Review: National Ballet of Canada’s season-launching triple bill offers cosmic timelessness, jubilance, and a few too many moves

Crepuscular, The Collective Agreement, Concerto

National Ballet of Canada. Choreography by Vanesa G.R. Montoya, Alonzo King and Kenneth MacMillan.

Until Nov. 13 at the Four Seasons Centre, 145 Queen St. W.; www.national.ballet.ca or 416-345-9595 or 1-866-345-9595.

How many lifts — acrobatic, awkward, effortful and otherwise — can be packed into a single ballet of 30 minutes or so? The National Ballet of Canada has the answer: too many.

That, at least, is the dominant flaw in “Crepuscular,” a rather odd work by emerging choreographer Vanesa G.R. Montoya that opened the company’s season-launching triple bill on Wednesday night.

This is the Four Seasons Centre debut of a work originally commissioned for online presentation during the pandemic that ultimately got a premiere live showing in August 2021 at Harbourfront Centre’s open-air Concert Stage. There its pre-recorded Chopin-sourced score competed with the sounds of seagulls, boat horns and other aural distractions.

“Crepuscular” seems fated this way. On Wednesday night, early on in the ballet, numerous unsilenced mobile devices came distractingly to life, possibly because of an Amber Alert; still no excuse.

Montoya’s ballet, now with live Chopin — solo piano and orchestral arrangements — purports to explore the mysterious evanescence of twilight. Five men and three women, deployed as couples, one of them same sex, do their utmost to bring sense, perhaps even meaning, to a variety of fraught encounters. The disjointed choreography, which includes plenty of close-to-the-floor moves, even with a hint of street dance, seems at odds with the music. Christopher Gerty reprises his original role from 2021 as some sort of lost soul. Similarly, Brenna Flaherty and Kota Sato again excel in the ballet’s most interestingly ambiguous pas de deux.

The main event of the programme is the company premiere and Canadian debut performance of “The Collective Agreement,” a 2018 work by veteran American choreographer Alonzo King, artistic director of his own San Francisco-based LINES ballet.

By King’s account, “The Collective Agreement” is inspired by the idea that in a turbulent and divided world of colliding ambitions, people must learn that the only way forward is to unite in recognition of their common humanity.

Ideas are notoriously hard to convey in dance. It’s arguable whether someone encountering “The Collective Agreement” unprepared would read into its choreographic complexity the message King strives to embody. What they would undoubtedly see is a multi-focused but always absorbing ensemble ballet that, while formally abstract, stirs strong currents of human drama.

Jason Moran’s richly orchestrated commissioned score — the American composer’s background is in jazz though its influence is here subdued — unfolds in distinct movements and propels the dancers in choreography that variously blends the elegance and fluidity of classical ballet, with the women on their toes, with the jutting hips, off-centre placement and forcefully slicing limbs we associate with dance modernism.

Robert Rosenwasser’s sometimes whimsical costumes help enhance the sense that whatever is happening cannot be defined by place or era. Jim Campbell’s hovering grids of LED lights function as sets rather than illumination. That duty falls to lighting designer James F. Ingalls. The mobile grids’ occasional appearances add to a mood of cosmic timelessness.

“The Collective Agreement” makes hefty physical demands of the dancers. More than this, it requires intense emotional commitment. The choreography never has the look-at-me presentational style of conventional theatrical dance. If anything, it’s inward-focused, an unfolding self-contained drama.

For a first outing in unfamiliar choreographic territory, the National Ballet’s dancers, made a convincing showing and will surely become more assured with repeated performance.

The programme closer, Kenneth MacMillan’s “Concerto,” provides a welcome dose of pure classical dancing pleasure.

The British choreographer made this large ensemble work in 1966 to give his then company in Berlin a thorough workout. Set to a 1957 Shostakovich piano concerto — No. 2 in F major — the ballet is redolent of its era. German designer Jürgen Rose’s unfussy costumes colour-code the dancers; principals in tangerine, supporting couples in rusty red and the corps in lemon yellow. The palette is very sixties but serves visually to clarify the evolving criss-crossings and layering of MacMillan’s choreography.

In its response to the Russian composer’s music, especially in the lively outer movements, “Concerto” conjures thoughts of that master of neo-classicism, George Balanchine. The central slow movement is markedly different. The brilliant clarity of John B. Read’s lighting design dims to a moody sunset, the perfect setting for romance. Indeed, a man and a woman enter but their interactions have a cool detachment as she uses the man essentially as support for a series of self-absorbed movements reminiscent of classroom barre exercises. The choreography does open up to include challenging lifts but if there’s romance here, it’s deliberately understated; and all to the good. It lends a serene atmosphere to the proceedings, amply respected and conveyed by Wednesday’s opening-night couple, Svetlana Lunkina and Peng-Fei Jiang.

Then we’re back to brightness and jubilance for a closing movement that integrates the entire cast, led here by the dazzling solo work of Jeannine Haller, in an appropriately uplifting finale.

SHARE: