Dance review: Reveal + Tell marks a dramatic, darkly witty, and ultimately beautiful step forward for Ballet BC
Crystal Pite stuns with The Statement and Medhi Walerski creates poetry in motion
Emily Chessa and Justin Rapaport in just BEFORE right AFTER. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Ballet BC presents Reveal + Tell at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre until March 5
A THEATRICALLY sinister work by Crystal Pite, a vibrating ode to Jeff Buckley’s music, and a luminous look at pandemic limbo: Reveal + Tell adds three new pieces of world-class choreography to Ballet BC’s roster at a time when many of the globe’s dance companies are still trying to find their footing.
The draw in Marco Goecke’s opener Woke Up Blind is the utterly innovative way he channels singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley’s aching, warbly voice and trembling, reverb-drenched guitar into dance. Hands shake at the speed of hummingbird wings, arms snake through the air like cobras and windmill like jet propellers. It’s a fascinating study in music melding with movement; no heavy messages, just dance that feels blisteringly new.
Next up, Ballet BC’s programming coup The Statement is perfectly timed: it’s the darkly witty creation that Pite made with Vancouver stage artist Jonathon Young after their Betroffenheit and before their Revisor. And you can see a lot of the same, genius play with language, both physical and verbal, that she and Young took to its elaborate heights in Revisor—making The Statement a perfect appetizer for that show’s return here via DanceHouse on March 30.
Originally crafted for Nederlands Dans Theater, The Statement features four office workers manoeuvring at, under, and on top of a boardroom table, a massive, menacing black light fixture looming over them like a giant anvil.
In Young’s existential, brilliantly circling script, heard in voice-over by actors, the suit-clad characters frantically try to craft a statement about a “situation” that has happened without the knowledge of the “upstairs”. The dancers physicalize the elliptical office-speak (“They’re expecting the truth.” “What is that? What does that mean?” “Are we on the record?”) in exaggerated ways.
Rae Srivastava (a standout here and throughout the night) scrambles his feet maniacally under him as he calmly and authoritatively leans his arms on the table. To the voice-over of “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” Justin Rapaport’s illuminated hands seem to roll his head along that same table. The dance is intricate and meticulously cued to every vocal inflection. As Owen Belton’s score becomes more ominous, the lighting darkens, and Pite warps the absurdly funny, farcical office politics into a nightmare of power and posturing.
Woke Up Blind. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Met with an extended standing O, The Statement is proof these dancers can excel with even the most challenging work—the kind that demands as much theatrical flourish and razor-sharp intelligence as technical precision.
With his new just BEFORE right AFTER, created for all 19 company dancers, Medhi Walerski offers a more abstract poetic piece. The Ballet BC artistic director has a way with dramatic openings and closings, and does not disappoint here. The work begins and ends with the sight of an illuminated face of a dancer lying prostrate towards us, elbows bent surreally, peering out from the open crack of a lowered curtain.
The gorgeously lit creation, all luminous grey light and shadows, reads as a beautiful metaphor for the pandemic experience. The first half is a flowing picture of humans working as a group to move onward (Kiana Jung taking a charismatic starring role), the second warped and slowed down, as they’re forced to pause and regroup.
In the latter section, there’s a wonderfully opiated pas de deux in which Srivastava holds Sarah Pippin at an extended, frozen-in-time slant. It’s a perfect example of how Walerski takes fluid balletic form and turns it into something hallucinatory. Belgian composer Adrien Cronet’s score, driving rhythms of found sounds in the first half and haunting, echoey orchestrals in the second, adds significantly to the delirious mood.
An exciting program that moves between black humour and quiet poignancy, Reveal + Tell was glowingly received by an audience ready to watch Ballet BC continue to stake out its place on the world's stage. A bit like that crouching figure beneath the curtain, tired of hunkering down and ready to spring out into the world again.
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