Strike a Pose

On Saturday, I was at an afternoon show of The National Ballet's new recital entitled Frame By Frame. This show is based on the life and work of NFB film-maker Norman McLaren. He was well-known for shorts which experimented with novel film and animation techniques. It was a series of vignettes either from a biographical event or one of McLaren's work. My main complaint was that there too many such scenes over the course of 2 hours, leading to viewer fatigue. With such busy-ness, there were hits but misses too. For every successful bio event (an inventive use of a drafting table) or recreation (a row of dancers shot like they were a single film strip), there were duds (an interminable foray into Shanghai complete with dancing Red Army soldiers, an anemic re-enactment of Neighbours). Often times, it felt like a scene was shoe-horned in so they can demonstrate another gee-whiz interaction between dancers and multimedia technology. It was promising work but Frame by Frame needed an editor.