Ballet BC dancers ride wild worlds of sound, sun, and genre-crossing styles in premieres on the NOW program
Choreographers Micaela Taylor and Tiffany Tregarthen revel in working with a company that’s hungry for new challenges
Micaela Taylor works with the dancers of Ballet BC. Photo by Peter Smida
Out Innerspace Dance Theatre’s Tiffany Tregarthen works with Ballet BC’s Sidney Chuckas. Photo by Peter Smida
Ballet BC presents NOW from March 7 to 9 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre
IT WAS AN AWESOMELY brain-frazzling piece of music that Vancouver choreographer Tiffany Tregarthen and her partner David Raymond had long dreamed of turning into a dancework. For more than a decade, the two were obsessed with Asa-Chang’s “Hana—a last flower”, which mixes robotic Japanese vocals, obsolete-analogue synths, playful orchestral blurps, and pounding beats, its off-kilter rhythms building to a high-speed frenzy.
And today here we are, in Ballet BC’s Granville Island rehearsal studio, with 12 honed dancers channelling those disorienting beats, falling off axis, convulsing on the floor, stopping and starting up again in a mix of detailed precision and eruptive release.
“I think the biggest challenge has been our desire to meet the rhythmic complexity and density of the music,” Tregarthen tells Stir on a break from rehearsal. “And just because there’s so many textures, and they come in quite rapidly, there’s that rapid change that we wanted to try to choreograph.”
On a larger level, Last Flower is a sign of how far the duo behind Out Innerspace Dance Theatre has come and the confidence it’s built over the past few years of commissions from companies here and in Europe. They trust themselves, and the dancers trust them enough to dive into this musical Möbius strip of nostalgia and futurism.
On a larger level, it’s also a sign of the fresh dance territory Ballet BC continues to push into as it prepares for this month’s NOW mixed program. Out Innerspace’s ambitious work—the duo’s second for the troupe—joins a program with a new commission by rising Los Angeles choreographer Micaela Taylor, who brings a unique blend of hip-hop and ballet training to her contemporary dance. Together they bookend Crystal Pite’s The Statement—one of the most taut and enjoyable pieces by the celebrated Vancouver choreographer, who’s also been a monumental inspiration to the other West Coast artists who share this roster.
In separate interviews, Tregarthen and Taylor both express they’re delighted to be teamed up with a company that’s hungry for a challenge.
For Tregarthen, the dancers were more than game for the wild ride of Asa-Chang’s world of sound.
“They just really, truly inhaled the music,” marvels Tregarthen. “I can’t believe how quickly they were able to hear what I was asking them to hear—the speed in which they could pick that up. And so when we add a story or character or content, it creates a bigger imprint and you can move quickly. Every day it’s just felt like, ‘Oh my god, we’re just devouring the music right now.’ And I really didn’t know how long that would take!”
On top of the rhythmic feats of the music, Out Innerspace will have the dancers moving in front of a panoramic video screen—one that edits together shifting images of the sun, taken every 22 minutes over 2023 by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Tregarthen says she and Raymond wanted to reflect their personal experience of watching that momentous footage—and connect it to the score.
“The sun is so much bigger than a single human experience is, it’s bigger than the sort of scale of time and physical scale that we can really comprehend,” she says. “And in that way, it can also make us think about things that are much bigger than our own experience. But also, it’s our star. It’s what we sort of revolve around, so it can feel very personal, and represent home.
“We just feel like there’s so much discovery in the music,” she continues. “And at the same time, there’s something nostalgic and there’s something familiar and playful. That term ‘nostalgic futurism’: it’s reflecting on the past and reflecting on ideas that feel close to home, and then also thinking about something so much bigger than the personal—a sense of bigger responsibility to the future also. And while I wouldn’t want to say it’s directly about climate change, or war, or any big thing that the planet is facing at the moment, there is just something about your own little rock in the bigger cosmos—your own sense of home when you see the sun.”
Working at Ballet BC is starting to feel like home for Tregarthen, too. Marking their 18th year of collaboration, she and Raymond are entering a busy new phase of their career. It was Pite, whose Kidd Pivot the duo danced with, who encouraged them to start creating commissioned works. They premiered Strange Attractor with Ballet BC in 2022, and they’ve also worked with Nederlands Dans Theater 2, Hessisches StaatsBallett, and Gibney Dance. Meanwhile, their own company’s Bygones has visited 30 cities in more than 14 countries.
