Review: The future is female judging by the National Ballet’s fall mixed program | Canada Voices

Title: Body of Work / Rhapsody / Silent Screen

Choreographer: Guillaume Côté, Frederick Aston, Sol Léon and Paul Lightfoot

Company: National Ballet of Canada

Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts

City: Toronto

Year: Runs to Nov. 16, 2024

Classical ballet companies can’t always pull off ambitious contemporary choreography. Depth, authenticity, emotional complexity and personality – the qualities that can make a contemporary dancer transcendental onstage – aren’t the focus of training at the world’s top classical institutions. Too often, the pairing can make for a dispiriting clash of too-rigid technique and too-little soul.

So it’s a happy surprise to see the National Ballet begin their season on Saturday night with a mixed program that features a beautifully realized contemporary knockout. Silent Screen, choreographed by European luminaries Sol Léon and Paul Lightfoot, would be a challenge for any company. The work is both minimalist and intensely theatrical; it demands dancers that can fully inhabit an expressionistic style. Technique is key, but secondary. Silent Screen asks for restraint and passion, presence and ephemerality.

Enter first soloist Hannah Galway. It’s very telling to me that, with seven performances scheduled, Silent Screen has just one cast. (Compare that with Rhapsody, the middle piece on the program, which has three). You can just imagine Léon and Lightfoot, who ran the iconic Nederlands Dans Theater for 18 years, watching the National’s company class and making an instant casting decision. Among the company’s women, Galway stands out as a real actor. We saw this in her interpretation of Helen Pickett’s Emma Bovary last season, in which she made the choreography feel like a completely natural expression of the character’s lust. In Silent Screen, which uses abstract movement infused with moments of gestural acting (an Edvard Munch-like scream is a recurring motif), we see a more abstract, but no less focused, version of this intensity. Every quiver, tremour, jolt and scream feels rooted in something real – she is grounded, sensitive and able to surprise herself.

Galway is supported by strong performances from principal dancers Spencer Hack and Ben Rudisin, who show zero inhibition in this pliable movement vocabulary. In fact, they both find intriguingly vulgar undertones in certain sequences, adding layers to the darkness. There’s also standout work from corps de ballet members Erica Lall and Emma Ouellet, who evoke just the right balance of calmness and strength.

A confession: I was worried this 2005 piece would feel dated. Set to all-too familiar works by Philip Glass (Glassworks and The Hours) and featuring a background film that moves from bleak seascapes to spiral into the interior of a human eye, Silent Screen boasts aesthetic choices that seem old. But these worries dissipated almost as soon as it began; I was so drawn into the work’s melancholy beauty that thoughts of its freshness felt petty. Léon and Lightfoot have created a stirring and poetic coherence between image, music and movement. These are two icons at the top of their game working with exquisite force and imagination.

The program’s middle piece, Rhapsody, also forces some reflection on what looks passé on stage. Choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton for the Queen Mother’s 80th birthday in 1980, the stage boasts a backdrop of an 18th-century colonnade that looks hand-drawn. (It was designed by Ashton himself at 75 years old). Pair that with salmon-coloured Juliet skirts and rhinestone-studded leotards, and you have an aesthetic that lands somewhere between tacky and twee.

It’s a shame because everything more integral about Rhapsody has aged beautifully. The syncopated phrasing and intricate musicality of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini pushed Ashton to do some of his most playful and inspired work. The corps get these wild, sashaying port de bras that move them across the stage, juxtaposed with quirkily fluttering parades on pointe. It’s sparkling, whimsical and technically sharp.

Ashton choreographed the lead role for Mikhail Baryshnikov, which can explain the acrobatic jumps that show up midway through this half-hour work. But Baryshnikov was more than a stellar athlete; he had a captivating presence on stage, too. Principal dancer Siphesihle November showed off some impressive grande allegro on Saturday, but otherwise came off as oddly detached or even preoccupied, as though it had slipped his mind that he was performing. This impression was exacerbated by the fact that his partner, newly promoted principal dancer Tirion Law, was a burst of light and energy. Elegant, quick, vivacious and technically clean, she stole this ballet.

Between Galway and Law, it’s the next generation of women who are changing the look and feel of the company right now. This distinctly women-driven moment makes the program’s quasi prologue, a five-minute solo choreographed and performed by Guillaume Côté, feel a bit atavistic. Côté will retire at the end of the season, following 26 years with the company, a legacy the National plans to celebrate all season. As a dancer, Côté brought depth and character to many iconic roles. These qualities don’t age; in fact, they often grow stronger and richer over the course of a career. It makes Body of Work a strange choice. Its often static, sculptural movement leaves little room for Côté to showcase his presence and emotional richness, while its technical difficulty exposes the vigour he no longer has.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)