Ballet Notes

Ballet Notes The Four Seasons & Polyphonia & Wolf’s Court June 2007 Cover: Chan Hon Goh in Spring from The Four Seasons (1998). Above: Rebekah Rimsay and Je-an Salas in Spring from The Four Seasons (1998). 2 The Four Seasons Choreography: James Kudelka Music: Antonio Vivaldi, The Four Seasons Costume Design: TRAC COSTUME: Carmen Alie and Denis Lavoie Lighting Design: David Finn Projections and Scenic Effects: Chris Wise The Four Seasons is a gift from THE VOLUNTEER COMMITTEE, THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA. Polyphonia Choreography: Christopher Wheeldon© Staged by: Ben Huys Music: György Ligeti Used by arrangement with European Music Distributors LLC, sole Canadian and U.S. agent for Schott Music, publisher and copyright owner. Costume Design: Holly Hynes Lighting Design: Mark Stanley Polyphonia is made possible by generous gifts from Gretchen & Donald Ross and an anonymous donor. Wolf’s Court Choreography: Matjash Mrozewski Commissioned Score: Alexina Louie Set and Costume Design: Yannik Larivée Lighting Design: Christopher Dennis Wolf’s Court is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Gail Hutchison. 3 The Four Seasons Polyphonia James Kudelka’s The Four Seasons (1997) was the first British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon is one of work he created for The National Ballet of Canada as the most sought-after dancemakers around and Artistic Director. Wanting a new challenge for the com- Polyphonia one of his most admired ballets. After a pany and striving to produce a ballet with significant stunningly successful New York City Ballet premiere on audience appeal, Kudelka choose Vivaldi’s much-loved January 4th, 2001, it was performed the next year by The Four Seasons as his score. He created the ballet London’s Royal Ballet and won the Laurence Olivier for Rex Harrington, one of the most distinguished fig- Prize for Best New Dance Production. Many other com- ures in Canadian dance, placing him firmly at its centre, panies have adopted this instant classic, among them on stage for almost the full 48 minutes of music. the San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de The ballet, hailed as a masterpiece at its opening on Montréal and The National Ballet of Canada. February 12th, 1997, traces the seasons in the life of everyman, from spring through winter. Each section is The work’s title alludes to a musical style popular in the constructed around a pas de deux between the Man Renaissance and exemplified by the work of Palestrina and a woman representing that season. Spring, or and the madrigalists, where many voices sing at once youth, begins with the innocent and thoroughly enrap- but each vocal or instrumental part has different tured young man dancing with a woman while bird-like melodies, rhythms and beginnings and endings of flights of exuberant young men and women dart past. phrases. The title hints at the movement: not relentless Summer is alternately fast and languid, passionate and unison but far more complicated interminglings of uni- acrobatic, its bursts of frantic energy broken by sultry son, canon, mirror-image patterns and apparent chaos. pauses until the sexual tension erupts again in the com- plex and risky lifts. No wonder the work is so popular. It’s edgy and clever, cool and chic, inventive and sassy, intellectually and aes- By Autumn, the season of work and harvest, the Man thetically challenging, crisp and pure. Wheeldon’s chore- has reached high middle age, enjoying comradeship ographic voice is at once traditional — formalist, musical, rather than serving primarily as a romantic figure. The committed to classicism and beauty — and novel. Autumn woman is left shivering at the end as if a cold front had descended without warning. In Winter, the The music aptly made visible by Wheeldon is a selec- Man is suddenly vulnerable, tormented first by one, tion of ten short piano pieces written between 1947 and then by three, young bullies before joining a stately and 1985 by the avant garde Hungarian-Austrian composer quietly ominous dance with four elderly people. In the György Ligeti (1923 –2006). Ligeti’s style varied from the pas de deux with the Winter woman, we slowly become folk-like melodies and percussiveness of his compatri- aware that she is the harbinger of death, watching with ots Bartók and Kodaly to the electronic manipulation of compassion as the Man dances a final solo embodying sound and what he dubbed “micropolyphony,” the cre- the physical infirmities of old age. He dies in her arms ation of orchestral sound clusters that gradually trans- as the other seasons’ ladies bid farewell. form themselves. In the Polyphonia pieces, despite the limitations of having only one instrument, we experience It was in The Four Seasons that Harrington made his the composer’s tremendous wit and variety. final performance as a Principal Dancer with the com- pany in May 2004. Kudelka’s and Harrington’s joint The ballet, for eight dancers in