OUT OF THE PAST
Baroque opera and classical mythology inspire contemporary effort by Edouard Lock.
The future of contemporary dance lies in part in rediscovering its past in the rich history of classical ballet, according to Edouard Lock, one of the country’s leading contemporary choreographers.
Lock, the artistic director of La La La Human Steps, said the relationship between contemporary dance and ballet has changed dramatically since he founded his company in 1980. Back then, the “cross- talk” between classical dance and contemporary was almost non- existent. Today, contemporary choreographers such as Lock are often being asked to create new works for ballet companies and classically trained ballet dancers are performing with contemporary dance companies.
But dance’s past isn’t being incorporated into the present without any changes, at least not by Lock. What’s happening, he said, is an awareness that ballet technique and narrative theme don’t necessarily need to go together.
“You have a technique open to any direction you want to take it in,” he said in an interview from his home in Montreal. “The type of material it has been associated with for a long time — the more classical narrative stuff — is not linked inextricably.
“Ballet technique is amply able to carry contemporary themes. If the technique is to survive, it has to be a living technique. It has to somehow correspond to the contemporary world and not just reference older work.”
Lock will be in Vancouver with his company this weekend for two performances of his most recent piece, called New Work, presented by Dancehouse.
Lock’s career has bridged the distance between contemporary dance and classical ballet. In his early years he established a reputation for creating dance works requiring extreme physicality such as his groundbreaking Human Sex in 1985- 86. In 1990, he co- conceived and was artistic director of David Bowie’s Sound and Vision world tour. He also collaborated with Frank Zappa on his Yellow Shark concerts.
Lock made a radical change in his choreography in 1997 when he adopted the pointe shoe, the traditional footwear worn by female ballet dancers that allows them to dance on their toes.
He has been invited to create works for some of the world’s leading companies including the Ballet de l’opera de Paris, the Het Nationale Ballet of Holland and the Nederlands Dance Theatre.
In the past three decades, La La La has performed in Vancouver at least eight times. The company’s last performance was in 2007 with Amjad, his re- interpretation of two Romantic ballets: Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. But that ballet wasn’t about exploring narrative; it was an investigation into memory and how the music and movement from those ballets have squirmed their way into our cultural landscape.
Like Amelia, the work immediately preceding it, Amjad emphasized how dancing in pointe shoes is simply a technique and not linked to a particular esthetic by having a male dance en pointe.
New Work, however, doesn’t have male dancers in pointe shoes. Lock said there’s nothing to read into there, other than it’s difficult to find professional male ballet dancers with the ability to dance on their toes.
“If the man is able to wield it as well as a woman, then there’s no reason not to give it to him,” he said.
“If he can’t there’s no point of doing it as some sort of political statement. It should be used well, or it shouldn’t be used. In this particular production, the men don’t have that ability so it wasn’t used.”
Like Amjad, New Work deals with memory. It’s inspired by two baroque operas: Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which tells the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and the Trojan hero Aeneas and her despair at his abandonment of her; and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice based on the Greek myth of Orpheus rescuing his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld.
Both are tragic love stories that deal with the end of relationships rather than the seduction phase at the beginning. Lock believes audience members will have various degrees of memories of the music or the narratives.
“It is theatrically interesting to deal with those interferences as opposed to representing work that is devoid of any reference,” he said.
“I’ve done that before with Amjad, but they were ballet memories. This time it is probably a wider set of abstract memories both in the associations people have and the influence they’ll feel as those associations get changed or tweaked or challenged.”
Lock believes looking back is part of a contemporary approach of inter- indexing history and culture.
“There [ once was] clearer separation between the now and yesterday and between one culture and another,” he said. “As information grows and is more easily accessible, there is a lot of cross-referencing and these are building essentially a new culture that is independent from locale and independent of time. It is a process that is intensifying and the theatre should echo that.”