The National Ballet of Canada made a long-awaited return to the stage with Angels’ Atlas, by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite.JOHAN PERSSON/Supplied
- Title: Angels’ Atlas, Soul and Serenade
- Genre: Ballet
- Choreographers: Crystal Pite, Jera Wolfe and George Balanchine
- Company: The National Ballet of Canada
- Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
- City: Toronto
- Year: Continues until Nov. 27
Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite could never have known, when her astounding new ballet Angels’ Atlas premiered on Feb. 29, 2020, that the world was about to be shuttered by a global pandemic. Watching Angels’ Atlas again Thursday night at the Four Seasons Centre, where the National Ballet of Canada celebrated a long-awaited return to the stage, Pite’s work seemed not only genius in its craftsmanship, but prophetic – a brilliant tragedy that defines a moment in history through music, lighting and movement.
When the curtain rises in this suspenseful thriller, the full company appears bare and vulnerable, clad in funereal black pants, the men shirtless and the women in nude leotards. After pairing off for a series of graceful struggles, half the dancers collapse, rising again only to pulse their outstretched hands, throbbing in rhythm like their pounding hearts. All the while, analog reflective images conceived by Jay Gower Taylor hover over the dancers’ heads, shifting like flickering candlelight on a cathedral ceiling. Liturgical music by Tchaikovsky and Morten Lauridsen, with additional electronic scoring by Owen Belton, both comforts and propels the mourners onstage.
Angels’ Atlas is a full embodiment of Pite's unearthly aesthetics.JOHAN PERSSON/Supplied
Angels’ Atlas is now a requiem. Viewed in 2021, the dance commemorates not only the more than 25,000 Canadians who died, but a collective struggle for stamina and sanity, for coping with loss. It’s a credit to both Pite and her well-rehearsed dancers that each pas de deux (for both male/female and same-sex partners) conveyed a push-pull dynamic so smoothly – bodies rolling across backs, turns to both the right and left. Nearly all movements were performed crouched down, as if ducking beneath a low ceiling. At the ballet’s apex, Siphesihle November strode across stage silhouetted by analog reflective images, his sinewy body surrounded by halos. So many choreographers experiment with projections, but none deploy technology with the sophistication of Pite and her collaborators.
Raised in British Columbia and nurtured as a choreographer mostly in Europe, Pite remains one of the world’s most in-demand dancemakers, whether she’s working in modern dance, ballet or theatre. So perfect is Angels’ Atlas to mark National Ballet’s return to the stage, that it’s possible to forget what a milestone the work already was for Pite, as a full embodiment of her unearthly aesthetics, co-commissioned by the National Ballet and Ballett Zurich.
Two other masterful works on the program, a 20th-century classic and a 2021 experiment danced for a camera, keep standards equally high. There’s no more iconic curtain-raiser in ballet than George Balanchine’s Serenade, which since 1934 has opened on a field of dancers each lifting one of their hands toward heaven. On the planet Mercury, where geographical features are named for artists, there’s a Balanchine crater, so called for a trailing field of blue dust that resembles the signature tulle skirts for Serenade. Like Angels’ Atlas, Serenade is a ballet that demonstrates its choreographer’s hallmarks and strengths, from its clever entrances and exits, to pretzel-like twists and dynamic movements on the diagonal.
George Balanchine’s Serenade opens on a field of dancers each lifting one of their hands toward heaven.Karolina Kuras/Supplied
Three classic roles in the ballet, set to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, went to company stalwarts. Jurgita Dronina radiated joy, as well as stunning technical prowess, as the Russian Girl. Each gesture was so well articulated that Dronina – who spent the pandemic birthing her second child and teaching floor barre from a playroom – summoned every eye in the crowd with a flick of her wrist. Tanya Howard checked her balance a handful of times as the Dark Angel, but was otherwise a poised Charon-like figure ushering dancers into the next world. Jumps were the most difficult skills for the dancers to maintain during the pandemic, and a few leaps did look weak during Serenade. Sonia Rodriguez compensated by bringing nuanced delicacy to the Waltz Girl, and was ultimately carried offstage by four men, her own abs of steel bracing her back in an arch.
Sonia Rodriguez, Piotr Stanczyk and Tanya Howard in Serenade.Karolina Kuras/Supplied
It’s worth noting that Howard, a biracial dancer from South Africa, starred as the Dark Angel the same day her homeland’s former president, F.W. de Klerk, issued a posthumous apology for the role he played in apartheid. Her dancing was sublime in Soul, an 11-minute dance film shown in lieu of intermission. It was choreographed by Jera Wolfe, who is of Métis heritage. Joining Howard in the performance was long-time National Ballet leading man Guillaume Côté, plus principals and offstage partners Harrison James and Ben Rudisin. With such a team, Soul served as a meditation not only on love and loss, but as a window into ballet’s future – one where diversity matters, where love is love and where technology continues to help viewers marvel at what the human body can do.
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