Christian Spuck’s exquisite Anna Karenina pairs emotional clarity with imagistic beauty | Canada Voices

Title: Anna Karenina

Choreographer: Christian Spuck

Company: National Ballet of Canada

Venue: Four Season Centre for the Arts

City: Toronto

Year: To June 21, 2025

Toronto has had its fair share of dancing Anna Kareninas. Between Russian choreographer Boris Eifman’s lurid 2005 adaptation (presented at the Sony Centre, now Meridian Hall, in 2015), and John Neuemeir’s bizarre reimagination of the book (produced by the National Ballet in 2018), you might think we’ve wrung Tolstoy dry of his pirouette potential.

But you’ll change your mind with Christian Spuck’s exquisite take on the Russian classic, which is currently receiving its North American premiere by the National Ballet. This is a striking and moving work of art that distills the essence of the novel and then tells us something more.

It’s easy to see Anna’s appeal to choreographers. Chronologically, there’s a near-perfect constellation between ballet’s ascendancy in Russian culture and the novel’s publication. Anna is a bit like a ballet heroine fleshed out in St. Petersburg society. Caught between duty and desire, she lives the black-and-white binary of Swan Lake, confronting a comparable kind of un-nuanced judgement. The sun hasn’t quite set on czarism and patriarchy; she’s a 20th-century woman born too soon.

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What’s remarkable about Spuck’s adaptation is how he pairs emotional clarity with imagistic beauty. The onstage action is often as detailed as a painting by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, or a crowd scene in a Merchant Ivory film, but the effects never come at the expense of the storytelling. From beginning to end, we are anchored in the novel’s two key plotlines – the burgeoning love story between Kitty and Levin, and the affair that pits Anna and Vronsky against her husband, Karenin, and then society at large.

It’s impossible to analyze the narrative without getting into the choreography, and then impossible to do that without getting into the music – a mix of Sergei Rachamninoff’s romantic symphonies and piano concertos with the creepy Hitchcockian compositions of Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski. This is the kind of production in which all elements cohere so seamlessly that the dancers seem to create the music as much as dance to it. Using stillness and speed, counterpoint and synchronization, the choreography expresses the characters’ motivations so effortlessly that the movement often seems translucent. We see the virtuosity of a sweeping grand battement, a suspended balance, an elaborate lift, and understand it as raw feeling.

For the dancers, this embodied choreography is a gift. As Anna, principal dancer Heather Ogden gives a heartbreaking performance. Anna’s plight could be inaccessible to contemporary audiences, particularly the dramatic suicide, but Ogden reveals layers. We get the depth of Anna’s unhappiness, her despair at losing her son, her increasing jealousy and paranoia. But then we also get the heady rush of new love. In a beautiful, sun-drenched pas de deux at the top of Act 2, when Anna and Vronsky have run off to Italy, we see an elated Anna revelling in new freedom, realizing that she is the author of her own destiny and can choose to walk away from convention. But at what cost?

Chemistry can make or break romance on stage. Luckily, there are sparks to spare between Ogden and her Vronsky, principal dancer Christopher Gerty, who is charming and caddish as a 19th-century bro. Ben Rudisin is just as strong as the dour and formidable Karenin; together, the three dancers create a tense tug-of-war. And while corps de ballet dancer Matthieu Pagès may not square with Tolstoy’s outdoorsy Levin, he brings an earthy soullessness to the role. He’s especially captivating in a spiritual Act 1 solo, and later in an ensemble section where he joins the shirtless labourers on the land, their bodies transmuting into the scythes they grip.

Part of the production’s power comes from the beautifully realized costumes (designed by Emma Ryott) and the minimalist set (designed by Spuck with Jörg Zielinski). In the crowd scenes, the women wear weighted satiny skirts that move with gorgeous buoyancy, gleaming like an oil painting under light. Ryott uses bold colour to enhance drama and tension; Anna’s blood red gown clashes with Princess Betsy Tverskaja’s magenta one (danced by the always-captivating Hannah Galway), until the latter somehow fades into the muted greens and blues worn by the others.

The set is mostly bare. Instead, a sense of place is created by old film projections on a vast white curtain. Footage of galloping hooves suggests a horse race, a line of cypress trees conjures the Italian countryside. It’s a convention that helps Spuck avoid melodrama in Anna’s suicide scene. The tension mounts internally; we see Anna in the midst of a private crisis as a steam engine chugs and breaks behind her. The moment doesn’t become public until she collapses. The cast runs on stage, their backs to the audience, until those responsible for Anna’s suffering turn one by one to face the light.

One complaint with the production cannot go unsaid. Readers who’ve followed my criticism over the years will know that I keep a tally of rape scenes in ballets because there are an alarmingly high number of them, all with female victims, all made by male choreographers. Karenin doesn’t rape Anna in the novel, and yet Spuck has given us this act of sexual violence in his ballet. I don’t get it – what’s the allure of staging this sort of gratuitous degradation? It’s a weak point in an otherwise beautifully crafted production.