Liquid Moonlight: The National Ballet of Canada’s 2024 Winter Season

Christopher Gerty and Hannah Galway in Silent Screen. (Photo: Bruce Zinger)

Last Saturday night, the National Ballet of Canada launched its winter season at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre with a triple bill featuring works new to the company. Running until November 16, the two-hour program included Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s evocative Silent Screen, Frederick Ashton’s sparkling Rhapsody, and Guillaume Côté’s introspective Body of Work. Côté’s solo piece expressed his personal connection to dance as he prepares for retirement at the end of the 2024/25 season.

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.

Lost in Translation: Wayne Mcgregor’s MADDADDAM

Siphesihle November and Jason Ferro in Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM. (Photo:Bruce Zinger; Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada)

"But the people couldn’t be happy because of the chaos.” It’s a line uttered during the course of MADDADDAM, and it comes close to summing up reaction to a ballet where the dance got in a swirl of virtuosic theatrical effects. Based on a trilogy of dystopian novels by Canada’s Margaret Atwood, British choreographer Wayne McGregor‘s lavish three-act adaptation for the stage, a co-production of the National Ballet of Canada and England’s Royal Ballet, commission of The National Ballet, confuses and disappoints. It doesn’t tell a story that’s easy to follow, and it doesn’t use the art of dancing that measures up to the soaring imaginative peaks of Atwood’s speculative prose. Where her novels feel futuristic, McGregor’s ballet, whose world premiere took place at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre at the end of November, appears curiously anachronistic, being more concerned with scenography – a hallmark of the early-20th-century Les Ballets Russes – than with pushing classical dance into brave new territory.

A Sparkling Jewels Crowns the National’s Season

Svetlana Lunkina and Spencer Hack with Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in "Emeralds" from Jewels. (Photo: Karolina Kuras)

“A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle, not the story, is the essential element.” – George Balanchine

The National Ballet of Canada has saved its best for last, closing the 2023-2024 season with a dazzling revival of George Balanchine's three-act masterwork Jewels. This plotless full-length work, performed at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre until June 22, demands its dancers fully embody a prismatic array of distinct styles – the gossamer lyricism of "Emeralds," the jazzy insouciance of "Rubies," and the imperial grandeur of "Diamonds," each act inspired by a different orchestral piece and Balanchine’s fascination with the gemstone jewelry of Van Cleef & Arpels. Over the course of the two-hour program that opened last Saturday, the company met this challenge with nuanced, musically attuned performances that showcased their versatility and depth of talent. Crucially, they adhered to Balanchine's vision of ballet as a visual art form where the choreography, not the narrative, takes precedence.

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.

Found in Translation: Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, Reconsidered

Heather Ogden in the National Ballet of Canada's MADDADDAM. (Photo: Karolina Kuras.)

In 2022, I walked out of Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre and wrote that MADDADDAM — Wayne McGregor’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy of visionary novels — had gotten lost in translation, the story confounding, the choreography swallowed by its own scenography. Watching the National Ballet of Canada’s revival last Saturday night, I retract nearly all of it. This time I was not confused so much as conquered. I felt, for the first time, that I was in the presence of genius.

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.

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.