Dance review: Ballet BC goes from fluid to fierce in REACHING U's strikingly shot double bill
New GARDEN and remounted Bedroom Folk show off troupe’s polar-opposite ends of versatility
Bedroom Folk. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Ballet BC streams REACHING U until April 21
BALLET BC’s strikingly filmed new double bill shows off two extreme opposite sides to the company.
The program, called REACHING U, contrasts new artistic director Mehdi Walerski’s hypnotically fluid GARDEN with the tight steps, electro-club beats, and fierce stares of Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Bedroom Folk.
The former is all grace and swirling motion; the tantalizing latter, a remount for the company, hits somewhere between the animal, the alien, and the automatonic.
Both of them translate surprisingly well on screen, allowing for wide stage shots that show the pieces’ integral formations, but also closeups that reveal the finesse, technique, and charisma of the corps’ individuals.
The trick to GARDEN is that it looks as free and easy as cascading water, even though it’s punishingly hard to pull off. The choreographer sets off a flow of gorgeous balletic movement that doesn’t stop till the final moment.
Figures whirl and lunge across the stage, duos giving way to trios and quartets, and a dizzying array of group counterpoint. It’s all driven by Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 14, the flickering forms in nude bodysuits giving beautiful embodiment to the notes.
Highlights include a sculptural quartet with Kirsten Wicklund and three men—Jordan Lang, Justin Rapaport, Rae Srivastava—intertwining, reaching, and pulling as they shapeshift into kaleidoscopic formations. There’s also some innovative, power-balanced pas de deux. (Brandon Alley and Parker Finley make a particularly strong pair, physically, expressively, and technically.)
It’s the most abstract, pure dance that we’ve seen from Walerski here in Vancouver. He was after a distilled essence of movement in this work originally commissioned for the Nederlands Dans Theater, and he’s achieved it. But GARDEN doesn’t feel like stripped-down dance. It still has enough artistic flair to add drama to this filmed version: a greyish canvas raises and lowers mysteriously behind the dancers, who appear as luminous forms catching the sepia light as they emerge from the dark.
Bedroom Folk, first seen here in 2019 and then on tour, reasserts itself as a strange, alluring masterpiece in the Ballet BC repertoire. Set to the driving beats of Israeli DJ Ori Lichtik, the piece works its own weird magic—morphing from some living amoebal organism into a cool nightclub mating rite.
Riveting and full of surprises, Bedroom Folk starts with a huddle of 12 black-clad dancers, their feet moving in tiny, tightly controlled steps, shoulders then jerking up and down, heads looking side to side. The movement starts to expand and build—bodies bend explosively backwards in unearthly arches, thighs bend into deep, punishing squats, and hands lift and flutter like alien crests, all set against a menacing orange-red-glaring background. Livona Ellis and Miriam Gittens have some of the most spellbinding moments, moving from the fierce and slinky to the broken-doll; and Zenon Zubyk and Alley make some inspired break-aways from the hive.
The sight of 12 bodies this tightly packed, sweat glowing off their bare backs, adds an extra level of taboo to Eyal's sexually charged vibe. Such physical interaction was only possible because of a brief few months where Ballet BC was allowed for form its own "bubble". The latest third-wave lockdown has put an end to that for now.
So these really are forbidden pleasures here--the serene and the seductively strange.
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