At Ballet BC, Crystal Pite grapples with shadow figures in Frontier's Vancouver premiere
On the DAWN program, the renowned choreographer reimagines a work whose black-hooded puppeteers embody the unknown
Ballet BC rehearses Frontier. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Crystal Pite. Photo by Anoush Abrar
Ballet BC presents DAWN at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from November 7 to 9
THE MYSTERIOUS SHADOW figures in Crystal Pite’s Frontier are a personification of the unknown—something the renowned Vancouver choreographer was grappling with when she first created the piece.
For Pite, they were the embodiment of an artistic struggle she went through in 2008. And in a way, those black-hooded “puppeteers”, their faces obscured, helped push her forward into the international sensation she is today—just as they move dancers around in the piece.
Now Pite is reconnecting with those shadow figures again in a newly reimagined and expanded 24-dancer version of the work originally commissioned by Nederlands Dans Theater in 2008. Never shown here before, Frontier is making its Vancouver premiere with Ballet BC, where Pite once danced. For fans of her artistry, the searching, mysterious work fills in a key part of an oeuvre that has taken her to the Royal Ballet in London, the Paris Opera Ballet, and beyond.
Frontier was only Pite’s second work at NDT, where she remains an associate artist today. The pressure was on after her ambitious first piece at the Dutch company, The Second Person, had made a buzz. Could it be that the inspired mind behind monumental dance-theatre works like Betroffenheit and Assembly Hall knows what it’s like to suffer doubts like the rest of us?
“It really, really flattened me—I really went to the dark side in the process, and to the point it was like ‘I can’t put myself through that again,’” she reveals to Stir during an interview in a quiet corner at Ballet BC’s Granville Island headquarters. “So how am I going to cope with this new work? I thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a way for me to embody the unknown or portray my relationship to doubt, and that’s how the kind of shadowy puppeteer character came into the thing. I thought, if I could personify it, or give it a character and make it dance, that maybe I could find a more generative relationship with it.
“And actually, I have to say that turned out to be true,” she continues. “I think I actually did that: the piece has done that for me. Obviously I’m talking about something that cannot really be portrayed—we’re talking about the unconscious, we’re talking about the creative impulse. We’re talking about things that really can’t be known or seen or understood, and, on a good day, that’s a really enlivening tension for me. Working with something that cannot be understood: that’s powerful territory. I’m understanding that better, or accepting that it’s part of the deal, and I have to engage with it if I want to keep making things. But it doesn’t have to kill me. It can be difficult, but it can also be generative.”
Those who have followed Pite’s career will remember kabuki-like, black-hooded puppeteers from her work Dark Matters, one of the seminal pieces from her own Kidd Pivot company. In both productions she draws on the concept of dark matter—the mysterious stuff that fills our universe that no one has ever seen. And she says both Frontier and Dark Matters are related.
“When I made Frontier the first time in 2008, I had already started working on Dark Matters, and so they definitely were in a feedback loop,” she reveals. “When I went back and I made the piece again in 2013, I had done Dark Matters in between. And I had learned a lot about the shadow character and about the content.
“I felt like the concept of dark matter sat really well with me,” she reflects now. “I liked the idea of things being moved invisibly—of these unknown forces that are at work in our galaxy and in our universe and in our brains. How kind of lovely or poetic is it that scientists even call it dark matter? It’s like saying ‘terra incognita’. And it cannot be understood, at least at this point—I find that mystery very beautiful. It aligns also with the mystery of consciousness. So it pulls together a lot of things that I love and I’m interested and fascinated by, and, of course, things that terrify me too—the destabilizing feeling of not knowing and the vastness of it all.”
At this point, we should note that Ballet BC artistic director Medhi Walerski was a young, standout dancer at the Dutch company in the late aughts, and he danced in both the Frontier that Pite created in 2008, and in the reworked 2013 film version of the piece. And so he was receptive when Pite put forward the idea of revisiting her shadow figures again for a new rendition of Frontier.
Pite says she has enjoyed digging into the piece again. She’s hung on to some parts: most noticeably the creation is bookended by spine-tinglingly powerful choral pieces by Eric Whitacre. But she’s changed others: her longtime collaborator, Vancouver composer Owen Belton, has reworked the midsection, changing a soundscape that was once punctuated by industrial roars and hums to something more akin to human breathing.
Expanding on the theme of the known and unknown, and the conscious and unconscious, set designer Jay Gower Taylor has created two diagonal scrims that play with ideas of “frontiers”.
“The piece takes place in this kind of wedge where the action happens, but then there’s a play between some of the things that happen outside of this wall,” Pite says, caught up in her excitement about the visual magic of the piece. “It’s like there’s this borderland, or this veil containing worlds.”
Along the way, Pite carves out the duality of the shadow figures in ways that are clearly influenced by the years she has dealt with them metaphorically since first tackling Frontier. On one hand, the hooded puppeteers can lift up and support the unhooded dancers; on the other, as often exists in her work, there is a sinister undercurrent.
Pite has spent an extended amount of time with the dancers to rebuild the piece, with Ballet BC drawing performers from Arts Umbrella to size the corps up to 24. The choreographer laughs that, with their black hoods and face coverings on—when they become masses of “shadows”—she often doesn’t know who is who. But the rapport between the dancers allows them to intuitively know who is lifting or whirling them, she says.
“They are extraordinary,” marvels Pite of Ballet BC’s honed corps. “These dancers are some of the best ones I’ve ever worked with. I mean it. They’re extraordinary.”
Ballet BC dancers Rae Srivastava and Jacalyn Tatro rehearse Frontier. Photo by Michael Slobodian
That means a lot coming from Pite, who continues to work with the top dance companies in the world. Before opening night for Ballet BC’s DAWN (a mixed program that includes works by Pierre Pontvianne and Imre and Marne van Opstal), she will have flown to Boston Ballet for the debut of The Seasons’ Canon, the sweeping piece she made for the Paris Opera Ballet. Right after DAWN opens, she heads to NDT in The Hague to create the third installment of a trilogy she’s been working on with acclaimed British theatre artist Simon McBurney, called Figures in Extinction. (The first installment of its exploration of humanity’s impact on the natural world, Figures in Extinction [1.0], received the top prize for a dance production at the 2022 Nederlandse Dansdagen.) All three creations will finally be staged together at NDT in February in a massively anticipated show.
Pite says the latter work is pushing her out of her comfort zone. It is a large-scale collaboration that uses the whole company.
“Simon is very spontaneous,” she says. “He needs people in the room. He needs props. He responds in the moment. So he’s just an incredible improviser. He’s so nimble in his mind, and he’s able to put things together quickly and so beautifully when he’s in the room, in the moment. And I’m somebody who really likes to plan and prepare, and I sometimes don’t do well with that.
“So I learned a lot from working with him, and that was the whole idea,” adds Pite, who explains the project has taught her a lot about letting go. “I wanted to discover other ways of working and other ways of thinking. I’m so fortunate to be working on it. Sometimes I think about it and just feel like a bunny in headlights; I can’t believe we’re going to have to make this thing. It feels overwhelming, but it often does. Definitely, I’ll be walking hand in hand with doubt on that one—my constant companion will be there.”
Clearly, Pite has had years now to wrestle and make peace with the shadows—and now she’s eager to embrace the unknown. 
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