Ballet BC: Starting the season on a high note - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kaija Pepper
With a masterwork by William Forsythe to open with, and a rousing finale to Ravel’s suspenseful Boléro by an up-and-comer, Ballet BC’s season started on a high note. Opening night on November 2 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre gave us three works by three very different choreographers: William Forsythe’s Enemy in the Figure, Shahar Binyamini’s BOLERO X, and Stephen Shropshire’s Little Star.
Ballet BC first danced Enemy in the Figure in 2018, leaving behind a strong impression of both the work and the dancers’ technical skill and polish. The newest iteration of the company were also up for the work, the cast of 11 tackling the challenge of this stylish, classic Forsythe with finesse.
Enemy in the Figure has certainly aged well: it premiered in 1989 with Frankfurt Ballet, where the American choreographer was artistic director, set to one of Thom Willems’ loud crashing scores. Ballet BC’s dancers fulfilled the choreography — with its high kicks and spins, and the inventive mix of the playful and rigorous — with precision and power.
Forsythe also contributed lighting, costume, and stage design, all of which cohere to create a sort of visual artscape of figures in a constantly changing landscape of shadow and light, including an onstage light moved about by the performers. A large bronze wall with undulating contours sits like a mountain might in an actual landscape painting, anchoring the scene.
Little Star, inspired by guitar variations on the familiar childhood tune known in English as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, followed, created by Miami-born, Netherlands-based Shropshire, who is presently pursuing his PhD. The program note says the movement material was developed with the dancers, and is “a transcription of the 19th century English poem The Star.” The poem proved a little thin as movement inspiration, with six dancers in red taking turns arranging their limbs and torsos in dry entanglements. There is also a seventh dancer, in sparkling silver, who carries seven helium-filled balloons onstage, which at the end spell out Twinkle.
Israel’s Binyamini chose some pretty compelling music as his inspiration: Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, composed in 1928 for dancer Ida Rubinstein, that strange hypnotic piece with the repeating melody that takes the form of one long crescendo until its crashing finale. Binyamini has worked with the music before, most recently in Seoul, so his piece for Ballet BC had a good head start. In the pre-show chat, he described this version as “a reduction of many years of trying many different things.”
Binyamini danced with Batsheva from 2006 to 2013, when he began teaching artistic director Ohad Naharin’s distinctive Gaga movement language. He was also a choreographic assistant to Naharin. So it’s not surprising there is a strong influence from Naharin in Binyamini’s choreography, which has that same lush embodiment, as if there are worlds pulsing within each body.
In BOLERO X, the stage is filled with 50 dancers in flesh-coloured tops and heavy black tights, with 31 Arts Umbrella students supplementing the ranks of Ballet BC. All 50 are prowling and grounded, their bodies filled with some kind of inner fluid that seems to push and pull them into their movement.
