Ballet BC: A playful double bill by Johan Inger and Roy Assaf - Vancouver Ballet Society
By Kristen Lawson
Ballet BC closed their home season, at Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre May 11-13, with two bold and playful works that premiered in Los Angeles on May 6. Both featured the entire company, putting the dancers through their paces using song, dance, and theatrical elements all at once. The choreographers clearly had fun in the rehearsal studio, infusing their works with humour and cheek.
Israeli Roy Assaf made his company debut with 20 People, named for the number of dancers onstage. The work declares its absurdity when it opens with the house lights still up, the female dancers sitting at the front of the stage, meditating in hot pink velvet bodysuits. Donny Hathaway’s smooth version of A Song for You plays as they toss their hair and perform melodramatic floorwork in perfect unison.
The tone shifts when the music stops and the only sound is the dancers’ voices holding a single note for as long as possible. This continues through the entire piece, sometimes with 20 voices, sometimes with only one. A single voice on the vast stage seems fragile and lonely compared to the strength of the group.
The space is made more open than usual with a white marley floor and no curtains, creating a kind of black-box theatre on the Queen Elizabeth’s proscenium stage. Dancers travel in and out constantly in small groups, moving as one, reminiscent at different times of schools of fish, Greek choruses, and Busby Berkeley chorus girls. Although I had no idea what was happening in the thoroughly abstract 20 People, I found it entertaining. The program note instructing the audience to do pelvic floor exercises when they became impatient didn’t help lift the opacity of the work.
Johan Inger’s PASSING was clearer, without being obvious. I did have the advantage of attending the pre-performance talk with Inger on opening night, in which he discussed his inspiration and intentions.
While Ballet BC has performed the Swedish choreographer’s work twice before, this is his first piece created for the company. He used the dancers’ individual talents to add elements such as a beautiful a cappella solo and an intimidating tap dance to the work.
Opening with a stark rectangle of light, accompanied by soft guitar and whistling, PASSING features many characters within a single community, exploring human existence from birth to death and beyond. Black ash is scattered on the white ground, at first providing a path for the dancers, and eventually filling the entire floor so that each movement leaves traces in the dark snow.
With colourful costumes and playful interactions, the dancers seem content as they hold hands and perform one large folk dance. Individuals and groups break away throughout to live out mini-scenes but always return to the whole. These scenes were fun, dark, sexual, and everything in between.
PASSING takes on a trance-like state as ash falls from above in soft lighting, and the colourful clothes are shed. Individuals disappear into the group, and the group disappears into darkness. It made me think of the way every generation of our past seems less bright and nuanced than our own. The audience held their breath until the last ash fell, too caught up in the moment to break the spell, before erupting into applause.
The evening unfolded in a surprising order, with artistic director Medhi Walerski’s curtain warmer starting at 9.30 pm, after intermission. Welcoming us instead was a video of rehearsals, leading directly into the mesmerizing PASSING, which overshadowed the slightly too long and opaque 20 People.
