DANCE REVIEW: MIXED PROGRAM, NBOC
National Ballet’s Mixed Program brings vibrancy, colour and light
24 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 5 out of 5

Despite the fact that Winterlicious is now behind us for another year — winter itself, maybe not so much — Karen Kain is offering up a menu you might want to consider — and best of all, it’s a zero-calorie affair. In fact, you might even burn up a calorie or two in enthusiastic applause, should you decide to chow down on the dance banquet that Kain has cooked up for the National Ballet of Canada’s new evening of mixed programming, which opened a limited run Wednesday on the stage of the Four Seasons Centre.

To whet the appetite, the evening launches with the cool and sustained elegance of George Balanchine’s APOLLO, set to the the haunting notes of Apollon Musagète, composed by Igor Stravinsky. A work designed to showcase the danseur noble at the zenith of his career, it seems a role almost tailor-made for Aleksandar Antonijevic, who brought a lovely sense of disciplined vulnerability to his opening night performance.

Birthed by a flame-haired Leto (Stephanie Hutchison) and instructed by his half-sisters Calliope (Jillian Vanstone), Polyhymnia (Elena Lobsanova) and most especially Terpsichore (Sonia Rodriguez), Antonijevic gives us an Apollo worthy of the pantheon of memorable performances in this demanding work.

Balanchine is also on offer for the dessert course, with his THEME AND VARIATIONS, an often thrilling homage to the glory days of Russian ballet, taking centre-stage. Set to the music of Tchaikovsky and given the whole tutu-tiara-tights rig-out by designer Santo Loquasto, this is a ballet rich in both tradition and talent, particularly when it showcases dancers the likes of Heather Ogden and Piotr Stanczyk, backed as they are by the hugely talented corps. Technically strong, the work lacked only that nebulous spark that in its brief flaring can join two dancers into a single unit.

Such connections were certainly on offer in the main course Kain cooked up for the evening, however — the company première of choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s explosively colourful RUSSIAN SEASONS, created originally for the New York City Ballet in 2006. But as the ballet unfolds on the wings of Leonid Desyatnikov’s glorious score — a nod to soprano Susana Poretsky and violinist Stephen Sitarski, as well as the NBOC Orchestra and conductor David Briskin is certainly in order here — the dancers of the National Ballet lose no time at all in making it their own, tackling it with the same joyous skill and professional ferocity with which they once tackled demanding new works from James Kudelka, the company’s erstwhile artistic director.

Led by Guillaume Côté and Greta Hodgkinson, a dozen dancers, including Ogden and Antonijevic, Xiao Nan Yu and McGee Maddox and Brett Van Sickle and Lobsanova, fill the stage with the colour and explosive passion of a Russian year, seemingly tumbling over each other in their natural drive to dance. From an awakening spring to a winter’s lingering and frozen death, this thrilling explosion of colour and skill — at times, brooding and threatening, at others whimsical and silly, but always passionate through and through — represents a steppe by steppe celebration of the shifting of the Russian seasons. Galina Solovyeva’s costumes are jewel-like and timeless, flawlessly lit by Mark Stanley.

And fittingly, as winter ultimately strips the life from RUSSIAN SEASONS, the promise of a new awakening — in the new production of ROMEO AND JULIET that Ratmansky has been commissioned to create for the company to launch its 60th anniversary season — hovers tantalizingly in the future.

A feast for the eyes, the ears and the soul, the National Ballet has put a new spin on Winterlicious. And chances are, you’re going to love it.