Dance review: At Ballet BC's HERE season opener, its largest-ever work brings the audience to its feet
Shahar Binyamini’s exhilarating and unforgettable 50-dancer BOLERO X caps a top-notch program that showcases a powerhouse corps
Ballet BC’s BOLERO X, beefed up with Arts Umbrella dancers, by Shahar Binyamini. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Ballet BC’s HERE continues at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to November 4
A LONE FIGURE IN black shiny tights dances, illuminated in the dark—arching, swirling perilously off axis, and moving across the stage with groin-punishingly low lunges and squats. Around him, you can barely make out a huge half-circle of pale shapes. Are they set pieces? Sculptures?
In Shahar Binyamini’s triumphant BOLERO X, as the light slowly rises, those figures gradually come to life, on all fours, their bare arms like pillars framing the space, their heads bobbing to the beat. Fifty dancers then build their movement as Maurice Ravel’s famous music layers and crescendos.
Ballet BC’s stunning season opener ended on an exhilarating high, the dazzling new work’s climax bringing audience members instantly to their feet for a loud and extended standing ovation. It was one of the most memorable premieres the company has had in its history—and if you can score tickets for the last night, Saturday, you’ll be able to talk about it for years to come.
The story behind the epic work added to all the feels that came from watching the breathlessly physical BOLERO X: its Israeli choreographer Binyamini, an alumnus of the famed Batsheva Dance Company, had barely made it out of war-ripped Israel to put the finishing touches on the piece. Its appeal came from the fact that it was not just a celebration of the joy and power of dance, but of connection and humanity in a painfully divided world.
Part of the pleasure watching it was witnessing a top-of-its-game corps (supplemented by 30 Arts Umbrella dancers) commit so fully to BOLERO X’s passions and its gruelling, sensual movement. The work draws on the explosive language of Batsheva’s signature Gaga technique, so earthily grounded that dancers like Michael Garcia and Sarah Pippin sometimes sink into gorgeous splits to cross the floor. The pas de deux are arrestingly strange and seductive, enhanced by the deep-cut V waists of the second-skin tights. At one point Kiana Jung arches backward off Rae Srivastava until her head loops downward through his feet. At another, Pippin languorously bends up her legs as she rides Orlando Harbutt, tabletop-style, across the stage.
Orlando Harbutt and Sarah Pippin in BOLERO X. Photo by Michael Slobodian
For Batsheva fans who have seen Ballet BC stage creations by Ohad Naharin or Sharon Eyal, it’s fascinating to watch the way that Binyamini distills and interprets his mentors’ influences into his work. Whereas Eyal’s dancers take on the fierce glare of dance-club automatons, Binyamini’s feel deeply, intimately human, despite the scale—and even as they move as a massive, convulsing machine as BOLERO X builds, arms, legs, and elbows thrusting out like pistons and levers. It’s the largest-scale piece the company has ever staged, powered by wildly pulsing group formations and mesmerizing solos and duets. It was breathtaking and left you craving more, as the best dance does.
BOLERO X capped a strong and avant-garde-feeling program.
HERE opened with a remount of contemporary icon William Forsythe’s Enemy in the Figure. It’s a ridiculously complex piece that only top-flight companies can hope to pull off—which Ballet BC’s young and energized-feeling artists proceeded to do. Still cutting-edge after 30-plus years, Enemy is a dazzling mix of precision and chaos, dancers appearing in and out of darkness amid an undulating wall. Dancers send a huge rope rippling ominously across the floor at random junctures. A sophisticated deconstruction of ballet, Enemy makes near-impossible technical demands of its performers, who move through fragmented sequences—rocketing high jumps, split-second arabesques, whirling turns.
It’s set to the abrasive, off-kilter soundtrack by Thom Willems, which revs its tempo up and down. All the while, dancers move and tilt a massive, sepia light that carves and recarves the space. Sometimes they extend and bend their legs backward up the walls; at other moments, they skitter mantis-like across the floor, or run breathlessly around the central setpiece. In its deconstructed frenzy, the piece also, somehow, feels cinematic, with all the urgency of a mystery thriller that never quite reveals its secrets.
The demanding work accentuates the standout talent the company has right now: Srivastava, swirling in fringed costumes; Pippin’s unearthly extensions; the powerhouse Jacalyn Tatro. It’s also fun to watch the effortless, almost street flow that charismatic emerging dancer Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera (filling in for Patrick Kilbane) brings to Forsythe’s language.
Rounding out the program was American-trained, Netherlands-based Stephen Shropshire’s Little Star, a piece that managed to be whimsical and dreamlike yet also serious and intellectual in its studies on variations in movement. We’ll leave some of its visual touches a surprise; just know that Shropshire is also a respected gallery curator, and the stage comes to life through colour and framing like an artwork in itself. The piece features seven dancers in bright variations of red costumes (gorgeously conceived by Shropshire, working with Kate Burrows) gathered around a central dance floor, the performers watching each other take a moment to “twinkle” in the spotlight.
Sarah Pippin and Zack Sommar in Little Star.
Shropshire’s premiere begins simply, with a dancer moving to the age-old lullabye “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. Then the different vignettes begin, in a format that might remind you of a hip-hop-battle ring, yet set to the delicate solo-guitar variations on the music by Angelo Gilardino (matched by more delicate movement than on the rest of the program). Shropshire has said the dancers worked closely to interpret the language of the lyrics, based on the poem by Jane Taylor. The movement is a detailed contrast of hard angles and soft release, legs and arms folding into themselves, then reaching to the stars. A highlight is the unusual partnering between Pippin and Zack Sommar; one minute he turns her upside down with her limbs spread wide and starlike, the next he holds her gently on his lap, carefully crossing her legs for her. But there is someone lurking in the background, craving his own time to shine, complete with balloons and sequins—despite the disregard of the others. And so there is an unexpectedly moving denouement to this sophisticated choreographic enquiry.
An affecting portrait of all our needs for attention? A wry comment on the sometimes existential experience of making art for a fickle crowd? Whatever its messages, Little Star was part of a program that makes it clear this is a moment for Ballet BC to twinkle in the spotlight.
Ballet BC Dancers Rae Srivastava and Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera in Enemy in the Figure by William Forsythe. Photo by Michael Slobodian
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