NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA.

NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA 

CITY CENTER OCTOBER 6-11, 1998

REVIEWED BY AMANDA SMITH

The undercurrent of anguish that ran through so many of National Ballet of Canada's dances made the company's first New York appearance in a decade less upbeat, less of a pleasure, than it would have been otherwise. This is a ranking international company that does its share of the ballet classics at home, but the programs it brought consisted solely of contemporary Canadian choreography, most of it plotless. As it presented itself here, it's a company in search of choreographic variety in its new work.

The choreographic vision of James Kudelka, artistic director since 1996, sets the tone. His own introspective, fluid Musings (1991) to Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A Major, a group work performed with the musicians on-stage, uses restrained ballet technique. In its melancholy, mysterious second section, a woman is handled by three men who often shield their eyes with their arms. The third section is its reverse, a quartet for three women and a man, curiously punctuated by a stylistically out-of-place little shuffle.

Kudelka's 1977 Washington Square, based on the Henry James novella about the making of a spinster, is straightforwardly and clearly rendered, with Rebekah Rimsay as the spinster and Ryan Boorne the caddish suitor, who first betrays her and then is himself rejected. (Martine Lamy and Johan Persson led an alternate cast.) Kudelka's Four Seasons, to the Vivaldi score, made twenty years later, is more open, both emotionally and stylistically. It has wonderful costumes by Carmen Alie and Denis Lavoie. Aleksandar Antonijevic was the man who wends his way through the seasons--a Shakespearean metaphor for the ages of man--ending eventually in a Pieta position in the arms of a mature woman; she is one of four older dancers called into service for this piece, their presence giving the work a suggestion of ancestry, both personal and artistic.

Desir is misnamed: it should be called Ecstasy, and it provided the only angst-free entry in the company's run as well as some very welcome unison dancing. With its rapt couplings by dancers in glamorous party dress, this Kudelka work is reminiscent of Twyla Tharp's Nine Sinatra Songs.

Dominique Dumais, a second soloist with the company and a choreographer to watch, showed the weight of absence, to contemporary music by Eric Cadesky. The dance for nine in white spandex led by Stephanie Hutchison is aerobic, full of flinging limbs and lush modern angst. In her Tides of Mind, a duet danced by Jennifer Fournier and Rex Harrington to a recording of the second movement of Henryk Gorecki's sometimes strident Symphony No. 3, the dancers are pulled forward by an unseen force, then recede like the tides.

Ballet British Columbia artistic director John Alleyne was represented by the neoclassic quartet Split House Geometric, to Arvo Part's churning Fratres, calling for one couple to dance, then take their places, almost as ghosts, behind another couple. The dance, full of halted flow, featured for the women the jarring combination of baby-doll nighties over spandex.

There's a lusciousness to the Canadians' dancing, but at the end of the day, the dances on this tour were too similar in mood, tone, and even form: at least five of the seven pieces open with a lone figure on the stage. It makes one consider, wistfully, the adage that variety is the spice of life.