Tregarthen says she’s been connecting with the Ballet BC troupe as a dancer herself.
“I just feel like the chemistry is right,” she explains. “I feel like I’m with dancers who I understand and feel comfortable with, and then I can actually think out loud with them. I don’t have to win them over. I don’t have to convince them to dig deeper into something.”
Micaela Taylor at Ballet BC studios. Photo by Peter Smida
Learning to stay true to yourself
L.A.-BASED MICAELA Taylor has found a similar connection with the versatile dancers. In her case, part of that was an openness to the way she fuses hip-hop and street vocabulary into her movement.
“From the first day I just realized we are such a great match because they inhaled my choreography,” she says on a break from rehearsal. “They picked it up so fast, which is really great for me, because I tend to create pretty quick. And so that allowed us to go even deeper in the material—it just makes everything richer and clearer. And so it was a perfect match. I’ve actually told them this has been one of my most favourite processes ever.”
That’s high praise from Taylor, who’s created pieces for the likes of Gibney Dance Company, the Venice Biennale, and BODYTRAFFIC. In L.A., she runs her own The TL Collective, which stands for “To Love”—an indication of the warmth she brings to her process.
The work she’s creating here, with 16 dancers, is her biggest piece yet.
“I was thinking a lot of burnout, and this idea of exhaustion—working yourself past your limit,” she explains. “I realized that it takes a certain level of athleticism and stamina to actually work past that point of exhaustion. There’s something that internally drives and motivates that—and I’m not quite sure exactly what it is! It’s a coping mechanism of wanting to be successful or insecurity or trying to make a means. I think it might be a mixture of all that.”
Taylor works with a style she’s developed, called “expand practice”, the goal of which is digging into one’s authentic self, and expressing it in a variety of styles and genres, bringing out emotion from the core. The American got her start in hip-hop and jazz—a natural fit in a city where commercial dance rules. She moved into classical dance at about 13 years old, largely leaving street forms behind. But as she went on to study contemporary dance as an adult, she started to notice she still had the influences of hip-hop inside her.
“As I graduated from college, I realized that the groove and the isolation never really left my body,” she reflects. “It was innate; it was natural. And so in my work, you see a combination of my dance history, where I started training, mixed with classical shapes and lines and that kind of refinement.”
It was when she really learned to let go and trust her instincts that her career really took off—eventually leading to her being chosen as one of 25 to Watch in Dance Magazine’s 2019 roundup. Today, she moves easily between contemporary stage works around North America and Europe, and commercial projects in L.A.
“I think that for me, when I first started, I was imitating a lot,” she says candidly, “because I wasn’t as confident in who I was and what I brought to the table creatively when I first started. And it wasn’t until I had this realization that actually, even when I’m borderline imitating other choreographers, my work still looks different. And I tried to hide the differences. But it was when I stopped trying to hide those differences that I think people really latched on and said, ‘Hey, this is genuine to you. This feels real, this feels authentic.’ And I started to see those doors open up.
“I think the most resistance I’ve found is within myself—an embarrassment or nervousness to let that side of me or my creativity come through,” Taylor adds. “But I think what has helped me with feeling more confident is seeing that sort of articulation and isolation in so many great choreographers—like Crystal Pite: although it’s not hip-hop, you see a mix of genre and style and a variety of histories in all the dancers that she works with. That is amazing. So I think that has given me a little bit more confidence that ‘Hey, like, just be who I am.’”
Expect a similar hybrid in the music. Created by her longtime Los Angeles-based composer-collaborator TRU, the score interweaves bass guitar, electric drums, and a man’s voice. Taylor describes the music as “soulful”, “funky”, and “rock-n-roll sinister”. The design? Just know that the piece is called Salt Conscious—the only hint at a set piece Taylor is good-naturedly keeping a surprise for audiences.
Together with the physically explosive movement (see the trailer below), Taylor captures everything about hustle culture and the rush to do more. But there’s also a little about the drive and energy in the work that speaks fittingly to the larger trajectories and daring of these assured dance artists’ careers. 
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