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Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, 2nd August 2001


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Thursday evening the 2nd of August, friends and I saw a performance of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal in the outdoor Theatre de Verdure in Lafontaine Park, during our brief visit to Montreal. Their program consisted of Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco", which had led me to suggest seeing the program, a new ballet by Adam Hougland, "Beyond", and Duato's "Jardi Tancat".

"Barocco", staged by John Clifford and danced to a shmaltzy recording, disappointed me by being rather slow and placing too much emphasis on pose at the expense of flow-through. A certain softness also tended to rob the ballet of some of the life and energy it had had for me as recently as this spring when I saw it danced by Ballet Chicago Studio Company, even though the BCSC dancers had been pre-professional students while the GBC dancers were cooly confident seasoned professionals with strengths more than equal to the demands of the program.

Hougland made "Beyond" in Spring 1999 at Juilliard, where he was a student, to Vaughan Williams's "Fantasy on a Theme of Thomas Tallis". In it, the cast of four women and four men all covered from neck to ankle in identical silver-gray dresses slit up the front stays massed on the left fifth of the stage, marked off by a luminous line, until the massed string orchestra subsides later for solos and duets, when one or two dancers venture Beyond the line (Get it?) into the uncrowded remaining space only to return for various reasons to the mass according to the general plan, if not the momentary content, of the music. At the end, the initial pioneer crosses into the right wings, unsurprisingly. I think eliminating the dresses and the line would let the dancers show us the dance and the space more immediately and so would provide stronger support for this ballet's conceptual burden.

I thought GBC looked its best in "Jardi Tancat", in costumes (and decor) also by the choreographer which let us see the dancers' form and movement. Its burden of socially-reinforced fortitude in the face of despair lies lightly enough on its vigorous and varied movement vocabulary not to bother me, nor does it go on with this too long.

The academic among my companions, though, preferred "Beyond", for its concepts to "read" and for the "gender equality" of the cast. She liked "Barocco", but it was "just pretty" and had only one boy. But the classical-music lover, thinking that music and choreography were usually made together, was happily surprised that "Barocco" was set to the Bach concerto, and it remained his favorite of the evening.

And I was impressed by the general quality of the whole enterprise, not least the little theatre, which has a stagehouse with adequate lighting, a good sound system, and good sight lines owing to well raked up rows of seats of such an unusually open design that they had little area to get wet by the drizzle which had just stopped, and ventilated well, in comfortable contrast to the usual bent-board seats I've found getting harder and stickier during the evening in American pavillions.

And there was no admission charge! (Cybertip: Neither was there mention on GBC's website of the series of five consecutive evenings this program was given. I found out about it on montrealonline.com, operated by the Montreal Gazette.)

[ 08-11-2001: Message edited by: Jack Reed ]

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