Ballet BC, Frontier/PASSING Review 3*
Ballet BC brings a programme of cutting-edge contemporary dance by Crystal Pite and Johan Inger to Sadler’s Wells
Vancouver-based Ballet BC (British Columbia) is Canada’s foremost contemporary dance company. Its stated aim is “to create dance at its most essential: visceral, thought-provoking and transformative.”
To that end the 20-strong company, which has been going just shy of 40 years, extends its collaborative net far and wide, attracting international dance makers at the cutting edge of the discipline.
The double bill it’s brought to the UK for a tour which started at Sadler’s Wells begins at home and then moves further away. The first piece in the programme is by the Canadian choreographer du jour, Crystal Pite, a former member of Ballet BC, whose work is in huge demand internationally.
Her piece Frontier was created in 2008 for Nederlands Dans Theatre, where she is associate artist, and re-imagined specifically for Ballet BC in 2024. It deals with the unknown in the shape of The Shadow.
A shadow is something we all cast when we block the light, and as such it’s inseparable from our bodies, moving in harmony with us. But in psychological parlance, the shadow is also the darkness inside each one of us, something we find it hard to acknowledge.
Crystal Pite’s Frontier exists at the intersection of these two opposites.
In a recent interview, Pite stated she didn’t like choreographing; and Frontier doesn’t come across as a labour of love. It is, of course, highly accomplished and thought-provoking – all PIte’s pieces are; but it’s dark and very cold.
The shadows, fully encased in absolute black cloak and hood, never assume human shape; they are like moving stains that interact with the white-clad people as if gradually drawing them into the unknown.
Ballet BC dancers Jacalyn Tatro and Rae Srivastava in Frontier by Crystal Pite. Photo: Michael Slobodian
Tom Visser’s crepuscular lighting creates almost physical planes of shade, which blend with the shadows’ lack of corporality to enhance a sense of growing strangeness.
The final sequence, where a mass of shadows (the company is augmented by four Rambert School students) cluster as one dark blob and slowly glide across the stage is pure Pite.
The second piece in the programme, PASSING, was created for Ballet BC by the Norwegian choreographer Johan Inger. At 55 minutes long (at times it felt a lot longer) it’s dance-theatre with the emphasis on absurdist theatre rather than pure dance.
It’s made up of a series of vignettes, which purport to explore the moment when individual and group merge, though this is not always apparent. It starts on a primal plane with a dance of joy and innocence between two people; one of whom goes on to birth 18 individuals. As they emerge from between her legs they rise and slowly march in what is surely an homage to Pina Bausch’s signature parades.
However, scarce as the dance sequences are, there isn’t enough choreographic variety and invention to make them interesting.
Still, there are moments of beauty, particularly the finale, when stripped to basics under a soft shower of light snow, the dancers fill the stage with their utter vulnerability.
Ballet BC Artist Sidney Chuckas in PASSING. Photo: Michael Slobodian
Ballet BC dancers are a pleasure to watch; and there is much in this programme that answers to “visceral and thought-provoking.” I’m not sure, though, it is good enough to be “transformative.”
© Teresa Guerreiro
(Banner image credit: Artists of Ballet BC in PASSING. Photo: Luis Luque)
Ballet BC is at Sadler’s Wells 20 – 21 May 2025. Info and tickets here. It then tours internationally. Full details here