BALLET REVIEW: MIXED PROGRAM
THE MAN IN BLACK; NO. 24; PUR TI MURO;
THEME AND VARIATIONS

Pictured:
Robert Stephen, Rebekah Rimsay, James Leja, Piotr Stanczyk

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
21 JUNE 2013
R: 4/5

TORONTO - Not many ballet dancers would trade toe shoes for cowboy boots, even to dance a ballet set to the music of the country master. But then, not many dancers have worked with a choreographer like James Kudelka, who has a proven gift for weaving music from any number of sources so organically into his balletic vision that he creates magic carpets to carry his audience to places we never realized we wanted to go. That’s what he’s accomplished in his elegantly heartfelt THE MAN IN BLACK, a work he created more than three years ago that is only now entering the repertoire of the National Ballet of Canada, where Kudelka once served as artistic director and resident choreographer.

TMIB had its company première Wednesday in an evening of mixed programming at the Four Seasons, teamed with a beautiful new duet choreographed by principal dancer Guillaume Côté, titled No. 24 and with Jorma Elo’s whimsical PUR TI MIRO and George Balanchine’s mint confection, THEME AND VARIATIONS, set to Tchaikovsky.

As its title implies, TMIB is set to the music of the legendary Johnny Cash — specifically, a handful of tunes recorded near the end of the singer’s life, when his voice seems all but rubbed raw from the savouring of the very richness of a life he’s preparing to leave. From six of Cash’s recordings — In My Life, Four Strong Winds, Sam Hall, If You Could Read My Mind, Hurt and the deeply touching Further On (Up the Road) — Kudelka creates a work for four dancers that celebrates the music, even while it is woven into a heart-wrenching study of love and loss that is deeply affecting but never maudlin.

His dancers — Rebekah Rimsay, Piotr Stanczyk, James Leja and Robert Stephen — are arrayed in full urban cowboy rig-out and, at least, initially, move with a swagger suggesting another night of two-steppin’ line dancing, but slowly, subtly, Kudelka weaves in just enough classical form to carry us to another plane as his talented quartet weaves its magic across a bare stage, lit with elegant simplicity by Trad A Burns. There is passion here, and deep sorrow, but there is also a sense of exultant celebration that is likely to leave you breathless, even while you wipe tears from your eyes.

For an audience already charmed by PUR TI MIRO’s heady blend of skill and archness and by the fluidity with which Elena Lobsanova washes up against the pure steel of Keiichi Hirano’s performance in No. 24, THE MAN IN BLACK could have been a perfect conclusion to a wonderful evening of dance. Which meant a further challenge to Greta Hodgkinson and Côte as they led us and their their castmates out of Kudelka’s living, breathing, bleeding world into the icy geometry of Balanchine at his best — and they succeeded impressively.
But it was still Cash, not Tchaikovsky, who played us home.