Reviewed by John Herbert Cunningham
Bright Lights, Big City performed at the Centennial Concert Hall by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Wednesday, May 4, 2011
A Canadian chestnut sandwiched between two firecrackers came off in a brilliant display, providing a feast for those lucky enough to attend Wednesday’s banquet of dance at the Concert Hall.
This is principal dancer Tara Birtwhistle’s swan song sans lake. Birtwhistle instead re-creates the cesspool that Rita Joe, an Aboriginal woman, finds herself in when she leaves her reserve for the bright lights of the big city. Her ecstasy is that night of lovemaking before she leaves for a job that entices her away from her friends and family but is quickly lost or taken away. In any event, she finds herself in poverty that can only be relieved through drink, drugs and prostitution. Birtwhistle dances against the backdrop projection of Chief Dan George narrating the story of this outcast who cannot return, and to the booming voice of the paternalistic white judge who cannot understand that it is racism that has led to Rita Joe’s condition and ultimate demise.
The RWB's Rita Joe, 2011 model year
There are some who consider The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which premiered as a ballet in 1971, to be dated. Of course, this complaint could be levelled against 95% of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s repertoire, such as The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, etc. but no one would dare do that. That is probably unfortunate, as perhaps the message would finally get through to artistic director André Lewis that most of the RWB’s performances have become staid and boring. Give us something else, André, besides the full corps de ballet all the time. Where are those great pas de deux, those fantastic solo performances?
Thankfully, you gave it to us with this performance. Not only was Birtwhistle impressive and worthy of the thundering and prolonged standing ovation she received, not just because she is retiring after twenty years, but also because her performance stirred the soul and grabbed the audience with its emotional content, and then also because it was bookended by two excellent modern ballets.
Before leaving Rita to history, I have to comment on the amazing pas de deux involving Birtwhistle and Jamie Paul that dominated the middle of this choreography. Paul’s disrobing down to his underwear and Birtwhistle’s to her slip while a bed was wheeled onto the stage offended one elderly couple enough that they walked out of the Concert Hall auditorium, but those who remained were in awe. This crowd response should provide enough of a hint to Lewis to make RWB performances more exciting.
Let’s now return to the beginning, that being Peter Quantz’s In Tandem which began this evening’s performance. Quantz is a graduate of the RWB’s school. He has won international recognition for his choreography. This one, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and premiered in New York in 2009, leaves no question that this recognition is well-deserved. The curtain opened to two ballerinas poised en pointe, kitty corner from each other on the stage. The backdrop was a slate grey canvas with some streaks of a lighter blue-grey towards the bottom. The two male dancers, who would later join the six females ultimately involved, were dressed in black. The ballerinas were dressed in costumes with a black lower part while the upper matched the backdrop.
Quantz employed an arsenal of jetés during the performance using some high risk manoeuvres on the part of the ballerinas who entered into leaps of faith that their male partners would prevent them from having their flying bodies splattered on the stage to the accompaniment of the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s ‘Double Sextet’. Following in the footsteps of Merce Cunningham, whose partnership with John Cage led to an independence of the music from the dance, Quantz used an interesting derivation where sometimes the music and dance would come together and sometimes they functioned independently.
Unfortunately, an otherwise stellar performance was marred by a serious faux pas. There was a passage in the ballet where a male dancer near the stage left curtain was performing what turned out to be a pas de deux with a female dancer. The problem was that anyone sitting in seats 1-20 or so was unable to see the female dancer until she emerged from the cover of the curtain.
The ending was highly unusual but, as this is one of those situations where words fail, any description would be wholly inadequate and so attendance is mandatory.
But this was far from the end. We had, of course, Birtwhistle’s performance in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, followed by Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. Tharp has earned a reputation as one of the most innovative and exciting choreographers, her pieces regularly being featured internationally and particularly in New York. The curtain rose to reveal a stage heavily immersed in mist and a lighting design, originally by Jennifer Tipton, reminiscent of Cubism – not the early Cubism of Braques and Picasso, but the later of Léger and Delaunay. The striking design was accompanied by the music of another minimalist composer—Philip Glass. This music accompanied the dance of the crimson slippers. Starkly contrasting with the black and white outfits of the thirteen dancers were the crimson slippers of the ballet dancers, the corps divided equally into stompers, who wore sneakers, and ballet dancers, who wore those crimson slippers. The odd one out was known as the ‘crossover woman,’ whose outfit revealed furtive glances of more crimson to come.
This was a highly energetic dance placing incredible demands on the dancers’ bodies for in excess of a half hour. Towards the end, you could see that fatigue was becoming an issue. If it had gone on any longer, the stage would have been littered with exhausted bodies.
Having been immersed in modern dance for the past few weeks, what with the Jolene Bailie and Natasha Torres-Garner performances, it was fascinating to attend a ballet. Although there has been extensive crossover between forms, there remains one outstanding difference—body type. Whereas a wide range of body types are accepted in modern dance, ballet still adheres to the Baryshnikov anorexic ideal. What is interesting is that as a result of this similarity in shape of the ballerinas, the males never having been subjected to the same cookie-cutter, ballet has the ability to create certain dance formations that would be completely unavailable in modern dance. This was apparent a number of times throughout the evening, the choreographers making effective use of it.
Goodbye, Tara. We’ll miss watching you grace the Concert Hall stage. But at least you won’t be gone far as you assume your new role of ballet mistress.
