Three for the road from the National Ballet
Company’s rare visit to Montreal features contemporary works
Any local appearance by the National Ballet of Canada is a noteworthy event, all the more so because Canada’s biggest ballet company has been such an infrequent visitor.
Indeed, its three-night stand at Place des Arts next week is only the company’s second appearance in the past 12 years. Last seen here five years ago, NBoC is again coming under the umbrella of the Danse Danse series.
Given the contemporary dance mandate of the series, the program features a contemporary triple bill with exuberant ensemble pieces by William Forsythe and Wayne McGregor in which the dancers still get to show off their chiselled classical ballet lines, and a work by Marco Goecke that poses interpretive challenges for its two soloists.
The Forsythe piece is particularly welcome. Whereas in recent years McGregor’s company has performed here twice and Goecke has created works for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Montreal has not seen a large-scale Forsythe work since the Frankfurt Ballet put on an extraordinary show under his direction in 2003.
Acknowledged today as one of the world’s supreme dance creators, Forsythe was little known in North America in 1991 when he created The Second Detail for NBoC at the invitation of the company’s thendirector, Reid Anderson. The two men knew each other from their days working at Stuttgart Ballet. Having seen Forsythe’s revolutionary choreographic beginnings in Europe, Anderson readily brought the American to Toronto — an astute move in retrospect.
“It was a very intense creative period and I remember being disappointed that I wasn’t in (The Second Detail), but there were other dancers who could do a better job of it,” said Karen Kain, who retired as NBoC’s star ballerina in 1997 and is marking her 10th anniversary as artistic director. “I watched rehearsals, though, and Forsythe really knew how to keep the dancers challenged mentally and physically in the moment. They weren’t just told what to do — they actually participated. It was a shared experience.”
Since then, Forsythe’s approach has been widely imitated, sometimes to the point where dancers almost take over the job of creation.
While The Second Detail has recognizably classical ballet positions, their configurations and the placement of the work’s 14 dancers go well beyond classical ballet’s circles and straight lines. To draw a comparison with painting, Forsythe’s landscape reflects not the harmonious compositions of the 17th-century Dutch, but the tense structures of Cézanne.
“I thought it was so cool and wonderful,” Kain recalled.
At the time, she said, older patrons were not happy about the loud, throbbing music by Thom Willems, who also composed the music for Forsythe’s famous work In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, seen several times in excerpt at Montreal’s defunct Gala des Étoiles. NBoC is contractually bound to present Willems’s music for The Second Detail at the proper level, and not so long ago the composer himself came to see that the level was respected.
Forsythe, however, has adapted his choreography over the years for other companies, adding sections and changing the ending. Nonetheless, despite some minor adjustments, NBoC will be performing the original version, providing a window into the creative mind of a genius in a formative part of his career.
NBoC’s second work, Chroma, by Forsythe’s younger spiritual heir McGregor (they both love to deconstruct existing classical dance forms), was a big hit in Toronto when it had its North American première there in 2010. That was four years after its creation for the Royal Ballet, where McGregor is choreographer in residence.
On NBoC’s mixed program with two other contemporary works, Chroma sold out quickly, which was very rare in Toronto, recalled Kain. She admitted that Toronto audiences are not as accustomed to avant-garde visions as audiences in Montreal.
“It feels a little more like ballet — contorted, but it still feels extended and fluid,” said NBoC first soloist Dylan Tedaldi, one of Chroma’s six male and four female performers, in a recent phone interview. “It gets fast and some movements are punched, but it’s a blast to dance. The music is so exciting — it really pulses.”
The pulsing comes from pieces by the White Stripes and by Joby Talbot, a versatile British composer who has written movie soundtracks and orchestral works. He also composed a more staid, but serviceable, ballet score for NBoC’s 2011 hit Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as well as for its upcoming The Winter’s Tale, both with choreography by Christopher Wheeldon.
Tedaldi will also interpret the eponymous role in Goecke’s Spectre de la Rose, a recent work that was very loosely inspired by Michel Fokine’s famous 1911 duet for Nijinsky and Karsavina.
For decades, Fokine’s duet was a ballet repertory staple. Many major male dancers have donned the Spectre’s rose-petal tights to jump and twirl and gesticulate prettily around the young girl who sits sleeping in a chair and dreams of dancing with the Spirit of the Rose.
Such a romantic vision must appear absurd to the iPod
and YouTube generation, and Fokine’s version has largely fallen by the wayside. Goecke nonetheless has retained both its theme and von Weber’s lilting Invitation to the Dance in creating a work with a far more dynamic interplay between Spectre and girl.
“The movements are very angular, sharp,” said Tedaldi, who learned the role last year along with NBoC star Guillaume Côté, who had implored Kain to add it to the repertory. “It’s exhausting because you’re not moving your limbs all over the place but put so much energy into every little change of motion of the hands and legs and make them super sharp. Especially for my role as the Spirit of the Rose, I’m supposed
to get a little frantic and crazy.”
Tedaldi was taught the role by Goecke’s assistant, Giovanni di Palma, who gave some unusual cues for interpreting the choreography.
“While partnering, I make a claw hand and reach down and attack the girl and Giovanni said, ‘At this point, you’re hungry and you want to eat her butt.’ ” Clearly, we are far from Fokine. Two partners perform with Tedaldi: Kathryn Hosier and Chelsy Meiss. Ironically, Côté, still recovering from a knee injury, will be unable to perform here in the role he so coveted. Despite his injury, Côté was looking chipper last month as he handled his new post as artistic director of the St-Sauveur Arts Festival with aplomb.
NBoC’s visit to Montreal will get international exposure thanks to a live online feed in connection with World Ballet Day on Thursday. During the course of the day, the second of its kind, the feed will show backstage and rehearsal scenes of NBoC, the Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Ballet, Australian Ballet and San Francisco Ballet — a global tour covering several time zones. To fill in the eastern North America portion, NBoC is adding footage from BJM Danse and Boston Ballet.
There can be no quibbling about a program that includes Forsythe, McGregor and Goecke, but how many more years must Montreal wait before it finally gets to see NBoC in Alexei Ratmansky’s marvellous Romeo and Juliet, or in Wheeldon’s charming Alice?
“We wanted to bring Alice, but it’s prohibitively expensive,” said Kain, who has created partnerships with local theatres and producers to take NBoC on tours to Los Angeles and London in recent years. “I want artistic excellence and to go on tours again, but I also don’t want us to go bankrupt!”
In her 10 years at the helm, she has avoided that and then some.