Dance review: Crystal Pite's Body and Soul distills the major themes of her career on an epic scale
The Vancouver choreographer conjures three distinct worlds in her complex and enigmatic work for the Paris Opera Ballet
Movement ripples through mass formations in Body and Soul. Photo by Julien Benhamou
DanceHouse streams the Paris Opera Ballet’s Body and Soul until February 23 as part of the Digidance series
FROM EERIE ALIEN fantasy to tender human contact, the filmed version of Crystal Pite’s Body and Soul offers both grand visual wonders and intimate emotional encounters.
But for Vancouver audiences now able to stream her 2019 Paris Opera Ballet premiere for the first time, the production also offers a compelling study in the evolution of her work. Many of the themes and ideas we’ve seen the dance icon develop on the West Coast and abroad for two decades converge, distill, and metamorphize on an epic scale.
It’s predictably captivating stuff for those who love her daring side—the dreamlike worlds, the fractured structure, and the flashes of unfettered fun. And it’s also going to resonate with those who appreciate her meticulously articulated movement. While the shoot might not always capture the sheer size of the staging, Body and Soul still feels like a capital-E Event, even on your 36-inch TV screen. The wild applause of an enraptured Parisian audience after each act adds to the mood.
Body and Soul’s fractured structure will remind you of the bravado the young star showed here a decade ago with Dark Matters. She cleaved the earlier show into two contrasting parts, and here she splits Body and Soul into a triptych of stylistically contrasting sections.
Riffing further on past work, the spoken text will make you think of Revisor’s word play: here, French actor Marina Hands reads stage instructions (“Two Figures are seen. One is on the floor. The other is moving back and forth”) that repeat and distort throughout the piece. The first and second act’s rippling group work and aching partnering recall her lyrical Solo Echo, staged at Ballet BC. And the third act, with its phalanxes of black-latex-clad insects will remind you of the hive mentality of Emergence, the piece she created for the National Ballet of Canada. In this new work, the creatures’ long, insectoid masks hearken back to the faceless headgear in her Tempest Replica. Later, the unhinged explosion into a dance party feels a bit like the ironic “showtime” elements in Betroffenheit.
But despite all those touchstones, Body and Soul feels thrillingly new—a complex and enigmatic meditation on conflict and human connection that invites multiple interpretations.
The show begins simply and strikingly, with two male dancers in a sepia spotlight following the voice-over directions—one of the piece’s most defining elements, made all the more enticing in Parisian French (with subtitles in the streamed version). That duet expands to a large group of mostly synchronized dancers in long grey coats, alternately conjuring an army and an anonymous crowd. Remixed in Owen Belton’s remarkable soundtrack, the words create their own rhythms. Particulary hypnotic are the stepping instructions, where “gauche, droit, gauche, droit, gauche” is recast by the dancers in different ways—as a march, an act of mechanized conformity, a sign of aggression. Conflict is triggered by a single, stark word: “Combat.” Composer Belton goes on to warp and fuse the spoken words with an electro-soundscape that calls to mind an echoing ghost seaport and roiling waves.
The group work here is kaleidoscopically dazzling, two long lines of dancers, the first in black, the other in white shirts, pushing back and forth like a churning ocean. Throughout, individuals break out from that human sea—sometimes left lifeless on the floor as others move on.
Frédéric Chopin’s 24 Preludes set a completely different tone in Part Two, with the Paris Opera’s honed performers fully embodying the romantic pieces’ emotional shifts. This is pure dance, deeply emotional pas de deux with bodies wrapping and unwrapping in scenes of longing and loss, and beautiful, undulating sculptural group formations exploring interconnectedness. In one moving moment, the dancers lie on the ground, their hands pounding over their chests, their hearts metaphorically pouring out onto the stage.
Part Two feels like the beating human heart of Body and Soul.
The third act yanks us out of that human world of feeling and into the cold hive mind. It features creatures right out of a Guillermo del Toro nightmare, the dancers skittering en pointe (as they did in Emergence) and leaning forward on threatening black pincer-arm extensions. Pite has found angular, alien ways for them to move, and they wear faceless, tear-drop-shaped black headpieces, their individuality obliterated.
The third act’s wild universe. Photo by Julien Benhamou
Even on film, it’s a sight to see these sinister masses scuttling against set designer Jay Gower Taylor’s crinkled-metallic backdrop—though one can only imagine the power of watching these beetles in S&M body suits take over the Palais Garnier stage. Their soundtrack? The spoken phrases of Part One now return whispered and glitched out in sinister new form.
But Pite pulls us out of this dystopia by introducing a hairy beast whose animal abandon breaks free of the insect brain. The show ends in a dance party that seems to celebrate body and soul—the individual triumph over the regimented insect formations.
Part Three looks incredibly cool—and it’s probably befuddling to those who don’t know (or get) Pite’s work. The finale is one of those audacious leaps she’s made her name for. We end up in an entirely different universe than we started in. But where she’s taken us in Part Three gives us a strange new perspective on all that has come before—like we are now seeing Parts One and Two through a Lewis Carroll-style looking glass, or perhaps from some other space-time dimension. By plunging us into an inhuman world, Pite has given us a new appreciation for what it may mean to be human.
From the beginning of her choreographic career, Pite has taken on the biggest subjects (dark matter, no less)—and it feels like Body and Soul is one of her most expansive and amorphous looks at the meaning of life. The central tension lies between humanity’s need to conform and its drive to strike out as individuals, all complicated by our innate need for love and connection. At the same time, Body and Soul is a highly sophisticated exploration of dance itself—of the way the body responds to music, to words, to group dynamics.
For more clues, the creative team offers helpful and candid insights off the top of this broadcast. But there’s still so much to unpack, and there isn’t necessarily a lot of answers. Still, that’s a lot like life right now. Though Pite and her collaborators could never have known it as they prepared to take the Garnier stage, they were creating a gift uniquely suited to a moment when the world is also trying to make sense of, well, everything.
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