The National Ballet of Canada
for the Luminato Festival
At the Four Seasons Centre
for the Performing Arts
June 6-7, 10-14, 2009

   The National Ballet triumphs in two diverse modes. The first piece is Diane Dumais’ Skin Divers in its North American Premiere, almost six years after its world premiere for the Berlin Ballett-Komische Oper, Berlin, where Ms. Dumais serves as Artistic Director. Based on two poems by Anne Michaels (“Skin Divers” and “Last Night’s Moon”), this composition is a lyrical expression of the archive of the human body and of emotions of love and fear. The poetry, narrated by the author herself to the accompaniment of Tatyana van Walsum’s video extreme close-up of a woman’s breast, flanks, legs, and pubic area, has a quiet contemplative tone as it moves inward from nature (stars, high grass, cows, flowers, moon, rain) into human intimacy, dream, memory, love, vulnerability—all interwoven in a lush texture. The eight dancers (usually appearing as duos, though often combining with one another as trios, quartets, and quintets) move to Gavin Bryars’ String Quartet No. 2 (performed live by a superb string quartet of Fujiko Imajishi, Dominique Laplante, Angela Rudden, and Marianne Pack, under the baton of David Briskin). The music allows for soft or shrill melodies and harmonics. Sometimes it sounds minimalist; at others, it seems repetitively extending—and so with the dance movements themselves.

   In costumes that seem mainly bleached of colour (except for a pale pink tutu for one dancer) the better to articulate flesh, and danced against a large scrim that gradually yields to a fringed curtain through which the dancers disappear and reappear, the eight dancers (evenly divided by gender) manage to make their own vivid impression against Michaels’ dense but beautiful poetry. Their movements, however, are not tightly linked to the poetry. They are more evocative of the score as the dancers glide, flutter, execute languorous turns and extensions, soft leaps and swirls, or aggressive splintered forms and arabesques. Explicit bird or vegetative imagery (in fluttering hands or wing-spans and sinuous frond-like swaying) express a squirming world in which we strive to rise above gravity in both senses, breathe through our skin (always under someone’s anonymous gaze—as represented by the eye on the video screen), with love our “dark field, our shadow web.”

   Intensely poetic both in spoken word and movement (kudos to the octets), the piece is abstract, intellectual, and mysterious in a beautifully kinetic way. What I do miss, however, is the sense of moisture that is evoked by the verse and that the Berlin company did suggest literally and metaphorically. From my seat in the auditorium, and this could be because of the lighting from that vantage point, the piece shimmers at times but lacks water imagery or texture that would physically express the body’s tide.

   The hot sultriness of Carmen follows the controlled formalism of Skin Divers, but Davide Bombana’s version is an aesthetic gamble that writes paid to Roland Petit’s famous choreography and the high, serious tragic character of Bizet. Dispensing with the customary frills that embroider the central tale of the gypsy’s sexual but ill-fated seduction of Don Jose, Bombana’s version is hormonal through and through. His Don Jose and Michaela are an unhappy couple, suggested by the opening sequence where she sits passively in her pale blue dress as he is quickly attracted to Carmen. Stephanie Hutchinson captures Michaela’s unhappiness and touching craving for love by moving in small steps towards her Don Jose and almost pleading for his attention. Bombana’s designer (Dorin Gal) supplies a set that is essentially a curved bull-ring or arena or cage in hard metal, and that he sometimes lights in lurid reds or blues. The music is an eclectic collage of Bizet, Meredith Monk, Rodion Shchedrin, Jose Serebrier, and Tambours du Bronx, evoking idiosyncratic mockery, parody, and driving aggression, but sometimes lightened with tenderness and broad comedy.  The instrumental passages are occasionally accompanied by synthesized sounds that are eerily mysterious and sometimes by unintelligible whispers and shouts in foreign or invented languages. So, the tonalities and textures are deliberately in collision with one another, but the dissonances and mixtures create a violence that emphasizes the conflicting passions of the central characters.

   But Bombana pares even the music down to the bone, as it were, focusing on the Habanera, ent’actes, intermezzi, and a few arias, sometimes merely beginning references to Bizet only to interrupt them with avant-garde percussive passages. He even provides comic release when it is least expected, creating a space for four transvestite toreadors in ruffled flamenco dresses who wield huge black Spanish fans that they wave about like phalluses in what is evidently a parody of Hispanic machismo as they sing offkey. Fundamentally, he wants nothing to dilute or reduce the impact of the natural forces at play in the story. And the principal force is sexual allure, passion, and destruction. At the performance I saw, very slender Bridgett Zehr compensates for her slim figure by using her long legs and arms as weapons against Aleksandar Antonijevic’s carnal Don Jose by a choreography of thrusts, high kicks, long extensions, and abrupt turns. Antonijevic incarnates masculinity to the point where you can almost smell the pheromones. And this lustiness is complemented by Christopher Stalzer’s tattooed Garcia, leader of the bandits and Carmen’s lover. His pas de deux with Carmen is an erotic highlight that is bettered only in the final scene where Antonijevic and Ms. Zehr engage in what becomes a literal dance of sex and death.

   Yet, though Bombana exercises the sexual elements of the tale (even with his bare-chested male corps of trim men in tight-fitting trousers), he does not elicit high-powered lust in general. Even his device of turning Escamillo into a man-bull, smeared in grey and adorned with large horns, has only the aesthetic of lust rather than its heat, though Aarik Wells leaves no doubt in a viewer’s mind just what those horns are supposed to be as he ravishes a prostrate Carmen. Part of my disappointment is caused by a corps of cigarette girls, costumed uniformly in tunic tops and short pants, whose movements are what I would call “white” dance, i.e. movement that has an artificially prescribed symmetry rather than an organic or natural freedom. And so, this Carmen comes off as being more carnal in its intent than in its execution. Its modern temperament and texture are visually interesting, but to put it figuratively, while the foreplay is stirring, the orgasm leaves something yet to be desired.

pic 1: Paolo Pagano and Luca Masala from Ballet du Capitole de Toulouse (photo: Davide Herrero)

pic 2: National Ballet company in Skin Divers (photo: Sian Richards)

pic 3: National Ballet company in Skin Divers (photo: Sian Richards)

pic 3: Carmen and Don Jose (photo: Sian Richards)




Go Back to: Dance Reviews