LES GRANDS BALLET
Sumptuous, promising new season
Three masterworks from the company repertory, a new creation and two classical story ballets by major foreign guest troupes make up the 2015-16 season of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, details of which artistic director Gradimir Pankov revealed on Monday. And Nutcracker fans need not fret, of course. Fernand Nault’s perennially popular version will be back in December.
Les Grands’ sole new creation will have its première in March 2016 as part of a double bill. La lueur de l’Aube is touted as a “meditation on the self” by the Swiss-born choreographer Ken Ossola. As a dancer with Nederlands Dans Theater, Ossola took part in the original casts of several works by that company’s world-famous choreographer, Jiří Kylián, who mentored Ossola’s transition into choreography 15 years ago. Ossola’s first work for NDT was in 2011. All that can be said of his still-tobe-created work for Les Grands is that it will feature music by a composer rarely used for dance, Rachmaninov.
On the same bill will be the return of Shen Wei’s majestic RE(II), a work that unfolds before a filmed background showing views of Kampuchea’s famous Angkor Wat temples. The erotically charged sculpted figures of the temples are echoed in the languid shapes of the dancers’ ghostly white figures.
Majestic also applies to Kaguyahime, Les Grands’ opening work of the 2015 fall season in October. First presented here as a North American première in 2012 — Ken Ossola was among the three Kylián specialists who staged it — Kaguyahime is the company’s most expensive production in Pankov’s 16-year directorship. It looks expensive, too, with an immense backdrop curtain dripping gold. The tale of the moon princess Kaguyahime, whose presence on Earth causes rivalry and war, will again be accompanied live by the taiko drumming ensemble, Kodo.
Classical ballet fans — and there are many in Montreal — will rejoice that the upcoming season has two delightful 19th century story ballets. Alas, we’ll have to wait until next February to see the first of them, Coppélia, performed by the Shanghai Ballet, a well-travelled company whose origins date back 50 years.
Coppélia is best known in Canada from the justly celebrated Frederick Ashton version, one of the jewels in the repertory of the National Ballet of Canada; the troupe gave a lovely performance of it in Montreal more than 15 years ago. The Chinese troupe’s version of Coppélia is by Pierre Lacotte, a master of classical form in his own right as Montreal saw last year when the Ballet of the Paris Opera performed the elegantly choreographed phrases of his version of Paquita. Count on Lacotte to stage the tale of the village girl Swanilda, her admirer Franz and the mysterious Dr. Coppelius as a comic romance that should delight audiences from the age of 6 up.
In May 2016, Don Quixote rides into town on the powerful legs of the National Ballet of Cuba, which is becoming a welcome regular visitor. The ballet’s sprightly main characters, Basilio and Kitri, are ideal roles for virtuosos to show off their personalities and technique, most notably in their famous grand pas de deux, a staple of galas. The Cubans’ version is credited to legendary ballerina and company artistic director Alicia Alonso following Marius Petipa’s original 1869 version for the Bolshoi Ballet. A generation ago, the National Ballet of Canada performed Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Don Quixote in Montreal, and the Bolshoi brought its sensational Don Quixote to nearby Saratoga, N.Y., last year. The Cubans, though, have the firepower to match the Russians.
A month after Don Quixote’s sunny antics, Les Grands ends its Spring 2016 season in dark mode with another work out of its recent repertory — Dream Away. Created for the company in 2013 by Germany’s Stephan Thoss, Dream Away has an ingeniously constructed set that serves as a symbolic bridge between dreamland and reality. From the start, Dream Away draws you in and never lets go.
Notably, four of the new series’ six offerings will take place in the big Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier of Place des Arts rather than in Les Grands’ usual smaller home, Théâtre Maisonneuve. For the past several years, Les Grands has done well in drawing nearcapacity or sellout crowds, as it did this month for the restaging of The Little Prince, which ends its latest run in Théâtre Maisonneuve on Saturday, March 28. For this production, choreographer Didy Veldman radically revised her 2012 choreography in a way that clarifies the Little Prince’s encounters with various characters on Earth. A notable improvement. Then again, under Pankov, Les Grands has never been a company to get too selfsatisfied.
Finally, at the season announcement, Les Grands’ executive director, Alain Dancyger, gave an update on the construction of the company’s new studios on Bleury St., opposite Place des Arts. The new building — known as Espace Danse Montréal — will house not only Les Grands’ studios and the company’s new National Centre for Dance Therapy but also studios for Tangente, Agora de la Danse and the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal.
“It should be finished by summer, 2016,” Dancyger said.
Dance note: Montreal’s annual International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) has 14 films devoted to dance, among them documentary profiles of American ballerina Tanaquil Le Clerq (George Balanchine’s wife and muse), Quebec dance pioneer Jeanne Renaud, Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers’ founder Rachel Browne, as well as films devoted to boys studying ballet, kids studying flamenco, and a look at Serge Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. FIFA continues at various downtown venues until March 29. Tickets: $12.50-$13.50, seniors, $11-$11.50, youth age 25 and younger, $10-$10.50. See artfifa.com