Fast-rising choreographer Dorotea Saykaly builds her biggest vision yet at Ballet BC's What If
On an all-world-premiere program, the Compagnie Marie Chouinard alumna draws on sci fi for RELIC
Dorotea Saykaly works with Ballet BC dancers in the studio. Photo by Jon McRae
Ballet BC presents What If from May 12 to 14 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
AS A DANCER, Dorotea Saykaly has had a remarkable career—and now she’s ready to tap all that experience and mix it with her own distinct vision in her largest work as a choreographer.
The winner of the Emily Molnar Emerging Choreographer Award will debut her theatrical, sci-fi-influenced RELIC for 12 Ballet BC dancers at the What If season closer this week. (RELIC shares the mixed program with two other new works on an ambitious all-world-premiere bill: German talent Felix Landerer’s Everything will be ok and Vancouver-based Out Innerspace Dance Theatre’s Strange Attractor.) For Saykaly, it marks the culmination of years of dancing for the likes of Compagnie Marie Chouinard and Sweden’s Goteborg Danskompani, along with her own dance-film explorations.
“It’s been just an incredible experience to dive into this–finally releasing this animal that’s been caged,” the artist tells Stir with a laugh, speaking over the phone between rehearsals with Ballet BC.
In her eight years with the wild Montreal visionary Chouinard, Saykaly was a standout as everyone from a gold-pastied demon in Orpheus and Eurydice to a prosthetic- and crutch-wielding ballerina in bODY rEMIX. “She’s a very intuitive creator,” recalls Saykaly, “so we were tapping into instincts.” Saykaly says she was also influenced by Chouinard’s precision and her ability to build entire worlds onstage.
In 2014, Saykaly relocated to Sweden to join the Goteborg Danskompani, where she worked with many of the contemporary dance world’s most exciting choreographers: think Sharon Eyal, or Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet.
“It was just one after another, and I love a good challenge in the studio,” Saykaly relates. “I’m a late bloomer—I never had an official great dance education, I never went to an academy really, I got rejected from a lot of programs!—so I learned a lot on the field. So whenever a new choreographer gives me new things to learn, I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’”
Surrounded by creative dancers doing outside projects, and learning under the leadership of two strong female directors, Saykaly choreographed her first solo at Danskompani. (Called UNraveling, it later scored the audience prize at the Warsaw Zawirowania Competition.)
And in 2019, she decided to take a sabbatical to dive into creating her own work—only recently deciding to leave the company to go at it full-time, she reveals.
“I actually felt like I wanted to step up my game,” she says of moving out of the company atmosphere—as exciting as that environment was. ‘There was something also at some point where I felt like you maybe don't wait for an outside source to give you what you want. Sometimes you just want to explode as a performer and research different tools that you have….It just comes back to those instincts that it’s time to move on–even when it's a good thing.”
Basing herself between Copenhagen and Montreal, Saykaly submitted a work-in-progress to the inaugural Emily Molnar Emerging Choreographer Award over two years ago and took the prize—one that’s finally allowing her, post-pandemic shutdowns, to design RELIC for the dancers of Ballet BC.
Saykaly has drawn inspiration as diverse as the Cain and Abel creation myth to Renaissance paintings to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”. The choreographer, who’s worked a lot in dance film, also draws on sci-fi movies for the piece.
“Funny enough, somebody said ‘There’s something so cinematic about your work,’” the artist says. “When I was growing up, my parents were movie buffs.”
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Saykaly’s work is the way she plays with contrasts—a tension between the artificial and the organic, and the human and the animal.
Those contrasts are reflected in composer Riku Mäkinen’s haunting original score. “He takes natural sounds and synthesizes them and amalgamates them,” explains Saykaly, who’s also worked with dramaturge and theatre director Mathieu Leroux on the project. (Saykaly has also added her own voice-over to the soundscape.)
And even though she’s working in some robotic-cyber elements, Saykaly also stresses, “I do try to touch on fragility. Humans are such beautiful and strange and complex creatures.”
Overall, she’s been thrilled to have the chance to explore her biggest work yet with the honed dancers at Ballet BC.
“The dancers have been really generous,” she enthuses. “They're super strong and versatile.” And they’re game for releasing that “animal that’s been caged” as Saykaly builds the next, exhilarating chapter of her already impressive career.
The artists of Ballet BC rehearsing RELIC. Photo by Jon McRae
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