DANCE REVIEW: MIXED PROGRAM: CHROMA, SERENADE, EMERGENCE
25 Nov'10

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4.5 out of 5

If you want answers to the really difficult questions in life -- How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? say, or even something really tough like, What is it about Justin Bieber and his fans? -- ask the National Ballet of Canada's Karen Kain.

We're not guaranteeing she'll come up with the answers, but in the wake of having solved the dilemma of how to succinctly encapsulate a history of modern classical ballet in tidy fashion, she's no doubt looking for new challenge. She accomplished this feat in her company's latest evening of mixed programming which opened Wednesday at the Four Seasons Centre, an evening in which she balances her audience on the very cutting edge of modern dance, then rockets them back more than 70 years to when the movement was in its infancy, creating a thrilling picture of the medium's evolution.

Kain opens the evening with CHROMA, an explosive and exciting new (or newish -- it premiered in London in 2006) collaboration from British choreographer Wayne McGregor, originally created for the Royal Ballet and produced in association with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

For the uninitiated, CHROMA most often describes intensity of colour, but it can also be used, as it is here, to describe a freedom from white -- a phrase which McGregor and his collaborators seem to interpret liberally as a sort of "freedom in white." Set in an icy white box designed by architect John Pawson, it is set to compelling and often highly dramatic music, composed fittingly enough by the White Stripes, some of it especially for this work for 10 dancers.

Led by Aleksandar Antonijevic and Greta Hodgkinson, a troupe that also includes Tanya Howard, Zdenek Konvalina, Noah Long, Tina Pereira, Brendan Saye, Robert Stephen, Dylan Tedaldi and Bridgett Zehr tackle McGregor's elaborately deconstructed and counter-intuitive choreography with a heady mix of passion and skill, obviously reveling in its complex demands.

This is a ballet that moves far beyond the elegance and romanticism traditionally associated with ballet, embracing instead a new dance vocabulary that celebrates androgyny of a very different sort while it rejects established geometry for a sort of explosive random pattern that is never anything short of compelling. Left breathless by McGregor's vision of a brave new dance world though they might have been -- and rest assured, they were -- the audience was nonetheless delighted to settle back into something more traditional once the curtain fell on CHROMA.

Particularly when that something happened to be George Balanchine's SERENADE, a masterpiece of the very geometry McGregor's work rejects, created back in 1934 and now considered to be amongst the celebrated choreographer's most enduring works.

And frankly, as danced by this company, it's easy to understand its enduring power, featuring as it does the talents of Xiao Nan Yu, Heather Ogden, Stephanie Hutchison, Brett van Sickle and McGee Maddox in various memorable and breathtaking pairings. It also serves as showcase for the precision, skill and grace of Kain's corps de ballet, which happily proved itself to be largely up to the challenges of this hugely beautiful and demanding work.

Having thus elegantly traversed the history of modern classical ballet in just two numbers, Kain wraps up the evening with a second look at Crystal Pite's acclaimed EMERGENCE -- a bee-inspired work that drew straight As from both audience and critics in its debut last season. And while it feels somewhat added-on here, it clearly remains a crowd-pleaser.