International Intrigue
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal bring a welcome, European viewpoint to experimental dance, and once again featured challenging work from choreographers we'd not normally see. TooT is Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman's exploration of societal repression. She wanted to explore "the relationship of the individual to society," and selected Shostakovich music because the composer was forced during the Soviet regime to serve political reality while maintaining his artistic freedom. She used a piece of music that had "American influence." Political? I'd guess so.
This brilliant piece of Commedia dell' Arte with the performers in white face was superficially a jeux d'esprit with clown-like performers cavorting around merrily. But the movements became increasingly mechanical. In a circle of oversized blocks, they sat and rose, repeated the movement and then marched off stage like robots. The blocks were pushed into a wall, and one of the performers ascended and began calling out commands: Group One turn! Group Two jump! Ferociously clever theater of the absurd, it ended with the dancers marching slo-mo on the audience and then laughing at us.
Belgian choreographer Stijin Celis's Les Noces completed this extraordinary program. Here was a fascinating gloss on one of ballet's most famous dances — Bronislava Nijinska's Los Noces with original music by Igor Stravinsky created for Ballet Russe de Diaghilev in 1923. Celis' 2002 version of the classic retains Stravinsky's score as well as Nijinska's theme of a peasant wedding. But life has changed in the last 70 years, and this peasant wedding took place in what looked very much like a registrar's office with bare wooden walls and benches.
These peasant bridegrooms arrived in black suits, their soon-to-be brides in white tulle and tight white caps and dangling blond braids. In Celis' rendering of the classic, there are no parents present. The men advanced on the women who retreated in formations, if not steps, not unlike classical ballet. As the music lamented, the men dragged the benches across stage front and shut out the audience with their broad backs. Upstage the ladies flirtatiously flipped up skirts and shook their braids. The final coming together of the couples was as much about anonymity and menace as romance. The brides were carried off like the Sabine women, subdued not wooed.
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal
Sat., Nov. 18, p.m., Annenberg
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