Ballet steps back into prehistoric era
Mosaic III: Cave Beat Company: Citie Ballet Choreography: Francois Cheuvennement and Tony Olivares When: Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Where: Timms Centre for the Arts, University of Alberta Tickets: $15 to $35 at TIX on the Square, tixonthesquare.ca
Inspired by the paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France, playwright Katherine Koller approached Edmonton’s Citie Ballet artistic director Francois Cheuvennement about making a new ballet. She would write the libretto. Would he create the accompanying dance steps?
Cheuvennement was intrigued by the idea of taking audiences’ imaginations into the UN heritage site, which is no longer open to the public. He tapped local contemporary choreographer Tony Olivares to help create a ballet about human evolution, exploring our ancestors’ early bipedal days. The themes of our past — from hunting and gathering for survival to the discovery of fire — proved a fertile ground to create a new dance vocabulary together.
Olivares was born in Nicaragua and his first exposures to dance were folk dance. A graduate of Grant MacEwan University’s late dance program, Olivares is an eclectic artist with bold and diverse passions. He pursued work in the forestry industry and also practises as a sculptor, working in metals. As a dancer, Olivares moves unlike any other, often exploring improvisational impulses as a choreographic starting point.
There is no doubt that his approach to choreography is startlingly different from what Cheuvennement is accustomed to as a classical ballet artist. But he says the process for Mosaic III: Cave Beat has been a side-by-side collaboration.
“Tony and I worked on every movement together ... it is our vocabulary. It isn’t truly his choreography or mine, but ours. It wasn’t as though I was creating a phrase of eight counts of movement and then he was creating another eight counts. We didn’t work this way. We created every single movement together. It was a slower process because we were arguing on some of the steps,” Cheuvennement laughs.
“Mainly it was like ‘no, we should go this way, no this way, no this way.’ It was really interesting and we do actually work really well together.”
Cheuvennement says his nine company dancers, seven female and two male, were up to the challenge of working outside the strictly classical realm. They were introduced to Olivares’s style over the summer months and have worked hard all season to master the new way of moving.
As a musical bed for the cave dance, Cheuvennement went back to one of his favourite composers when he was a dancer in France, Latvian-born Peteris Vasks. Vasks’s contemporary music incorporates archaic, folkloric elements to express themes such as man’s interaction with nature and the juxtaposition of the beauty of life with the suffering of man by the hand of another man.
“It is really interesting music, very contemporary and at the same time classical. I’ve always wanted to use his music for one of my dances, and when Katherine started talking cave paintings, right away, I started thinking about his music.”
As the storytelling, musical beats and dance language fused, Edmonton surrealist painter Levi Etherington was brought into the mix, to respond to the resulting Cave Beat and create original acrylic paintings onstage during each of the three acts of the performance: Awakening, Quest and Exodus. All three of Etherington’s paintings will be available for purchase at the end of the performances.
The first act, Awakening, is about the discovery of fire and is rooted in the earth. Oddly enough, the dancemakers found themselves accessing the most contemporary dance vocabulary to interpret prehistory.
The second act, Quest, is about the hunt, with dancers becoming the hunters and the hunted animals. “This is a more upright and classical section,” says Cheuvennement.
He won’t reveal much about the third act, Exodus, other than saying our human tribe is on the move to somewhere new.