“Thrilling and unsettling”
Crystal Pite’s bewitching shadow world is the highlight of this Canadian company’s double bill
By Siobhan Murphy
The shadow characters that fill Crystal Pite’s Frontier swarm up from the audience and roll on to the stage like a wave. All clad in black, like kabuki stagehands, with face-obscuring long hoods, they swarm and scurry in the penumbral gloom, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, attaching themselves to the dancers who appear in white.
They are Pite’s embodiment of the unknown, a physical form for the unconscious and for doubts and fears, mechanically manipulating actions and reactions. They are also a representation of the universe’s dark matter, that mysterious invisible force that shapes our reality. If that sounds heavy-going, don’t worry – Pite’s ability to take big ideas and drill down to their essence is extraordinary.
Frontier, originally created in 2008, was only her second work for Nederlands Dans Theater. For the Vancouver-based Canadian contemporary dance company Ballet BC, she has reimagined and expanded it. Twenty-four dancers (including four Rambert School students) take on her distinctive movement style of fluid undulations, emphatic clean lines and sharp articulations with aplomb, conveying inner struggles with accomplished ease.
The dancers move in tight revolutions around each other, tangling as the shadows control and contort the white-clad dancers, until the latter push back, or are whisked into the darkness. Actual shadows loom large on set designer Jay Gower Taylor’s construction of scrims – sometimes with no visible bodies creating them – as Eric Whitacre’s haunting choral music gives way to horror-show creaks, groans and backwards whispering. Pite’s shadow creatures have a velvet softness and an insinuating creepiness, and when they fill the stage, arms flapping like a murder of crows on the wing, it’s thrilling and unsettling.
Johan Inger’s PASSING, the second half of this Ballet BC double bill, is altogether different. The Swedish choreographer, whose rather unnerving take on Carmen was performed by English National Ballet last year, has created a sprawling, messy meditation on the human condition, which starts with two dancers sprinkling black, ash-like confetti. Later, the stuff will rain down, accumulating on the floor – a way for the dancers’ moves to leave a physical trace, a legacy that endures, at least until someone comes along with a broom.
The 20 company dancers fling themselves into Inger’s stylised mash-up of folk dance, barn dance, hip-hop, swing and tap, embracing the absurdity that is liberally sprinkled throughout the piece. There’s an inventively silly birthing scene; hysterical laughing alternating with unfettered sobbing; fights, flirting, sex, sadness. The dancers mass together in a chaotic community, skipping, clapping, finger-clicking and stomping in syncopated unity, but individuals fall out of the group, sometimes because they can’t keep up, sometimes because they don’t want to conform. Eventually, each time, the group disintegrates.
By the end, they are down to flesh-coloured undies, moving with a kind of serenity as the ash falls, somewhat apocalyptically. We’re all just passing through, Inger seems to be saying, although en masse our repercussions can be seismic. But the wilfully meandering nature of the piece rather detracts from the power of this idea.
The Stage