The Ecstasy and the Excitement
Columns
Reviewed by John Herbert Cunningham
Bright Lights, Big City performed at the Centennial Concert Hall by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Wednesday, May 4, 2011
A Canadian chestnut sandwiched between two firecrackers came off in a brilliant display, providing a feast for those lucky enough to attend Wednesday’s banquet of dance at the Concert Hall.
This is principal dancer Tara Birtwhistle’s swan song sans lake. Birtwhistle instead re-creates the cesspool that Rita Joe, an Aboriginal woman, finds herself in when she leaves her reserve for the bright lights of the big city. Her ecstasy is that night of lovemaking before she leaves for a job that entices her away from her friends and family but is quickly lost or taken away. In any event, she finds herself in poverty that can only be relieved through drink, drugs and prostitution. Birtwhistle dances against the backdrop projection of Chief Dan George narrating the story of this outcast who cannot return, and to the booming voice of the paternalistic white judge who cannot understand that it is racism that has led to Rita Joe’s condition and ultimate demise.
The RWB's Rita Joe, 2011 model year
There are some who consider The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, which premiered as a ballet in 1971, to be dated. Of course, this complaint could be levelled against 95% of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s repertoire, such as The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, etc. but no one would dare do that. That is probably unfortunate, as perhaps the message would finally get through to artistic director André Lewis that most of the RWB’s performances have become staid and boring. Give us something else, André, besides the full corps de ballet all the time. Where are those great pas de deux, those fantastic solo performances?
Thankfully, you gave it to us with this performance. Not only was Birtwhistle impressive and worthy of the thundering and prolonged standing ovation she received, not just because she is retiring after twenty years, but also because her performance stirred the soul and grabbed the audience with its emotional content, and then also because it was bookended by two excellent modern ballets.
Before leaving Rita to history, I have to comment on the amazing pas de deux involving Birtwhistle and Jamie Paul that dominated the middle of this choreography. Paul’s disrobing down to his underwear and Birtwhistle’s to her slip while a bed was wheeled onto the stage offended one elderly couple enough that they walked out of the Concert Hall auditorium, but those who remained were in awe. This crowd response should provide enough of a hint to Lewis to make RWB performances more exciting.
Let’s now return to the beginning, that being Peter Quantz’s In Tandem which began this evening’s performance. Quantz is a graduate of the RWB’s school. He has won international recognition for his choreography. This one, commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum and premiered in New York in 2009, leaves no question that this recognition is well-deserved. The curtain opened to two ballerinas poised en pointe, kitty corner from each other on the stage. The backdrop was a slate grey canvas with some streaks of a lighter blue-grey towards the bottom. The two male dancers, who would later join the six females ultimately involved, were dressed in black. The ballerinas were dressed in costumes with a black lower part while the upper matched the backdrop.
Quantz employed an arsenal of jetés during the performance using some high risk manoeuvres on the part of the ballerinas who entered into leaps of faith that their male partners would prevent them from having their flying bodies splattered on the stage to the accompaniment of the minimalist composer Steve Reich’s ‘Double Sextet’. Following in the footsteps of Merce Cunningham, whose partnership with John Cage led to an independence of the music from the dance, Quantz used an interesting derivation where sometimes the music and dance would come together and sometimes they functioned independently.
Unfortunately, an otherwise stellar performance was marred by a serious faux pas. There was a passage in the ballet where a male dancer near the stage left curtain was performing what turned out to be a pas de deux with a female dancer. The problem was that anyone sitting in seats 1-20 or so was unable to see the female dancer until she emerged from the cover of the curtain.
The ending was highly unusual but, as this is one of those situations where words fail, any description would be wholly inadequate and so attendance is mandatory.
But this was far from the end. We had, of course, Birtwhistle’s performance in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, followed by Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. Tharp has earned a reputation as one of the most innovative and exciting choreographers, her pieces regularly being featured internationally and particularly in New York. The curtain rose to reveal a stage heavily immersed in mist and a lighting design, originally by Jennifer Tipton, reminiscent of Cubism – not the early Cubism of Braques and Picasso, but the later of Léger and Delaunay. The striking design was accompanied by the music of another minimalist composer—Philip Glass. This music accompanied the dance of the crimson slippers. Starkly contrasting with the black and white outfits of the thirteen dancers were the crimson slippers of the ballet dancers, the corps divided equally into stompers, who wore sneakers, and ballet dancers, who wore those crimson slippers. The odd one out was known as the ‘crossover woman,’ whose outfit revealed furtive glances of more crimson to come.
This was a highly energetic dance placing incredible demands on the dancers’ bodies for in excess of a half hour. Towards the end, you could see that fatigue was becoming an issue. If it had gone on any longer, the stage would have been littered with exhausted bodies.
Having been immersed in modern dance for the past few weeks, what with the Jolene Bailie and Natasha Torres-Garner performances, it was fascinating to attend a ballet. Although there has been extensive crossover between forms, there remains one outstanding difference—body type. Whereas a wide range of body types are accepted in modern dance, ballet still adheres to the Baryshnikov anorexic ideal. What is interesting is that as a result of this similarity in shape of the ballerinas, the males never having been subjected to the same cookie-cutter, ballet has the ability to create certain dance formations that would be completely unavailable in modern dance. This was apparent a number of times throughout the evening, the choreographers making effective use of it.
Goodbye, Tara. We’ll miss watching you grace the Concert Hall stage. But at least you won’t be gone far as you assume your new role of ballet mistress.