With Adieu, Guillaume Côté leaves the National Ballet of Canada to make way for new talent | Canada Voices

• Title: Adieu: Grand Mirage/Bolero/Reverence/King’s Fall
• Choreographer: Guillaume Côté, Ethan Colangelo, Jennifer Archibald
• Company: National Ballet of Canada
• Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
• City: Toronto
• Year: To June 5, 2025

Some loathe goodbyes. Others relish the drama. It seems safe to put Guillaume Côté in the latter camp as he leaves the National Ballet with Adieu, an evening dedicated to his 27-year career with the company. The mixed program, which opened in Toronto on Friday night, culminates in the world premiere of Grand Mirage, a 35-minute ballet that falls somewhere between mini-autobiography, valedictory speech and Côté’s ode to himself.

You would be right to infer that Côté holds a special place in the company–few artists get a show celebrating their exit. But as the only principal dancer cum choreographer on staff, he’s been a long-time cherished Renaissance man who has charmed Canadian audiences for nearly three decades.

Charm might be the operative word here; no one would argue that Côté has ever been technically exceptional as a dancer. Instead, he’s distinguished himself with his presence, warmth and intensity as a performer. In certain roles–Romeo and Nijinsky for example–he’s been absolutely magnetic, bringing depth and vulnerability to formidable characters. Onstage, he’s unfailingly watchable, which may sound like faint praise but isn’t. Whether the movement is complex or vague, he infuses it with honesty and vigour, transforming sometimes abstruse steps into captivating expressions of feeling.

Guillaume Côté says farewell after nearly three decades at the National Ballet of Canada

The response to Côté’s choreography has been more varied. While his work has been presented at important venues across Canada, it has never been produced or commissioned outside the country–he doesn’t rank among our most famous choreographic exports, i.e., Crystal Pite, Emily Molnar, Marie Chouinard, Aszure Barton, Emma Portner. Some of his limitations as a choreographer are evident in his two works on the program.

Take Bolero, the 2012 ballet that kick-starts the evening, a tidy crowd pleaser set to Ravel’s popular eponymous composition. Architectural and compact, the piece features a woman in white as she is supported and manipulated by a retinue of four men, their movements echoing the patterns and repetition in the melody. Leading the ensemble, principal dancer Genevieve Penn Nabity is the picture of strength and precision, and we’re treated to some gravity-defying lifts worthy of a figure-skating rink. But it all feels like gazing on an exquisite platter of food we can’t eat; we never go deeper than admiring what we see.

Grand Mirage is a knottier work to analyze. It begins with a short film (by Ben Shirinian) that evokes Côté’s inner turmoil as he grapples with the doom of impending retirement. Close-ups of Côté’s face are interspersed with dreamlike sequences of frenzied dancing, flashes of him standing outside a seedy motel and footage of his appearance on a 70s-era talk show. (For some reason, the world we’ve been transported to is one of big lapels and bell-bottoms, the aesthetic unerringly Mary Tyler Moore.)

When the film screen lifts, we find Côté in a staged version of the same motel room, where he flounders about depressively until he is visited by ghosts from his past. Some of these vignettes feel clichéd to the point of meaninglessness. Former principal dancer Greta Hodgkinson struts into his room in a purple leisure suit, hamming up the diva antics. Nothing about the choreography helps us understand their relationship, until we hear the first chords of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 in E flat, and the dancers begin a pas de deux I can only describe as bed gymnastics, replete with upside-down lifts that often create an ungainly meeting between Côté’s head and Hodgkinson’s crotch.

A later sequence involving a dancer with horns (David Preciado) is perplexing, and when the set transforms into the wings and lights of a stage, Côté performs a showy pas de deux with a woman in a blue wig (Arielle Miralles). Zigzagging across the stage to Frank Sinatra’s crooning, they are wistful for a bygone era, but nothing new or interesting is happening at a choreographic level. Like much of Côté’s work in Le Petit Prince and Frame by Frame, it feels there to fill a dramatic moment. You can’t help but wish he’d worked the other way, with the drama unfolding from the movement itself.

Some moments are more memorable. Soloist Hannah Galway appears on stage like a half-living wraith from a Tim Burton movie, and while her connection to Côté’s narrative isn’t fully clear, it’s hard not to enjoy her haunting expressiveness, the sense that she’s made of paper, that every movement carries the risk of a tear. It’s not until the work’s end that we get something that approximates real feeling from Côté. Thrashing his arms to Peter Gabriel’s My Body is a Cage, he becomes angry, frustrated, inconsolable. The lyrics may be a bit on the nose (and the whole conceit a little redolent of James Kudelka’s The Man in Black), but it’s a relief to finally sense that we’re being taken seriously as an audience, and granted access to something visceral.

What will happen to Grand Mirage in the years to come? Between the film, the detailed costumes, the beautiful transforming set (all designed by Michael Gianfrancesco) the work clearly cost money to make. But it is so expressly and exclusively an ego-project for Côté, leaving so little space for another dancer’s interpretation, that it’s hard to imagine how and why the company would present it again.

Especially not when the National is hiring the likes of Ethan Coangelo and Jennifer Archibald, the two Toronto-born choreographers who have world premieres sandwiched between Côté’s pieces. Coangelo’s Reverence is an atmospheric ensemble work, performed in bare feet, that plays with unmannered forms and motion. The dancers assume pedestrian shapes that evolve into flashes of virtuosity; there’s a fascinating melding of loose limbs and vigour. Principal dancer Spencer Hack stands out for his expressive suppleness, and while some of the work’s nuance is overpowered by its tonal darkness, this is clearly the creation of a choreographer with vision, sensitivity and a theatrical imagination.

Archibald’s King’s Fall gets points for the evening’s most novel and experimental piece. A chaos of style that pairs pointe work and pirouettes with classic breakdancing moves, the ballet is a breathless and entertaining whirlwind. Dressed like knights in shiny medieval helmets and chainmail-esque suits, the dancers throw themselves into the collision of genres. King’s Fall is most successful when it’s playful–there’s room for more levity in the work–but Archibald’s ambition and creativity are refreshing throughout.

We’re left with a program of mixed quality and mixed feelings. What’s clear at the final tally: one choreographer’s Adieu is another’s heartening hello.