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.

Feeling Her Pain: Emma Bovary at the National Ballet of Canada

Hannah Galway and Siphesihle November in Emma Bovary. (Photo: Karolina Kuras/Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)

Emma Bovary ran at Toronto’s Four Season’s Centre from November 11-18.

In the promo video the National Ballet of Canada put out in advance of the world premiere of Emma Bovary, choreographer Helen Pickett says that her intention was to get the audience to understand what the titular character – one of the greatest female creations in all of literature – is feeling. That undersells it.

A triumph of dance-theatre where every gesture is loaded with narrative meaning, Emma Bovary evokes a visceral response in the audience. Much like Gustave Flaubert’s original mid-19th-century realist novel, the experience is vividly complex. We are riveted, repulsed, seduced, astonished, amused, horrified and ultimately sympathetic. Gratification is also part of the emotional mix. Together with her collaborator, the English theatre and opera director James Bonas, the California-born Pickett – a former Ballet Frankfurt dancer who has choreographed more than 60 works – has created an ultra-physical narrative ballet so potent it grabs you at your core.

Raising the Curtain: The National Ballet of Canada Returns from Lockdown

Artists of the Ballet in Angels ’ Atlas. (Photo: Johan Persson, Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)

Excitement surrounding the return of the National Ballet of Canada to the Toronto stage, following 18 months of pandemic-imposed lockdowns, swelled as soon as the doors reopened at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on Thursday night. “Welcome Back,” words writ large on the stage curtain, greeted the fully masked members of the audience as soon as they stepped into the theatre. The mood became immediately celebratory, jubilant, even festive, as if at any moment confetti would fall from the ceiling along with balloons.

Danse Macabre: Three Works by the National Ballet of Canada

Greta Hodgkinson in Marguerite and Armand. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

 

Given that dance seasons usually are organized at least a year in advance, the National Ballet of Canada couldn’t have anticipated the uncanny timeliness of a mixed program highlighting the body’s fragility, ephemerality and resilience – themes now resonating with a public spooked by the global spread of the new coronavirus, which the World Health Organization has recently declared a pandemic. A sure case of art imitating life.

None of the three works the company presented two weeks ago at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for The Performing Arts simulated a contagion – nothing as obvious or as graphic as that. Featuring the world premiere of Angels’ Atlas by Vancouver’s Crystal Pite, a remount of Wayne McGregor’s Chroma and the Canadian debut of Sir Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, the two-hours-plus evening more explored momentum and transience – metaphors, if you will, for the human condition in the throes of an existential crisis.

Imagining the Unimaginable: Crystal Pite's Betroffenheit

The cast of Betroffenheit. (Photo: Wendy D. Photography)

In Betroffenheit, the award-winning dance/theatre piece choreographed by Vancouver’s Crystal Pite, co-creator and writer Jonathon Young, who plays a central role, reappears in a long brown hair wig and a shiny blue suit in a scene replicating the lurid non-reality of a chemical high. He is the star of an interim lounge lizard act, surrounded by preening fan dancers fronting an aggressive ballroom duo, and partnered by his doppelgänger, the spindly and rubbery Jeremy Spivey. Wearing a painted-on smile, he is black where Young is white. But this isn’t an instance of colourblind casting.

As seen in the Canadian Stage presentation of Betroffenheit that took place at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre on April 22 as part of the 2016 work’s ongoing world tour, Spivey, a member of Pite’s Kidd Pivot contemporary dance company, is Young’s shadow, literally his darker self, and the keeper of his tortured secrets. He echoes Young’s repetitive yelps of pain, and mirrors his contorted body language as he boomerangs across the stage clutching a microphone into which he spews one-liners wrapped in canned laughter – even though what Young is saying isn’t really funny. His antics might look comical, but they are rooted in tragedy.

Dancing With Puppets and Pulling the Strings: James Kudelka's Malcolm

 James Kudelka (right), and Malcolm. (Photo: Bruce Zinger)

James Kudelka danced with a puppet this year. Malcolm was his name and while their dance wasn’t quite a pas de deux there was no mistaking theirs was a unique partnership. Kudelka might have seemed in control of the movements, but it was more Malcolm pushing him into new theatrical territory. With a puppet quite literally in his hands, no strings attached, Kudelka has moved beyond the boundaries of traditional dance performance, eschewing the kinetic to focus more on the art form's more subtle, expressive side as well as it's capacity for creating an empathetic relationship with its audience. It's something of an emerging trend right now. On the West Coast, choreographer Crystal Pite has been incorporating puppets into her work of late, including her re-interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest – The Tempest Replica – which Canadian Stage presented in Toronto in April. In Quebec, Robert Lepage has long used Japanese-inspired puppets in his theatrical productions. On Broadway, War Horse created a sensation last season with machine-driven puppets which helped to tell a story of loss of innocence and the brutality of war. Today's puppets, in other words, aren't just child's play. With Kudelka, to get back to the point, the puppet is a conduit for intimacy, stuffed cloth made substantial, and in more ways than one.