It’s form versus feeling in the National Ballet’s winter double bill, featuring a North American premiere from Crystal Pite

At the turn of the 20th century, Sergei Diaghilev’s avant-garde company Ballets Russes was producing ballets so radical that nearly every conservative Parisian was clutching their pearls. But one of Diaghilev’s last protégés, Serge Lifar, wasn’t so interested in impolite modernism. Instead, he prioritized form above storytelling and psychology, believing ballet was a mathematical architecture that could be systematized similarly to musical harmony. 

Lifar became director of the Paris Opera Ballet at just 24, staying on during the Nazi occupation of France. While the jury’s out on whether he was a true fascist collaborator, he was certainly a moral opportunist, and his penchant for classical purity and physical idealism reverberate loud and clear in his 1943 showcase ballet Suite en Blanc, playing as part of the National Ballet of Canada’s winter double bill. 

Set to Edouard Lalo’s Namouna — a lush French score with Spanish flair — the ballet arrives in eight symmetrical numbers. Dancers clad in head-to-toe bleach white costumes (tutus and sweetheart bodies for women or tights and blouses for men) come out for extended solos, pas de deux et trois, and ensemble numbers that typically begin in measured restraint before accelerating toward virtuosic codas. 

Despite Lifar’s clinical approach, there’s plenty of style to be found in the ballet’s sculptural clarity. Arms curve into rounded arcs that trace soft “S” shapes, while legs rise to a crisp ninety degrees, forming “L” shapes. According to lore, Lifar purposely embedded his initials into the choreography, as though carving his ownership into the plinth. A raised upstage platform also allows the corps to assemble in unobscured tableaux, becoming an ornate frieze above the main action (scenery provided by San Francisco Ballet).

After minor missteps from the dancers in the under-synchronized group numbers, the show picks up with a meaty middle. “La Cigarette,” the most sensuous variation, gives us the reason we bought the tickets: Genevieve Penn Nabity’s performance is chic, with the right mix of flirt and attack needed for the role’s smouldering expressions, smoky arms, and fiery batterie.

Naoya Ebe dances Suite en Blanc’s “Mazurka” handsomely. It’s a deceptively tricky solo with irregular musical phrasing that requires rhythmic intelligence. His statuesque poses linger just slightly behind the beat as though he’s stretching out the music to lay in it. 

Suite en Blanc is a curiosity. It’s clean and brimming with technical challenges but there’s a ceiling to what it can evoke. Taken out of historical context, this rendition is impressive, but not soul-stirring. 

After intermission comesFlight Pattern, Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s attempt to cope with the Syrian refugee crisis. It is — perhaps unsurprisingly — quite different in the feelings department. Originally created for England’s Royal Ballet in 2017, the work has an even wider resonance today, sadly, as refugee crises have become a more common contemporary experience. Taken together, the two ballets are total opposites. One is shiny; one is sad. And for that reason it might seem like they have little to say to each other, but there’s depth to their juxtaposition. Lifar’s ballet came out of the Second World War; Pite’s ballet emerges from the world of wars we live in today. The double bill might be asking: What role, if any, should dance play in times of crisis? 

One of the few visual similarities Flight Pattern has to Suite en Blanc is a deep black box set, which in designer Jay Gower Taylor’s hands becomes unpredictable and claustrophobic — a perfectly evocative articulation of the sensation of displacement. At times the stage is compressed vertically, the dancers appearing as though they can barely stand up straight; at others, panels close in from both sides, leaving gaps that look bright with potential. 

Set to the first movement of Henryk Gorecki’s tragic Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, which includes soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee in the orchestra pit singing in Polish from the perspective of a mother lamenting the loss of her son, the ballet rolls out in waves. The 36-dancer ensemble, a few of whom have just danced Suite en Blanc, opens the piece clustered together in gray overcoats (designed by Nancy Bryant). They’re keeled over at the waist and their torsos ripple upward in unison, as though bobbing in the same forceful current — a signature image across Pite’s works.

For much of the ballet’s half-hour runtime, individuality stays dissolved in place of mass motion. A dancer might briefly break from the formation to execute a gesture — a nodding head that looks outward; an arm stretched up, searching — and later that movement resurfaces in another body. These cyclical movements, where the shared experience migrates across the ensemble, are the most compelling to me. 

But direct narrative passages feel less assured. Two dancers play a couple who have lost their child (on opening night, they were Hannah Galway and Siphesihle November). Galway appears clutching a bundle of fabric that unravels to her horror and later she collapses beneath the weight of the gray overcoats that have been piled on her. In the ensemble’s most hopeful scene, the once dim, sparse light by Tim Visser shifts to a warm gold for the first time and dancers turn their gaze and chest upward, and begin to flap their arms in flight. These moments are striking, yet their emotional cues felt quite literal and I found myself wanting more space to discover on my own. 

For the finale, November erupts into a violent solo as Galway sits faced away, rocking in anguish. In a breathless whirl of leaps, lunges, and primal crawls, November is no doubt commanding in his fear, fury, and athleticism, but again it tips over from intensity into insistence and overwhelms the nuance established earlier. 

Still, Flight Pattern is timely and harrowing. Even if its symbolism presses plainly, the National Ballet does justice to the piece’s expression of collective, humanitarian grief for the majority of the performance. And Pite reminds us that ballet can smash its pristine porcelain carapace to confront the present tense.

Flight Pattern / Suite en Blanc runs at the Four Seaons Centre for the Performing Arts until March 8. More information is available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Lindsey King

Lindsey King is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor with bylines in Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Intermission, and The Creative Independent.

LEARN MORE