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| Guillaume Côté in Grand Mirage. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.) |
After 26 years at the National Ballet of Canada, Guillaume Côté could have chosen the easy road: a swan song in a signature classical role, a nostalgic backward glance. Instead, the Québec-born, Toronto-trained principal - whose artistry has shaped the company for a generation - delivers a bold, forward-looking program, Adieu, which opened Friday at the Four Seasons Centre and continues through the week. The evening featured three premieres and a reprise of Côté’s slow-burning Bolero, first created in 2012, making for a heady mix.
Among the new works was Ethan Colangelo’s audacious debut as NBOC choreographic associate. He set a dark, moody tone with Reverence, a piece inspired by the shadowy, phantasmagoric world of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. In contrast, newcomer Jennifer Archibald’s King’s Fall, an ungainly jumble of classical and contemporary idioms, proved a misfire - cluttered, weakly structured, and frankly beneath the company’s standards. A case of the less said the better.
It was left to Côté himself to provide the evening’s centre of gravity.
Grand Mirage, his multimedia fever dream created with Canadian filmmaker Ben Shirinian, is no mere vanity project. What unfolds is a primal scream — a fractured self-portrait of an artist at war with his own reflection.
Côté, exposed both literally and emotionally, navigates a nightmare landscape: rain-slicked windows, lurid colours, a therapist-cum-talk-show-host grilling him as reality slips.
Within this hallucinatory world, familiar figures from ballet’s history and Côté’s own artistic life emerge in unexpected forms. Making her return to the NBOC after her retirement in 2020, former principal dancer Greta Hodgkinson – Côté’s frequent dance partner and choreographic muse -- embodies ghostly glamour as the Mystery Guest. Hannah Galway’s Sylph is far more manic than ethereal, upending the conventions of romantic ballet, while David Preciado’s Faun evokes Nijinsky - a subtle nod to Côté’s own triumph in Neumeier’s full-length Nijinsky and to the unattainable standard of male artistry.
The bellboy, Albjon Gjorllaku, and Ross Allen as the film crew member who sweeps the stage, join for a jaunty, almost comedic pas de trois -- a burst of wit and lightness amid the motel room’s giant rose wallpaper, rumpled bed, and the mirror that Will, Côté’s haunted character, sometimes leans into.
Michael Gianfrancesco’s sensational set and costume design amplifies the hallucinatory edge, giving the work’s unsettling atmosphere a vivid, tactile reality.
That sense of disorientation is heightened by the score, which weaves in Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” its gentle irony underscoring Côté’s encounters with the mystery woman and other visitors conjured by his imagination. Nino Rota’s “Cadillac” conjures a hint of Fellini-esque decadence, while Peter Gabriel’s “My Body Is a Cage” hovers over the action, its lyrics evoking Côté’s own struggles, including a potentially career-ending injury that nearly caged his artistry for good.
Yet Côté’s farewell is no requiem. With a flickering, wood-framed 1970s television ever-present in the motel room — a stubborn relic that Will occasionally thwacks in frustration - he partners, writhes, and turns in real time, insisting on the truth of the body over the seduction of the screen’s illusions.
Grand Mirage stands as a metaphor for the ever-elusive goal of artistic perfection. More than that, it’s a cohesive, evocative work -- fully capable of standing on its own, and a testament to Côté’s singular artistic voice. In fact, it’s a piece that demands to be seen again, and would more than justify a run beyond the confines of this farewell program — perhaps with his own Côté Danse company, where he will now focus much of his creative energy, alongside helming the Saint-Sauveur summer arts festival in the Laurentians.
As the final curtain falls, Côté leaves on his own terms: not with a whimper, but with a bang. The night after his last bow with the National Ballet of Canada on June 5, he returns to the stage with Burn Baby, Burn at the Bluma Appel Theatre—a self-created work for Côté Danse that signals where his artistic journey is headed. For this multifaceted artist, the end is only the beginning.
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– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World.
