What: Ballet Victoria’s The Rite of Spring and Other Works
When: Saturday
Where: Farquhar Auditorium
Stars: 4 stars (out of five)
With a new venue and guest choreographers, Ballet Victoria offered dance patrons a different view on Saturday night.
The company danced a mixed program that pushed a bit further from the company's trademark entertainment-style ballet, as well as trading sets and costumes for a more pared down focus on dance.
As a smaller company in the national and international dance landscape, Ballet Victoria doesn't often have the opportunity to invite guest choreographers, which usually come at a significant expense.) And while artistic director Paul Destrooper knows what he’s doing, it’s refreshing to see three distinct voices in the program. The first half was dedicated to those guests.
Bruce Monk, who teaches at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School and counts Destrooper as a former pupil, designed a short duet in Quantum Entanglements. Principal dancers Andrea Bayne and Matthew Cluff were all limbs as they crept onto the stage feet first and low to the ground. From that Daddy Longlegs position, they moved independently and together, in what appeared to be very physically demanding pairings (picture Bayne standing on point in a split, then Cluff spinning her down to the ground). Despite Arvo Part’s emotional Fratres for Strings and Percussion as fodder, it felt like an unsentimental piece, with more mechanical movements than the music suggested.
It was the opposite with Monk’s Sigh, Cry, Hungry Kiss — an oldie but a goodie, for the way the dancers interacted so closely with the Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Suzanne and Closing Time.
Montreal choreographer Shawn Hounsell’s take Two was all show business. Clad in shorts and tees, the dancers alternated between disengaged ambivalence (walking across the stage looking at a cell phone) to Broadway-like peacocking as soon as it was their cue. Here was a good example of how different a choreographer’s voice can be; Hounsell’s flamboyance and theatricality was in stark contrast to Monk’s more abstract thinking.
The company returned to Destrooper’s hand after intermission.
But the Rite of Spring broke from Destrooper’s bread and butter of mixing classical technique with some humour and pop culture references. In this case, Igor Stravinsky's sinister score set the stage for something more thematic and more strictly about movement. Themes of power, relationships and sensuality played out on the stage. In one instance, Destrooper moving around a circle of dancers, pushing each from the centre of his or her chest, posing them then releasing them. The closest thing to a joke came when he collected tulle skirts around his neck, transforming into a haze of blue. Visually, there was a lot of geometry to the piece, with Cluff and Eric Hall mirroring one another in one instance and lifting Bayne in a star above a huddle of others and mirrored by other stars further out.
Farquhar Auditorium — a first for the company under Destrooper — worked well as a venue. And the large stage points to more potential.
Saturday’s show didn’t mark a radical departure for Ballet Victoria — it wasn’t on the avant-garde end of contemporary and the classical technique was still there. It might not be a show for those whose favourite parts of Ballet Victoria shows are the references to Avatar and Michael Jackson. But it was a welcome step in a new direction.
