Dance review: Flowing beauty, atmospheric visuals as FOR EVER devotes an evening to Ballet BC artistic director's work
Sophisticated choreography, with nods to classical roots, characterize Medhi Walerski’s Chamber, SWAY, and the new Pieces of Tomorrow
Ballet BC dancers Orlando Harbutt and Jacalyn Tatro in Medhi Walerski’s Pieces of Tomorrow. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Ballet BC presents FOR EVER at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to May 11
FULL OF FLOWING beauty and dazzling lighting, Ballet BC’s FOR EVER offers a chance for audiences to really get to know artistic director Medhi Walerski.
Since the France-raised choreographer took over the company in 2020, he’s put his stamp on inventive mixed programs that juxtapose bold local talents with cutting-edge voices from Europe and beyond. Occasionally, his own creations take the spotlight. But FOR EVER, the season-closing show at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre this weekend, features an entire evening of Walerski’s work—two pieces from his seminal time as a standout dancer and choreographer at Nederlands Dans Theater and a premiere.
What we find is a dance artist who draws keenly on his own rigorous classical training (which includes the Paris Opera Ballet), even as he takes it in new directions. A romantic who excels at elegant, yearning pas de deux, even as he pushes into contemporary edge. The evening also emphasizes an artist with a gift for visual atmosphere: dramatic lighting, swirling fog, and, occasionally, startling trompe l'oeils.
The night’s opener, Chamber, is a striking, large-scale work—almost impossibly ambitious when you consider a young Walerski created it in 2012 while still a full-time dancer at NDT. And it’s a riff on nothing less than The Rite of Spring. Walerski sends 20 dancers out on stage, playing between chaos and order. Though there is no “sacrifice” as in the original, Walerski gives a nod to Nijinsky through the circling of a group around a central couple. British composer Joby Talbot’s rising score echoes Stravinsky’s bleeping horns and sinister stabbing bass strings.
The most arresting feature is Chamber’s sophisticated play with portals—towering walls magically become opening doors, light slicing through their slats. Walerski seems to be expressing human beings’ duality—who we become behind closed doors when we’re not opening them to community. It’s an assured, multilayered piece that both honours the history of ballet and moves the form forward.
Chamber is a fitting, darker-energy bookend to the evening’s final installment, the world premiere Pieces of Tomorrow. Both flow with balletic grace, and both feel subtly ritualistic. The new work, also featuring the full 20-member company, opens with the awe-inducing sight of puffy clouds moving above the stage, rays of light then cutting through, like a thunderstorm has just passed—or like some cosmic act of creation has just taken place. (The mesmerizing lighting design is by Lisette van der Linden and Pierre Pontvianne.)
Ballet BC’s Chamber. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Below those skies, dancers in white tank tops and pale loose shorts swirl and gather like the clouds. Pieces of Tomorrow plays on cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth—movement looping and regenerating—set to the graceful strains of Bach’s violin concertos and then Johan Ullén’s uplifting Infinite Bach. There’s some gorgeous group work and partnering: check out the series of endless, inventive lifts in the pas de deux.
A glinting gold figure hovers like a faintly seen apparition behind a blackened screen—care of collaborator Lyle XOX, a Vancouver-based multimedia artist. When it emerges, Pieces of Tomorrow shifts into a kind of liminal space; the wearable sculpture, elaborately crafted from found objects, appears like a spirit of creation. Gradually time and space seem to fracture as the gold deity reveals itself. A giant steely-blue pole that slices through the middle of the stage magically rises to make way for its presence, the bodies edging away from it on elegant angles. Then it departs and the world of the dancers regenerates again.
It’s a cool moment that made you wish you were sitting in the front rows. Lyle XOX has made a name in the artworld for closeup photographic self-portraits of himself in elaborately sculpted head- and mask pieces. This is a sculpture you long to see closeup to revel in its found-object details.
Between those two pieces, the seven-dancer SWAY, created for NDT in 2019, launches with the dancers lined up, Sidney Chuckas slanting off axis away from them. An abstract ode to hope, this piece often finds the dancers swaying, as if caught in the surf of life, hanging on to each other’s hands or wrists to weather the tides. There are some outré shifts in lighting (again designed by van der Linden and Pontvianne), from orange sodium glow to harsh fluorescent glare, that play with time and space in ways that tie together the entire program.
Ultimately, Walerski has a way with large groups of dancers, the stage a canvas for subtle brush strokes of movement, textures, and rippling emotions. The solid, honed performers are as adept at expressing individual moods as the technical demands that they make look effortless.
Ballet BC audiences are accustomed to stark contrasts on mixed bills—something avant-garde one moment, something whimsical the next. In past mixed bills, we’ve seen dancers outrunning giant, spinning glowing rods and performers covered in apocalyptic ash. With that in mind, FOR EVER’s trio of works do feel similar in tone. What they reveal clearly, though, is an artist who continues to prove himself remarkably assured and at ease—someone whose complex ideas never appear laboured. And that’s no small accomplishment when there are magical portals and gilded deities around. 
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