Latest news with #CrystalPite
Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Ballet BC review — horror and comedy in a classy Canadian double bill
The Dance Consortium is a collective of UK venues whose aim is to bring the best international dance to our shores. It has made a winning choice with this exceptionally fine double bill by the Vancouver-based Ballet BC, unveiled this week at Sadler's Wells before continuing to tour to six locations — from Edinburgh to Plymouth — until mid June. The 20 dancers of Ballet BC are classically trained, but the works they perform are very much within the contemporary field. In other words, don't go expecting to see pointe shoes. But do go if you want to watch a superb ensemble delivering two complementary works that are, respectively, aesthetically impressive and marked by a smart, generously crowd-pleasing touch. First up is Crystal Pite's Frontier
The Guardian
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ballet BC review – fizzing energy from dancers laid bare
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
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Light of Passage – a mesmerising meditation on loss, grief and hope
An accidental Crystal Pite festival sprang up last week, following Figures in Extinction, the results of an exceptional four-year collaboration with Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater with a revival of Light of Passage, made for the Royal Ballet in 2022. It's a sweeping, powerful piece, combining three separate points of departure into its 90-minute running time, all set to Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, conducted by Zoi Tsokanou and sung with passion and poise by Francesca Chiejina. The first section, Flight Pattern, was originally a standalone work and the pulsating intricacy of its portrayal of a mass of refugees, moving in great swaths of misery before emerging in solos and duets of individual sadness and resistance, remains overwhelmingly strong. The single moment when a woman is laden with the burden of many coats is a searing image of grief and loss and the young dancers of the Royal Ballet dig deep into its patterning, uncovering the emotion beneath. In Covenant, the dancers are even younger – six junior associates of the Royal Ballet School, all in white, use the ranks of black-clad adults as their support and their protectors in a short, soaring assertion both of their hopefulness and their need for safety as they grow to adulthood. In Passage, the last part, the liminal space is between life and death and – in the performance I saw – Kristen McNally and Bennet Gartside made the love of two people seemingly separated by that final frontier full of touching grace and shared memory. Around them, dancers flood like angels, illuminated by reflective light designed by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser that seems to take on physical form, shifting in golden, molten clouds. The serious intent of the whole work is balanced by its ability to create these moments of elevation, with Pite taking on the roles of philosopher and magician in her ability to forge dance that beautifully conveys both thought and feeling. Light of Passage is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 12 March
The Guardian
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Figures in Extinction review – Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney's impassioned response to the climate crisis
One of Crystal Pite's most distinctive qualities as a choreographer is her willingness to grapple with the society around her, to craft works that engage with the issues of our time – bureaucratic bungling (Revisor), global diplomacy (The Statement), mass migration (Light of Passage). Theatre guru Simon McBurney of the groundbreaking Complicité has a similar belief in the power of art to change the world. Together over the past four years, with the exceptional dancers of Nederlands Dans Theater, they have forged Figures in Extinction – a work of serious thought, urgent entreaty and utterly sumptuous dance around the questions of human-made climate change and its effect on the planet. The evening-long show is made of three separate works, and it was the third that received its premiere last week at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International. Pite led the creation of the first, McBurney the second, and the third is credited as an equal partnership. But as a whole, the piece has extraordinary sweep and coherence. Each begins with all the dancers on stage and a question being asked. Images run from one to the other – the skeleton of a cheetah and the pinioned movements of a frog seen in the first section return in the last. The effect is one of cumulative richness forged from separate ingredients. Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list is a mournful litany of lost nature. Pite creates an encyclopedia of haunting pictures, suggestive of the creatures that are extinct but not mimicking them. In conjuring lost animals through human bodies, the work generates exactly the state of empathy its soundtrack pleads for. The second part, [2.0] but then you come to the humans, starts with a phalanx of suited dancers in suits on chairs, transfixed by their phones as urgent events unfold around them. As it develops, the movement embodies the dense arguments unfolding on the voiceover, about the left and right brain and the ways in which we have created a society that – quoting Einstein – 'honours the servant' by promoting the rational mind over the intuitive, 'a sacred gift'. Finally, [3.0] requiem explores ideas of death and time, the relationship between the living and the dead, and the faint hope that springs from the continuity of both. With music that ranges from Mozart and Fauré to Schnittke and Ice Spice, and scenes around a hospital bed where relatives lip-sync their grief over the dying while shadowy dancers seem to represent the dead, this section is the most diffuse of the three. Yet it is astonishingly moving in its willingness to grapple with the philosophical notions of extinction, on both a personal and a planetary level. Pite creates choreography that seems to stretch the dancers to their limits, their bodies so expressive, so impassioned, as they form into tableaux and patterns, that at one moment look like Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa and at the next like a medical documentary. Group movement breaks into solos and aching duets and finally resolves into stillness. It's textured, varied, utterly beautiful. In each section, Tom Visser's astonishing lighting, which constantly switches and highlights mood, Owen Belton and Benjamin Grant's compositions and sound designs, which blend classical melody with the sound of the street, and Jay Gower Taylor's fluid, evocative design all add to the weight and power of the trilogy. It's a towering achievement – a challenge to do more, think more and feel more. Figures in Extinction is at Aviva Studios, Manchester until 22 February
