ALBERTA BALLET GETS OFF ON RIGHT FOOT
But opening night tale of Shadowland lacks artistic depth in this creepy story
The much-anticipated opening night curtain-raiser on Alberta Ballet’s 50th season of dance at the Jubilee Auditorium finally arrived Thursday night when our province’s finest and most representative arts company, indeed one of our country’s largest and smartest, led off with its own statement about balletic art, inviting the long-standing, widelyknown Pilobolus to Calgary and Edmonton for eight remarkable shows.
The evening struck a gala pose amid a happy buzz as a packed house came to see just what unconventional dance and shadow movement could be about from a company strongly beloved for its contortionist commercials, and its popular appearances on talk shows and the Academy Awards.
Everyone arrived prepared to be wowed and certainly were by this visually appealing show, standing for Pilobolus at the end of their specially-designed, Calgary-created coda.
Artistic director Jean GrandMaitre’s program statement — “They leave us all in awe at what the human body can do” — was perhaps a signature comment about the specific impression Alberta Ballet wishes to leave with its audiences in a season featuring Dracula and GrandMaitre’s Canada-150th-birthday celebration Gordon Lightfoot ballet.
At the outset, it all got off on the right foot with a superbly danced, impressively pretzelled performance, albeit one often artistically unfocused in thought and purpose.
Still, Pilobolus gave people what they wanted, inundating them with a high element of athletic creativity cast in simple but effective low-tech shadowprojection art.
The work was undeniably impactful, but scarcely original in this project.
Pilobolus parades itself needlessly as creators of new dance words to describe what they do. Certainly all the other innovative movement-and-dance companies for the past half-century the world over would have a word or two to add on that subject.
The show’s storyline revolved around a teenage girl who is embarrassed by her parents who walk in as she tries on makeup while mugging in front of her mirror. After they leave, she is pursued by shadows of her shame projected on her bedroom wall and she is subsequently sucked into Shadowland, the work’s title and effectively, its sole premise.
Once there, she is pursued and harassed, menaced and repulsed, captured and humiliated, terrorized and eaten, and brought to sexual maturity by a centaur, all the while inexplicably transformed for much of the duration into a half girl-half dog by a recurring giant hand protruding from a grotesquely long arm.
It’s all a little disturbing and frankly more than a little creepy.
If this was an attempt to explore dark psychological undercurrents, it came off as puerile, and sadly, lacked the needed artistic depth of purpose or a convincing rationale to undergird its narrative premise.
Worse still, the show sent the wrong message about how a young girl might imagine her own emergent maturity, often cast in representative terms that were disturbing and long ago deemed to be unhelpful and unhealthy.
Certainly the athletic and movement power were always there, replete with an awe-filling series of composite and continually nuanced assortment of projected shapes, offset by more conventional non-shadow panels.
However, one might wonder what it was all for.
If it was to tell a story about developing inner strength and coming of age, those messages were overshadowed in panels that often went on far too long or indulged in too much repetition.
Moreover, the narrative was obscured by gratuitous displays of over-trickery, solely for the wow factor. And the musical score’s soporific pop melodies scarcely helped matters in their derivative emptiness.
Finally, there was nothing particularly comic, or even evil, about the shadow world Pilobolus advertised — instead it all came off as just a little too trite.
This company has done better in the past with absolutely stunning projects of spellbinding innovative movement strengthened with enviably focused concentration, less of which however, was on display Thursday night.
Nonetheless, it is well worth it to buy a ticket this weekend for the remaining two shows on Saturday.
There will be a super-abundance of considerable movement fascination consisting of excruciatingly difficult poses, body combinations, circus-meets-dance alacrity and impressive modular ingenuity from the nine-member troupe.
But if you know Pilobolus, you will find that the Shadowland project has made them into something very different from what I remember the company once was not too long ago.