leotards, presents ten masterpiece is preserved in the glorious 1999 film cre- dances in a mere half hour and the titles that composer ated by Rhombus Media and Veronica Tennant György Ligeti gave each selection are reflected in both Productions. music and dance. l, Désordre from Etudes pour piano, premier livre, uses concepts Ligeti borrowed from African drumming, with the pianist playing in perfect time but the musical 4 accents shifted so that the listener experiences chaos. The dance begins with the four couples neatly in place, but each does set steps in seemingly random order. The visual and musical cacophony deepen as the dancers’ shadows are projected on a scrim. Finally, order emerges from chaos as some steps begin to occur in unison. II, Arc-en-ciel (rainbow) from Etudes pour piano, premier livre, is slow and mysterious, seemingly danced underwater. III, No. 4 Tempo di Valse from Musica Ricercata, is a romantic hesitation waltz with a few quirky hiccups. IV, Invention, wittily shows three dancers performing a Bach-like two-part invention. V, No. 8 Vivace energico from Musica Ricercata, shows two men dancing jauntily in intermittent disunity to a fanfare. VI, No. 2 Hopp ide tisztán from Three Wedding Dances, a Hungarian wedding song, is a ravishing almost-classical pas de deux that shocks us when the man exits, leaving the woman to dance alone. VII, No. 7 Cantabile molto legato from Musica Ricercata, perhaps the most glorious section, involves two couples in varying configurations, sometimes in unison, sometimes mirroring each other, and sometimes completely independent of a slow melody supported by rapid ostinato (repeated) passages in the bass. VIII, No. 3 Allegro con spirito from Musica Ricercata, is another fanfare of major thirds with a very abrupt ending. IX, No. 2 Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale from Musica Ricercata, marked dramatically as gloomy, austere, and formal, is an eccentric, intense pas de deux to an omi- nously constrained but insistent pseudo-melody of minor seconds. X, Capriccio No. 2 — Allegro robusto, echoes themes from the opening, including the shadow dance, giving structure to the whole. Wheeldon’s Polyphonia is generally seen as an homage to George Balanchine’s angular leotard ballets, but it’s more diverse in vocabulary, the blossoming of a new Heather Ogden and branch on the tree of neoclassicism, definitely “roman- Nehemiah Kish tic with comic twists,” as Wheeldon described it and in Polyphonia. the ballet ends appropriately with effortlessly weightless horizontal lifts, a signpost that we’ve veered 90 degrees off the common path. 5 Wolf’s Court Wolf’s Court, premiering June 2, 2007, is Matjash The ballet has three sections. The curtain rises on a Mrozewski’s fourth work for The National Ballet of banner carried by an ambiguous empress, followed by Canada; the others are A Delicate Battle (2001), what composer Alexina Louie calls “a deluge of sound Monument (2003) and C.V. (2006). Although most cho- and movement,” as denizens of the imperial court reographers begin with the music, Mrozewski typically enact the ceremonies of their elite, class-ridden world, doesn’t. Instead, his creative process begins with a their well-oiled military machine. Stylistically, this sec- “vision” or haunting image; an exploration of what that tion is classical — an historically hierarchical style for a image might signify (a process that often leads hyper-hierarchical society, reminding us, too, of the Mrozewski into historical and political contexts) and a close connections between dance and military drill. “kitchen sink” stage, as myriad ideas and images begin to cohere. Thus, A Delicate Battle began with the The second section introduces the heirs apparent to image of a woman in a Victorian dress standing in the this dynasty, whose pas de deux involves an ambigu- snow, and the significance of that vision became the ous stylized object — a sceptre? Sword? Pointer? A struggle of art — specifically ballet — to survive in a group of four conspires and colludes, their movements chilly climate. Monument began with the image of a less classical and more angular, sometimes in and wall and blocks, and also entered the territory of art’s sometimes out of unison. Louie’s score is equally mys- ambiguous existence between past and future. terious and unsettling, using shifts of orchestral colour and unusual instruments — wine glasses, marimba, The conceptual kernel of Wolf’s Court reveals itself in vibraphone, temple blocks, log drums. At the end of the two words of the title. One set of ideas and images this section, the forces of empire launch a sudden came from Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee’s eerily attack, storming across the stage in clockwork forma- beautiful allegory of the struggle between oppressors tion, marking their gains with pins on the map, as and oppressed, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).

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