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Grands Ballets Canadiens at Annenberg
Stunned, baffled, admiring, offended
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Cirque du Soleil’s “Delirium” spectacle at the Wachovia Center received some competition in the clown department last week from their fellow citizens from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, who turned up in Perriot-esque personae.
The 24-member troupe presented two premieres at the Annenberg Center, both completely different in style and content from their last appearance. This was a brave touring show, danced with conviction without displaying individual strengths, personalities or even the company’s choreographic variety. LGCM is under new artistic directorship of Gradimir Pankov, of Macedonia, who was previously an artistic director at the choreographically influential Nederlands Dans Theater.
“TooT'” (2005) by Netherlands choreographer Didy Veldman concocts dance clownery par excellence, engagingly scored to Shostakovich's Jazz Suite No. 2. Veldman wisely springs her theatrical clowns out of organic choreography rather than weigh them down under a bloated theme.
The troupe’s constant animation featured squirrelly acrobatics, sexually suggestive duets, bounding trios and the camaraderie of dunces who, at one point, mocked the audience’s behavior in slow motion. This mayhem was played out around a sectional metal center ring that framed the 15 clowns in various comedy/tragedy masques humane.
Stravinsky re-interpreted
Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces” is a darkly monastic wedding march, and Igor Stravinsky’s score is unrelentingly astringent. It played as a masterwork in its time, but its cryptic austerity hasn’t held up well. Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis’s interpretation of “Noces,” created for this company, offers a village-of-the-damned group wedding, with 12 corralled brides ready for a conjugal sacrifice, reminiscent of the barbarity of Le Sacre du Printemps.
The brides are dressed in suggestively tailored wedding tulle and are presented to 12 grooms, who consort in funereal suits. Regimented formations by each gender show what kind of psychosexual world it is going to be, and it doesn’t look pretty: men sexually conspiring, crouched forward and advancing; women flirting stoically. This posturing gives way to primal images of splayed female bodies, mechanical pelvic sways and undead gazes that seem to excite leaps and military formations from the men.
A gamut of audience reactions
This courtship is played out like a corrupted ritual sacrifice in an explicit way that the original Sacre could not. Once the machinations of courtship are complete, the men grab their bounty and carry them off like plunder. Celis’s references to period Euro-Russian folk dance are dramatic.
To judge from the audience response to the matinee performance, people were stunned, baffled and admiring, even offended. Such disparities are always a signpost of genuine artistry, if not thrilling dance theater.
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Cirque du Soleil’s “Delirium” spectacle at the Wachovia Center received some competition in the clown department last week from their fellow citizens from Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, who turned up in Perriot-esque personae.
The 24-member troupe presented two premieres at the Annenberg Center, both completely different in style and content from their last appearance. This was a brave touring show, danced with conviction without displaying individual strengths, personalities or even the company’s choreographic variety. LGCM is under new artistic directorship of Gradimir Pankov, of Macedonia, who was previously an artistic director at the choreographically influential Nederlands Dans Theater.
“TooT'” (2005) by Netherlands choreographer Didy Veldman concocts dance clownery par excellence, engagingly scored to Shostakovich's Jazz Suite No. 2. Veldman wisely springs her theatrical clowns out of organic choreography rather than weigh them down under a bloated theme.
The troupe’s constant animation featured squirrelly acrobatics, sexually suggestive duets, bounding trios and the camaraderie of dunces who, at one point, mocked the audience’s behavior in slow motion. This mayhem was played out around a sectional metal center ring that framed the 15 clowns in various comedy/tragedy masques humane.
Stravinsky re-interpreted
Bronislava Nijinska’s “Les Noces” is a darkly monastic wedding march, and Igor Stravinsky’s score is unrelentingly astringent. It played as a masterwork in its time, but its cryptic austerity hasn’t held up well. Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis’s interpretation of “Noces,” created for this company, offers a village-of-the-damned group wedding, with 12 corralled brides ready for a conjugal sacrifice, reminiscent of the barbarity of Le Sacre du Printemps.
The brides are dressed in suggestively tailored wedding tulle and are presented to 12 grooms, who consort in funereal suits. Regimented formations by each gender show what kind of psychosexual world it is going to be, and it doesn’t look pretty: men sexually conspiring, crouched forward and advancing; women flirting stoically. This posturing gives way to primal images of splayed female bodies, mechanical pelvic sways and undead gazes that seem to excite leaps and military formations from the men.
A gamut of audience reactions
This courtship is played out like a corrupted ritual sacrifice in an explicit way that the original Sacre could not. Once the machinations of courtship are complete, the men grab their bounty and carry them off like plunder. Celis’s references to period Euro-Russian folk dance are dramatic.
To judge from the audience response to the matinee performance, people were stunned, baffled and admiring, even offended. Such disparities are always a signpost of genuine artistry, if not thrilling dance theater.
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