Canadians came with a "Statement" - Newspaper Kommersant No. 22 (7467) dated 02/07/2023

Canadians came with a "Statement" - Newspaper Kommersant No. 22 (7467) dated 02/07/2023


In the vicinity of Paris, the modern troupe Ballet BC (Colombie-Britannique) from Vancouver was on tour. Having traveled the world, Canadians are completely unknown in France, but the first names on the poster - Sharon Eyal with Guy Behar, Crystal Pite - and the good fame of previous tours ensured a full house. Tells Maria Sidelnikova.

The tour was planned for 2020. At first, the pandemic interfered, and now the main hall of the Chaillot Theater, where performances were scheduled, was closed for a two-year renovation, so the Canadians were sent far away from Paris - to Creteil, to the local MAC arts center. However, they are no strangers to working on the periphery. For more than thirty years they have been cultivating dance land in Vancouver, away from the famous theater destinations of Montreal and Quebec, managing with more than modest artistic resources - only fourteen permanent artists, six freelancers and a nomadic life without their own stage - to get the performances of the world's main authors into their repertoire. from William Forsyth to Crystal Pite and doing them very well.

The surge in French touring activity is associated with the current artistic director of Ballet BC, Mehdi Walerski. A graduate of the Paris Conservatory of Dance and Music, after occasional work in his homeland, at the Paris Opera and the National Ballet of the Rhine, he settled at the NDT, where he made a career as a dancer in fifteen years. He became a choreographer in the youth NDT II, ​​his performances are still in the repertoire of the Dutch. When retirement loomed on the horizon in 2019, an offer came from Ballet BC. On the Pacific coast, he continues to work according to the NDT patterns. The tour program, which is entirely made up of Dutch repertory performances, is proof of this.

"Bedroom Folk" by Sharon Eyal and Guy Behar commissioned by NDT in 2015. Although for the fashionable Israeli duet, the change of place does not affect the result too much. Whether it's artists from their LEV troupe or someone else's, the choreographers stage their own - painful, experienced, over-felt and according to a verified formula with invariable terms: the pulsating music of DJ Ori Lichtik; a simple composition that follows the metamorphoses of a synchronized group (approaching, moving away, trying to escape in order to immediately return), and a ritual dance that almost literally pulls out all the insides, hence its physical extremeness. From jubilant ballet emboite to vomiting convulsions, Eyal is one step away.

"Bedroom Folk" is a portrait of Ballet BC, a physically strong troupe with a solid technique that allows them to easily switch from the ecstasy of raves to the rigidity of classical chords. In a motley multinational company that flocked to Vancouver from all over the world, a whole gallery of characters. It is impossible not to notice the agile strongman Patrick Kilbane, whose tenacity and energy was appreciated by Forsyth himself. Androgynous, tall Emanuel Dostin with the viscous body of an alien looks absolutely in his place in the strange world of Eyal and Behar. A graduate of the Princess Grace Academy of Dance in Monaco, Italian Luca Afflito stands out with an intelligent classical accent. Confident and lively girls Livon Ellis and Emily Chessa have been dancing in the troupe for the second decade, but still with a young fuse.

The twenty-minute hybrid The Statement is Crystal Pite's masterpiece. She, by the way, also lives and works in Vancouver. The premiere took place in 2016, three years later he was brought to Moscow to the DanceInversion festival (for more details, see Kommersant on October 25, 2019), but he has never been seen in Paris. In collaboration with playwright Jonathan Young, Pite came up with a conditional situation of negotiations, painted it according to roles for two men and two women, and clothed it in a dance-theatrical form that was brilliant in its brevity and completeness. While the off-screen text mints banalities - about responsibility for what was said, for the decision to record or not, the artists intonate these formal dialogues with exaggerated plasticity. Gradually, the boundaries of theater and dance are blurred, role-playing completely loses its meaning, and the verbal struggle for power flows into eloquent bodily duets. The "statement" is difficult to spoil with execution, and this is also the uniqueness of Pite's idea. Mehdi Valerski selected the most experienced dancers of the troupe (Sarah Pepan, Patrick Kilbane, Rai Srivastava, Livona Ellis) for the tour. The only thing that changes the view is the context: the dances of diplomacy at the long negotiating table today look even more senseless and absurd than before.

For the final, the artistic director of Ballet BC saved his own composition of 2016, the plotless ballet "Garden" to the music of the Piano Quintet in A minor, op. 14 Saint-Saens. In the tradition of neoclassical ballet, Mehdi Valerski makes music visible. He puts a duet of piano and strings into the bodies of ten dancers, clad in identical flesh-colored overalls. The black-and-white light and the stretched sheet in the middle of the stage, which descends and rises twice - at the beginning and at the end with a roar along with the bracket, are apparently intended to figuratively distinguish between keys and strings. You can’t deny Valerska’s musicality, as well as the ability to compose poetic duets with sensual supports: it’s nice to watch, it’s not a pity to forget.



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