Urgency and Grace: The National Ballet’s Flight Pattern and Suite en blanc

The National Ballet of Canada company in Flight Pattern. (Photo: Ted Belton.)

The National Ballet of Canada opens its 2026 winter season with a study in contrast — the searing humanism of Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern and Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc, here staged to radiant precision by former Paris Opera Ballet étoile Charles Jude. Together they form a dialogue across eras: one confronting the fractures of our contemporary world, the other reaffirming ballet’s formal beauty and historical resilience.

Flight Pattern, created in 2017 for The Royal Ballet in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, has lost none of its urgency. Now receiving its North American debut and first staging by the National Ballet, it feels as if its timeliness has sharpened. Pite’s stripped-down vision resists fairytale escapism; her dance lives squarely in the present, where migration, loss and dislocation define our collective moment. It insists that dance that matters today isn’t about faraway fairy tales or dream worlds — it is rooted in the here and now.

The 35‑member ensemble, clad in grey overcoats and undershirts, moves with a kind of muted solidarity — bodies pressed together then torn apart against Jay Gower Taylor’s mutable set of walls that becomes by turns a barricade, a passage, a possibility. Snow — or perhaps stardust — falls over the shadow‑lit stage while Measha Brueggergosman delivers Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs with searing power, offstage. Soloists Hannah Galway and Siphesihle November break from the group to perform a heartbreaking duet marked by irretrievable loss and flashes of private tenderness, before dissolving back into the larger collective.

The overall effect is poignant as well as haunting, a ballet that confronts grief yet refuses to sentimentalize it. Pite shapes empathy through structure, crafting a bodily lament that becomes a fragile hymn to survival. The work builds from darkness toward the faintest intimation of hope, never glib, always honest — Pite forging a new path for ballet as a vessel of social conscience.

The artists of Suite en blanc. (Photo: Bruce Zinger.)

Suite en blanc, by contrast, is classical France distilled — witty, formal and unapologetically mannered. Choreographed in 1943 and first performed by the National Ballet in 2024, it now looks newly polished, danced to an Édouard Lalo’s score played by the National Ballet Orchestra under music director David Briskin. Expertly coached, the dancers bring fresh buoyancy to Lifar’s demanding neoclassical style — that bright blend of épaulement, hauteur and quicksilver geometry. 

Principal dancer Agnes Su is radiant in the Adage pas de deux she performs with Christopher Gerty and unflappable in the ambidextrous La Flûte section at the work’s shimmering conclusion. Geneviève Penn Nabity smoulders through La Cigarette’s sensual wit and Isabella Kinch glows softly in Sérénade. Leading the ensemble in this valentine to the art form is the La Sieste trio — Keira Sandford, Tene Ward and Monika Haczkiewicz — offering Romantic lyricism edged with taut control in their floating white Romantic tutus.

Elsewhere the skirts are high and chrysanthemum‑shaped, worn by whirling dynamo Beckanne Sisk in Thème Varié, alongside Peng‑Fei Jiang and Chase O’Connell, and by Koto Ishihara in the Presto. Naoya Ebe’s zesty Mazurka matches their energy. The Presto section, powered by Ishihara, Isaac Wright, David Preciado, Keaton Leier and the ever-engaging Noah Parets, brings it all home with effervescence.

Both ballets, in utterly different languages, speak fluently to the moment — one confronting it head‑on, the other reminding us of the enduring beauty of form.

The program continues at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre through March 6 with rotating casts.

– 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.