Among the new works was Ethan Colangelo’s audacious debut as NBOC choreographic associate. He set a dark, moody tone with Reverence, a piece inspired by the shadowy, phantasmagoric world of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. In contrast, newcomer Jennifer Archibald’s King’s Fall, an ungainly jumble of classical and contemporary idioms, proved a misfire - cluttered, weakly structured, and frankly beneath the company’s standards. A case of the less said the better.
It was left to Côté himself to provide the evening’s centre of gravity.
Grand Mirage, his multimedia fever dream created with Canadian filmmaker Ben Shirinian, is no mere vanity project. What unfolds is a primal scream — a fractured self-portrait of an artist at war with his own reflection.
Côté, exposed both literally and emotionally, navigates a nightmare landscape: rain-slicked windows, lurid colours, a therapist-cum-talk-show-host grilling him as reality slips.
Within this hallucinatory world, familiar figures from ballet’s history and Côté’s own artistic life emerge in unexpected forms. Making her return to the NBOC after her retirement in 2020, former principal dancer Greta Hodgkinson – Côté’s frequent dance partner and choreographic muse -- embodies ghostly glamour as the Mystery Guest. Hannah Galway’s Sylph is far more manic than ethereal, upending the conventions of romantic ballet, while David Preciado’s Faun evokes Nijinsky - a subtle nod to Côté’s own triumph in Neumeier’s full-length Nijinsky and to the unattainable standard of male artistry.
The bellboy, Albjon Gjorllaku, and Ross Allen as the film crew member who sweeps the stage, join for a jaunty, almost comedic pas de trois -- a burst of wit and lightness amid the motel room’s giant rose wallpaper, rumpled bed, and the mirror that Will, Côté’s haunted character, sometimes leans into.
Michael Gianfrancesco’s sensational set and costume design amplifies the hallucinatory edge, giving the work’s unsettling atmosphere a vivid, tactile reality.
That sense of disorientation is heightened by the score, which weaves in Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” its gentle irony underscoring Côté’s encounters with the mystery woman and other visitors conjured by his imagination. Nino Rota’s “Cadillac” conjures a hint of Fellini-esque decadence, while Peter Gabriel’s “My Body Is a Cage” hovers over the action, its lyrics evoking Côté’s own struggles, including a potentially career-ending injury that nearly caged his artistry for good.
Yet Côté’s farewell is no requiem. With a flickering, wood-framed 1970s television ever-present in the motel room — a stubborn relic that Will occasionally thwacks in frustration - he partners, writhes, and turns in real time, insisting on the truth of the body over the seduction of the screen’s illusions.
Grand Mirage stands as a metaphor for the ever-elusive goal of artistic perfection. More than that, it’s a cohesive, evocative work -- fully capable of standing on its own, and a testament to Côté’s singular artistic voice. In fact, it’s a piece that demands to be seen again, and would more than justify a run beyond the confines of this farewell program — perhaps with his own Côté Danse company, where he will now focus much of his creative energy, alongside helming the Saint-Sauveur summer arts festival in the Laurentians.
As the final curtain falls, Côté leaves on his own terms: not with a whimper, but with a bang. The night after his last bow with the National Ballet of Canada on June 5, he returns to the stage with Burn Baby, Burn at the Bluma Appel Theatre—a self-created work for Côté Danse that signals where his artistic journey is headed. For this multifaceted artist, the end is only the beginning.
.jpeg)
– Deirdre Kelly is a Toronto-based journalist, author and internationally recognized dance critic and style writer on staff at The Globe and Mail newspaper from 1985 to 2017. She writes for Dance Magazine in New York, the Dance Gazette in London, and NUVO in Vancouver, and is a contributor to the International Dictionary of Ballet and AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds. The best-selling author of Paris Times Eight and Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection, she is a two-time recipient (2020 and 2014) of Canada’s Nathan Cohen Prize for outstanding critical writing. In 2017, she joined York University as Editor of the award-winning The York University Magazine where she is also the publication’s principal writer. In 2023, she published her latest book, Fashioning The Beatles: The Looks That Shook The World. 
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