What: Ballet Victoria
Where: 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Wednesday
Where: Royal Theatre
Tickets: Starting at $30 (www.balletvictoria.ca or 250-386-6121)
Being a globetrotting choreographer opens one to unusual experiences. And sometimes Russian vodka plays a role.
Next week, Ballet Victoria will perform Luminous by Peter Quanz. The Winnipeg choreographer visited Victoria in January to teach the company the dance.
Quanz, 37, is an in-demand talent with an international career. He’s worked in Cuba, China, the United Kingdom and America. And he’s worked in Russia. That’s where Quanz met up with a shaman and a bottle of vodka.
In 2011, Quanz travelled to Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Russian state of Buryatia, where he collaborated with the Buryatian National Ballet. The dance he created, Dzambuling, earned him the State Medal in Literature and Arts.
Quanz was keen to soak up Russian culture. With this in mind, he participated in a shamanistic ritual. Quanz was instructed to keep a bottle of vodka in his room overnight. The next day, he was visited by a shaman.
“He drank away and went into a trance and made all these sounds. And then he told me incredible insights into my life. Dead on,” Quanz said.
The Hong Kong Ballet gave Luminous its première in 2010. Set to Affairs of the Heart, a romantic score by Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich, it’s a series of duets for eight dancers. Luminous is Quanz’s rumination on relationships.
“It’s looking at love and love lost. How the people we allow into our lives changes and contributes to who we are. And how, at times, we may be ready for the lessons that we could learn from these people,” he said.
In addition to Luminous, the Royal Theatre performances will include Paul Destrooper’s balletic reimagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as his dance Le Banc. The latter, offering scenarios set around a park bench, is accompanied by a cellist playing Bach’s Cello Suites.
About 45 minutes long, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set to the score Mendelssohn wrote for Shakespeare’s play. Principal dancer Andrea Payne plays Puck. It’s performed en pointe, but in typical Ballet Victoria fashion, traditional ballet technique is paired with contemporary flourishes.
“We have a little Matrix fighting section for the lovers, which is different. It’s kind of fun,” Destrooper said.
Destrooper and Quanz are old friends. They first met at the Banff Centre in 1996. Quanz was in a dancer-training program. Destrooper was in a parallel course for professional dancers.
Not long afterwards, Quanz was accepted by the school Royal Winnipeg Ballet, where Destrooper was a dancer.
“Paul was the first dancer who welcomed me to Winnipeg, spoke to my dad about the program,” Quanz said.
“I’ve always looked up to him as an artist, but also as a person, for how he made an attempt to connect with somebody who was just starting out in training.”
Destrooper said Quanz’s visit gave his company the rare opportunity to work with a top choreographer.
He said Quanz’s background as a dancer with such companies as the Stuttgart Ballet gives him a thorough understanding of how dancers’ bodies move.
For Quanz’s part, he admires Destrooper’s leadership of the Ballet Victoria. A full-time company in its 15th year, its budget has gone from $80,000 to $600,000, with the number of annual productions growing from one to four.
“Ballet Victoria is such an inspiring team of dancers who dug very deeply into the work [Luminous] right away,” Quanz said. “ I think they have tremendous artistic potential.”