Playtime

Since The National Ballet had a 1991 commissioned piece from choreographer William Forsythe, they decided to put on a retrospective on him titled Physical Thinking including two Canadian premieres. On a rainy Wednesday night, I went down to the Four Seasons Centre to check it out.

The evening started with those premieres: The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude and Approximate Sonata 2016. Forsythe liked to have his dancers execute lightning-quick turns, jumps, and limb movements. They often start with some classical set-up whether solo, pairs, or groups, veer off into more contemporary sequences, and circled back to that balletic foundation. I felt there was often a playful quality to the dancing. Exactitude had Schubert's Allegro Vivace (Symphony No. 9) to drive the piece. Approximate's spare score allowed us to hear the footwork and even breathing from the several pas-de-deux.

During the intermission, some dancers came out to the Atrium to lead any interested audience members in a sequence of simple movements. It turns out these would show up in The Second Detail. The music often contained snippets that evoked in an attenuated way a particular genre of music. Similarly, the dancers often shifted into movements that felt like 20s flapper girl or tango but not quite. Detail ended with a dancer, dressed in a white tropical dress, gyrating wildly through the corps. This presented quite an interesting contrast to their silver tights and constrained movements.