Ballet BC review – fizzing energy from dancers laid bare

The Guardian

21-05-2025

In brief, this double bill from Vancouver-based Ballet BC comprises one really great piece and one that starts promisingly but loses its way. Plus some incredible dancers.
To the good stuff first: these dancers, the men especially, are so vividly alive in Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite's Frontier, with quicksilver reflexes and fizzing energy, even though everything's executed with total control. Soloists dressed in white dance Pite's treacle moves as if you can see the gravity. But they are among shadows, hooded figures all in black, who at times lift and support the soloists as if they're being carried by invisible forces. Elsewhere they loom ominously, they are ghosts or fears. The mood is eerie with the whispers and echoes of Owen Belton's soundtrack.
Pite has a way with readable visual ideas. What might amount to a line written down – black v white, individual v group – becomes expansive in movement, sensitively alive. (She has said the dark figures represent the unknowns of the universe and consciousness, but it works whether you know that or not.) She has a talent for composition and structure, and for considering the audience's journey. The transcendent voices of composer Eric Whitacre open the piece and they return at its end in a choral catharsis, to make a satisfying whole.
This mastery of composition is something that's missing in Johan Inger's piece Passing (and, to be fair, in a lot of choreography). The Swede is much less well known in the UK than Pite. ENB danced his Carmen last year, but this is a lighter piece, certainly at the outset. It feels human in scale, with guitar-picking music and folksy movement, playing out snippets of life's landmarks and seasons, its circles, rituals and relationships, with light, colour and humour; the dance itself is pleasingly wry in tone.
But somewhere around the halfway point, it becomes overstretched. A mournful a cappella song outstays its welcome, things get nebulous. The company end up circling the stage in their underwear in a huge shower of confetti – it's beautiful to look at, but missing the profundity it's no doubt aiming for. The thick drone of the soundtrack doesn't help. Bring back that choir!
At Sadler's Wells, London, until 21 May. Then touring until 11 June