Wave-Particle Duality

Saturday night, I went to see The National Ballet mixed program. The classical short Marguerite and Armand was book-ended by two contemporary pieces: a remount of Wayne McGregor's Chroma and the world premiere of Crystal Pite's Angels Atlas.

Firstly, the middle piece seemed the odd-one-out for tonight. But supposedly Karen Kain acquired performing rights for it as a retirement gift for principal dancer Greta Hodgkinson. A dying courtesan relived events from her past: notably the tempestuous love triangle with Armand and the duke. I'm not so fond of these dramatic stories revolving around male anger and possessiveness. Also I thought Liszt's piano sonata in B minor was wonderful but the orchestration was so-so. But the dancing between Hodgkinson and Guillaume Côté was beautiful.

Both contemporary pieces used light as metaphor and physical force. In Chroma, the dancers' were inside a white box-like enclosure and brightly, almost mercilessly, illuminated. To orchestral arrangements of The White Stripes' songs with elaboration, they moved with inhuman speed and contortions. On this second watch, I was particular taken with a sequence where the light had shifted to blue during a pas de deux. The spotlight on each dancer created a sharp shadow twin on the floor. I wished when the dancers joined up that one of the spotlight could have been turned off to maintain that crisp projection instead of a blurring of the shadows.

For the last piece, Pite's new work was supposed to showcase innovative light manipulation. It wasn't quite as cutting-edge as the hype but it was undoubtedly a critical component. The backdrop often had slowly moving clusters and showers of light arcs. It was like watching a lightning storm or a meteor shower slowed down to human-level perception.

When the piece started, the dancers laid prone on a darkened stage as tendrils of light drifted down toward them. Perhaps emotionally primed by Tchaikovsky's Opus 41 No. 6: Cherubic Hymn, it felt to me like watching the moment when the spark of life, whether a supernatural gift or a metaphorical representation of human awareness and intelligence, entered their bodies. Throughout the piece, the light-work seemed to be generated from the life-force and movement of the dancers.

It was unusual to see pairings in Pite's work given the insectile synchrony in her piece Emergence. But these gave room for vigorous spins and lifts. There was still exciting sequences of formation dancing performed with precision and power. At first, it was vibrating arms and torsos in time to electronic crackle. Later, body undulations animated the dancers. Often, a quick wave of movement would propagate rapidly back and forth among the group. There was a slower transmission near the end where human contact created a branching cascade of fallen bodies. I watched this spread of shared grief or perhaps more ominously contagious death and couldn't help but think of the current headlines about pandemics and quarantine. It was an engaging new piece in The National Ballet's repertoire.