Dance review: Stunning imagery and fresh voices power Ballet BC's energized NOW mixed program
Out Innerspace Dance Theatre sets fiery work against solar flares, while newcomer Micaela Taylor brings street touches to contemporary style
Ballet BC’s Last Flower by Out Innerspace. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Ballet BC presents NOW at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to March 9
AMID A STRONG and energized program at Ballet BC’s NOW, one striking image stood out: dancers lined up, silhouetted against a blazing sun, some upright and others upside-down with their feet in the air.
That moment, from Out Innerspace Dance Theatre’s Last Flower, marked the beginning of a daring and fully realized accomplishment for its Vancouver choreographers, Tiffany Tregarthen and David Raymond. From there, the piece pushed not only into dazzlingly complex realms of rhythmic movement, but into meaningful, multilayered themes around destruction and creation.
There was a lot to talk about on the NOW program’s mixed bill. The three-parter opened with the return of Crystal Pite’s taut masterpiece The Statement—a work of such clever wordplay and staging that it’s stunning no matter how many times you’ve seen it. NOW also introduced audiences to Salt Conscious from rising Los Angeles talent Micaela Taylor. Her singular mashup of split-second hip-hop isolations, theatrical touches, and contemporary flow felt excitingly fresh.
As for Last Flower, it featured high-def footage of the sun, created by video designer Eric Chad from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory images, and spread across a panoramic screen behind the dancers, its curlicuing flares threatening yet mesmerizing. At times, watching the dancers moving toward its orange glow, exploding into flailing arms, you felt like you were watching some kind of dystopian rite of sun worship. Though never literal, the piece made you acutely aware of our star’s power to feed our earth, but also to destroy its “last flower” through global warming.
Dressed in designer Kate Burrows’s impressive shiny-bronze costumes and tiny sunglasses, 12 dancers moved to the off-kilter rhythms and electro-manipulated voices of Japan’s Asa-Chang—the discombobulating stop-start music putting incredible demands on the troupe. Here, as in the other two works on the program, the corps rose to all the challenges, committing fully to Last Flower’s quirks and moods, the choreography as intricate as it was physically pummelling. At one moment, the dancers cradled a convulsing woman in their collective arms; in another, Sidney Chuckas executed a riveting solo before stopping to gaze into the hypnotic flaming orb. When the sun wasn’t blazing onscreen, lighting designer James Proudfoot carried the glow through to a row of orange-y LED lights to incredibly cool effect.
Mad respect for a gutsy work, taking risks that delivered a big, bold, and sometimes thrillingly abrasive experience.
Ballet BC’s Salt Conscious by Micaela Taylor. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Taylor’s world premiere, Salt Conscious, had its own gasp-inducing visual surprises that we won’t divulge here—except to say that Alan Brodie’s light helped carve out vivid geometrical spaces onstage. But it was the choreography that was most inventive. Set to a sampled soundscape, created with L.A.’s TRU, was an eclectic mix that included wrestling-ring announcers (“Let’s get rea-a-a-ady…”), the sounds of soul brothers, and a ticking motif. It was an abstract, 16-dancer ode to work-till-you-drop hustle culture.
The dancers wore Burrows’s striking black-leather costumes, with two performers in contrasting white in mime-like makeup. Drawing on a background of hip-hop, street-dance and commercial work, as well as rigorous Gaga, ballet, and contemporary training, Taylor’s vocabulary is a refreshing mashup, with touches of stylized humour. Mouths pulled into exaggerated “‘Os”, dancers pantomimed spoken words, and jazz hands waved. There were glimpses of toprocks and floor work, with lots of articulated, jutting elbows and shoulders. In one moment, the dancers sat in a circle, their legs pumping like the pistons of a giant machine on overdrive. At others, it softened, with a rapturous pas de deux between Chuckas and Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera. It was an adrenalized, busy mix—a portent of great things to come for this young artist. The crowd ate it up.
Rounding out the program, of course, was Pite’s iconic The Statement, originally created for Nederlands Dans Theater. Written by Electric Company Theatre’s Jonathon Young and read by actors, it is set to the looping office speak of a quartet of stressed-out office workers. In this piece exploring corporate hierarchies, Tom Visser’s lighting heightens what’s happening around a central boardroom table. At one moment, the scene switched between spotlit performers on top of the table to glitching light over two cowering frantically beneath it. At others, Patrick Kilbane’s character rolled his head along the table in distress (“Oh god, oh god, oh god”), illuminated in the darkness like it was disembodied. Kilbane and dancers Sarah Pippin, Vivian Ruiz, and Rae Srivastava nailed its theatrical, lip-synched demands. Consider the way Srivastava slid around the table like a spider, his hands flat on its surface, his legs bending maniacally beneath it.
It’s amazing to see a program with two equally daring, genre-pushing premieres, at this time in the world, to pretty much sold-out houses over three nights. There’s a creative buzz at Ballet BC that sets it apart from the North American dance scene right now. Like Last Flower’s flaming sun, it’s on fire. 
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