Fated and Fully Realized: A Triumphant Kismet opens the National Ballet’s Spring Season

Genevieve Penn Nabity and the artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Kismet. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In the promotional video the National Ballet of Canada released ahead of Kismet, the world-premiere ballet by Jera Wolfe that opened a double bill at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre on May 29, the Métis-Canadian choreographer speaks of a central figure on a journey, unable to outrun a destiny. Take him at his word and you’ll search the stage in vain for plot. Better to let the literal narrative go.

What Wolfe has made instead is something more elusive and more moving: a 25-minute meditation on belonging, danced against a backdrop of northern lights and bodies that bend and sway like trees in wind.

The word itself comes from the Arabic qisma — a portion, a share allotted to you. And the destiny I read on opening night was Wolfe’s own: that of a contemporary choreographer who has found exactly where he belongs, which is with the country’s premier classical company, hewing close to the classical line rather than reaching, as so much new work now does, for video screens or the fashionable tics of mathematical, gestural abstraction. Kismet needs none of it. Set to two movements of Ezio Bosso’s Symphony No. 2, played with feeling by the National Ballet Orchestra under David Briskin, the piece trusts the old vocabulary — arabesque, attitude, the long arched spine — and finds it has plenty left to say.

Genevieve Penn Nabity and Ben Rudisin led as the central couple, their near-translucent unitards (costumes by Robyn Clarke) ribbed with a snaking, trapunto-like padding that hid nothing of the muscle beneath. Their opening adagio — quiet, elongated, gaze locked, her hand at his chest — unspooled to little more than a thread of strings. Then Simon Rossiter’s superb lighting did its first trick: out of the shadow stepped a second couple, mirroring the first to the inch, then a third, a fourth, until the stage thickened with paired bodies all moving as one. It’s an old idea, the canon, the song sung in the round — early Jiří Kylián knew its power — but I hadn’t seen it deployed quite so hypnotically in years.

Rossiter lights a circle at the centre from below, an amber glow that recalls a piece of René Lalique glass lit from within, and around this platform the ensemble crouches in a forest of undulating wrists and arms. There is a great deal of floor work for a classical company, all of it timed to the blade — arms scything the air on the score’s slicing accents, nothing left to chance. The evening’s most exhilarating moment came when bodies massed on the floor suddenly unhinged upward and flew, full-length, into waiting arms on the platform; they landed with the gravity-free abandon of a figure skater mid-glide, and the audience audibly gasped.

Jenna Savella and Donald Thom in Emma Bovary. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

After intermission, Helen Pickett’s Emma Bovary, returned and expanded since its 2023 premiere, gave Jenna Savella her opening-night spotlight in her final principal role before retirement — generous, committed, though I missed the fractured psychological imprint Hannah Galway brought three years ago. Around her the company fleshed out Emma’s delusions: Shaakir Muhammad a charismatic, dangerous Rodolphe, Donald Thom an aptly earnest Charles, Alexandra MacDonald a flinty mother-in-law. Also in supporting roles were Spencer Hack as the salesman, Arielle Miralles as the housemaid, Isaac Wright as the pharmacist's assistant, and David Preciado as the abbé.

There is no polite subtext to Pickett’s choreography, created in collaboration with dramaturge James Bonas. This is ballet stripped of its euphemisms. Where dance usually only suggests intimacy, here it is staged outright — clothes torn off, flashes of bare flesh, Emma mounting her husband, then her lover between her legs before he hoists her onto his hips. As the sex began to leave little to the imagination, I watched a mother steer her children up the aisle, what was happening onstage evidently more than she’d bargained for.

By contrast, the added scenes (the church, the amputation) followed Flaubert too faithfully and let the run swell to 65 minutes, which felt too long. Savella carried it. I only wished the woman’s madness had been etched deeper into every social scene rather than crossed through.

Kismet, then, was fated to be the night’s triumph — and one hopes it becomes not merely Wolfe’s first mainstage piece but a mainstay.

The program ran in repertory through June 4.

– 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.