BALLET REVIEW: THE FOUR SEASONS; EMERGENCE


Pictured: Greta Hodgkinson, Guillaume Côté

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
23 MARCH 2013
R: 5/5

To everything there is a season, we are told — and happily to every season, there seems to be a rhythm that rarely gets old. For proof, look no further than the balletic masterpiece that is THE FOUR SEASONS — a signature work created for the National Ballet of Canada in 1997 by then-artistic director James Kudelka. In the intervening years, despite its brevity (it clocks in just shy of 45 minutes), it  has emerged as one of the most treasured works in the company's extensive repertoire.

And with good reason, as proven once again in the current revisiting, which opened in concert with Crystal Pite's more contemporary EMERGENCE in an evening of mixed programming at the Four Seasons Centre Wednesday.

Set to Vivaldi's all-but-ubiquitous work of the same name and featuring violinist Stephen Sitarski, THE FOUR SEASONS overlays the seasons of a man's life with the seasons of the calendar and binds them into a stirring meditation that overflows with joy and sorrow, reflection and exploration, life and death. Guillaume Côté is cast as A Man, and he leads us through the seasons of his life with assurance and grace, each of those seasons made memorable not just by his interaction with a single ballerina, but by his work with the corps as well, creating in the process, a community that supports him even while it seems to interfere with his desires.

As his Spring, Stacy Shiori Minagawa turns in a performance as fine and delicate as the first snowdrops of the season, while as Autumn, Stephanie Hutchison gives us a highly feminine season rich and ripe, before mellowing into a glorious Winter, danced by Xiao Nan Yu, centred and soaring in her maturity.

But memorable as those three seasons are, Summer is, fittingly in a winter that seems determined not to relinquish its grasp, the season that lingers in the heart, danced as it is with commanding finesse by the ethereal and incomparable Greta Hodgkinson, who drew deserved cheers from an opening night audience, conspiring with Côté to evoke the kind of long, hot summer of which dreams are woven.

There is, of course, the rhythm of another kind of life at the heart of Pite's EMERGENCE, which uses the world of insects as its inspiration and moves to more natural cadences of captured in Owen Belton's naturalistic score.

A bold departure from the carefully controlled classicism that inspired THE FOUR SEASONS, EMERGENCE uses almost the entire company, moving in strict unity, to create a rhythmic militaristic quality that proves hypnotic in an eerily fascistic way. But it also offers a showcase for artists like Aleksandar Antonijevic, Keiichi Hirano, Elena Lobsanova, Heather Ogden, Sonia Rodriguez, Piotr Stanczyk and Patrick Lavoie, many of whom are given moments in the spotlight before blending once again with the dancing swarm. And happily, the rhythms of both linger long after the curtain falls.