Adelicate dance
National Ballet’s innovative Frame by Frame, based on visionary work of Norman McLaren, makes its world premiere
Norman McLaren’s short film
Pas de Deux was a revelation when it debuted in 1968: A pair of luminous dancers, their movements leaving shimmering tracks across a black screen. It was a technical near-impossibility that McLaren had made real, his irrepressibly inventive visual poetics emboldened by his peerless skill.
For McLaren, it was just another day at the office. Revelation was a near-daily achievement for the wryly irreverent genius of a filmmaker who, through the 1950s and ’60s, near single-handedly built the National Film Board’s shining international reputation. Without him, the country would be lighter an Academy Award or two, and likely much more.
It all makes Pas de Deux a nobrainer inclusion in Frame by
Frame, the National Ballet of Canada’s onstage homage to the late visionary filmmaker, getting its world premiere on June 1. But his other films, too, have a connection to dance that’s less obvious.
“Looking at McLaren’s work, I realized: he’s a choreographer,” said Guillaume Côté, a principal dancer at the National Ballet and half of Frame by Frame’s lead creative team. “Of course you can see that in
Pas de Deux, but even in his earlier works, like Blinkity
Blank, when you have these explosions of colour and form swirling around in the dark, it was all about these very beautiful abstractions to music. He picked these pieces of music and created movement around them. In a way, that’s what I do.”
Revelation was a near-daily achievement for wryly irreverent filmmaking genius Norman McLaren
Côté, who is also a choreographer, found a kindred spirit in Robert Lepage, the Quebec City-based theatre writer and director whose company, Ex Machina, has always embraced a deeply experimental ethos. Lepage’s long-standing interest in McLaren’s work helped to bridge a gap.
“The National Ballet and I have made so many attempts to work together,” said Lepage, in Toronto recently for rehearsals. “But we’ve never really found a way to make it work. The ballet is an institution and we’re more of a laboratory, really. But we made some compromises: they agreed to send us some dancers, we agreed to work according to their schedule,” he said, pausing to shoot a sharp glance at Côté, and both of them laughed.
“Let’s just say that the way dancers rehearse is not how I rehearse. But those first five days of experimenting and learning to live together in the same rehearsal room yielded these amazing things, and the potential was clear.”
That first grope at collaboration was in 2015; a handful of workshops later, things started to take shape. Côté worked out the dance elements of nearly a dozen McLaren films, while Lepage applied his unique brand of stagecraft.
The division of labour became necessarily fluid (“I think of Robert as the choreographer, too,” Côté said), and collaboration less a term of convenience than a necessity. Translating McLaren’s wild little works from screen to stage is not for the uncommitted.
“Some days were incredibly productive and other days...” Côté said, smiling at Lepage, who shrugged. “Some ideas are great in the rehearsal room,” he laughed. “And some just suck.”
Pairing up was also true to their subject himself. McLaren’s vast leaps in idea and form often came from his own collaborations: with Evelyn Lambart, a frequent partner on McLaren’s abstract films, or Ludmilla Chiriaeff, who choreographed the dance for Pas de Deux.
In Frame by Frame, several sequences are named for those collaborators, a kinship to which Côté and Lepage can relate. “The spirit of the whole thing isn’t necessarily the great genius of Norman McLaren, but his humble meeting with these remarkable people,” Lepage said. “We each do our own thing, but it’s true we could have never done this alone.”
Indeed, bringing some of McLaren’s more idiosyncratic efforts to the stage would appear to verge on the impossible.
Take Begone Dull Care from 1949, which made the cut for Frame by Frame. A gorgeous, abstract cascade of ragged colour tumbling down the screen, McLaren paired it with a perky number by the Oscar Peterson Trio. It’s raw, an experiment where colour and music bleed fully into each other.
Lines: Vertical, a 1960 piece that’s so sparse (it is exactly what it says, lines spanning the screen top to bottom, tracking back and forth), its ability to convey a spirited playfulness seems transcendent. And then, of course, there’s McLaren’s Neighbours, the 1952 masterwork that won him an Oscar and the National Film Board (NFB) its international reputation as an experimental hotbed.
It’s a landmark of filmmaking, stop-motion or otherwise, in which a cheerfully cartoonish scene — cardboard cut-out houses, a white picket fence — devolves into violent chaos over a single flower. In the end, everyone dies — the flower, too — as McLaren’s whimsical-seeming essay on the divisions of the Cold War devolves into bleak terror.
Onstage, Neighbours, however inhuman, at least has humans to work with, making it one of the lesser challenges. Lepage, though, sees humanity in all of McLaren’s work, however abstract.
“It was an extraordinary thing he achieved: to address human nature with dots or scratches, or whatever,” he said, with an exasperated laugh at the almost random glee of McLaren’s curiosity.
“But when he moves on to actual human beings, it’s very strong. You want your show to be about that, something that explores form and rhythm, but there’s something about humanity that has to be perceived, too.”
Frame by Frame runs June 1 to 10 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Tickets and info at national.ballet.ca.