The National Ballet of Canada, under the artistic leadership of Hope Muir, returns to Sadler’s Wells after an eleven-year gap with an all-Canadian triple bill, showcasing three Canadian choreographers in a diverse repertoire of traditional and contemporary works.
PASSION, created by James Kudelka, former artistic director of The National Ballet of Canada, is a love story to the first movement of Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano in D, Op. 61a. Two couples juxtaposed – one classical, the other contemporary – dance and move within the corps de ballet who are doing their own classical repertoire and ignoring the modern outsiders.
The classical couple are restrained, elegant, graceful, precise, traditional, ultra-clean, sexless, no relationship as such. The modern couple are more intimate, personal and sweaty, but not as visceral as one would like. They are constantly being encircled, interrupted, separated and sidelined by the corps.
ISLANDS is a sculptural duet for two queer women created by Emma Portner in which the two dancers are joined together in the same trousers, like inseparable Siamese twins. Their legs and arms are continuously intertwining, deliberately making it difficult to know whose limb it is. The sculptures they create with their bodies are contorted, weird, comic and fascinating. The duet is set to an eclectic compilation of music by contemporary artists as well as original music by Forest Swords.
ANGELS’ ATLAS was created by Crystal Pite in 2020 during the pandemic. The ballet, in-depth, dark, muscular, powerful, otherworldly, is brilliantly lit by Tom Visser and develops against an enormous backdrop of shifting reflections created by Jay Gower Taylor. The ballet is about humanity’s transience, resilience, grief and mortality. It is set to original electronic music by Owen Belton, the choral pieces by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium. The combination of the magnificent spiritual music and the sheer number of bare-chested dancers and their coordinated flailing arms and physicality is thrilling.
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