of songs, well known and less well known, from early to late in his career,” Robitaille says. “So we go all the way from ’Songs of Leonard Cohen,’ his first album of 1967, to ‘You Want It Darker,’ released just before he died.”
There was also the question of texture, musical and emotional. Cohen’s songs are deeply reflective, often melancholy meditations on life and love, their fleeting pleasures and inevitable pains. But too much of that would make for a monochrome ballet.
Robitaille started with 30 songs and ended up with 15. Along the way, the five seasons theme became more of a working tool. This was partly at the urging of Eric Jean, former longtime artistic director of Montreal’s Théâtre de Quat’Sous. In an unusual move, Robitaille brought Jean into the project as dramaturge/stage director to give unity to “Dance Me’s” many elements.
“I advised Louis toward a more abstracted approach. ‘Dance Me’ traces a journey, but it’s not a story,” Jean said.
Robitaille wanted “Dance Me” to have a strong theatrical dimension and readily agreed when Jean asked to bring in his own trusted team of collaborators — lighting, scenography, videography — to accomplish that goal.
Jean, who counts himself a de-
vout Cohen fan, also set himself a personal challenge as director.
“Above all it was important for me that the work would capture the elegance that was so much who Leonard Cohen was as a man and as an artist.”
Says Robitaille: “This is the biggest, most ambitious creation in the 45-year history of BJM. We’re taking a huge financial risk. We’ll just see what happens.”
So far, the omens are good. “Dance Me,” produced at what for BJM is a whopping $500,000 budget, received an immediate standing ovation at its Dec. 5 world première; just as well since BJM negotiated exclusive five-year rights to the use of Cohen’s music for dance purposes and plans to tour the production worldwide.
“Dance Me” is at Toronto’s Sony Centre, 1 Front St. E., on Dec. 15 at 8 p.m. See sonycentre.ca or call 1-855-8727669. CBC-TV will air “Tower of Song: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen,” Wednesday, Jan. 3 at 8 p.m. Special to the Toronto Star