Ballet BC - Boys! Boys! Boys!
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Boys! Boys! Boys!
This dance aficionado is going to come clean and point out that his knowledge of dance is purely amateur and that any opinions herein should be taken with a flake of salt (preferably Maldon Salt). I would also like to state that as a retired magazine photographer the former tickets to openings in the arts, for quid pro quo services rendered, have all but shrunk to a trickle. For this reason I must be very frugal in those performances for which I must disburse funds of a pension nature.
My presence with my 11 year-old granddaughter
Lauren Elizabeth in Friday, October 18, at the latest Ballet
BC program called Tilt at the
Queen Elizabeth was funded by a small quid pro quo.
That acknowledgement does not give me the
possible sense of guilt that I would have were I to pan the show as being a
terrible one. There is no guilt because my review is a from-the-heart good one.
With those cards on the table I have to add
one more important one. Because of frugality I have to admit here that my last
presence at a Ballet BC performance was during the previous mandate of the Ballet
BC Artistic Director who shall remain nameless as Soviet-style political
revisionism and non-personing is alive and well in Vancouver. None of us should
know that the man, brought us many ballets by the world-renowned William
Forsythe when other ballet companies in Canada were parading tutus around
May Poles.
With the air now cleared to that of a
crisp-blue-skied fall Vancouver day, October 22, 2013 I can now indulge in
wowing and raving of our (Lauren was ecstatic, too) Friday experience at Ballet
BC’s Tilt.
I never thought I would ever begin anything
I would write on our venerable city ballet company with this, Boys! Boys! Boys!
There is a very long bench of talent in Ballet BC, one end being
at Davie and Granville and the other on Granville Island, smack by the studios of Artemis
Gordon’s Arts Umbrella Dance.
While the women in Ballet BC
are beautiful and talented (I will write a tad about them further on) I only
had eyes for all those men.
At one time testosterone at Ballet BC
seemed to be the realm of cool Edmond Kilpatrick and a more passionate one by the
long departed (and sorely missed by this amateur) Miroslav Zydowicz. Once
Kilpatrick left Ballet BC I stopped noticing the men.
Friday night my eyes were constantly
shifting from Peter Smida, to Scott Fowler, from Connor Gnam to Thibout
Eiferman and from Alexander Burton to Ryan Genoe. There were others but that
night my eyes were on the former.
For many years men in Ballet BC
were lifters and blurs. I wanted to stare and enjoy the bodies of the women. Ballet BC
has always been a feast for the eyes for lovers of women. Kudos to costume designer Kate Burrows for not hiding those wonderful bodies with superfluous cloth.
On
Friday I again enjoyed (alas I have never photographed her) watching the
classical ballerina that she is for me, Makaila Wallace, knowing that after
this year she will be gone. I watched those two different female powerhouses
that are Rachel Meyer and Alexis Fletcher. Scurrying with delight around those
two I watched Livona Ellis and Emily Chessa (on that bench from Granville Island). I watched in delight but this
time I also noticed some of the men dancing with them. In particular in Jorma
Elo’s I and I am You, that was the combination of Alexander Burton with Mikaila
Wallace and Peter Smida with Alexis Fletcher. It seemed like Mikaila was signaling, it's not over yet. And for good reason she was superb.
Few might know that Alexander Burton treats
a dance floor like his architect father’s vision of space. Few might know that
I first saw apprentice dancer Scott Fowler as a little boy at Arts Umbrella. Who would guess that
the muscled man who oozes in testosterone is the vary same boy? If those two
weren’t enough and considering that I am suddenly noticing a mature Smida there
is that little joy of motion that is apprentice dancer (from the Bench!) Ryan
Genoe who has a style and face to perhaps launch more ships than the fair
Helen.
All those men and many more that I will
notice in future performances have brought a balance to Ballet BC
that I never saw before. In particular
there is French-born Thibaut Eiferman whose enthusiasm for dancing is infectious.
But there is something more. Perhaps it is his Frenchness. Or it could be his
face. It is a face that reminds me of another era and of a ballet company I
never saw in the flesh and that is Diaghilev’s Ballets Rousses. If I understand well Artemis Gordon may have played a talent scout here in persuading the powers-that-be to hire the young man.
My granddaughter was in glee watching all
those men wearing party hats in Johan Inger’s Walking Mad. I did not
want to tell her that I saw the whole wonderful farce as a mixture of several
bowler-hatted-waiting-for-Godot and a connection to Peter Noon’s band The
Tremblers (if you have to ask, you don’t know). The dance was definitely all
about funny sex to me!
In I and I am You I watched as the queen,
Mikaila Wallace competed with her perhaps replacement Alexis Fletcher.
But most of my interest was in watching
Emily Molnar’s (in cooperation with the artist of Ballet BC)
piece 16 = a room. With all those men front and centre, Molnar’s work
accompanied by Dirk P. Haubrick’s sound scape ( I particularly liked one that sounded like a hovering helicopter), Jordan Tuinman’s lighting and
Kate Burrow’s costume design. Here was something spare but bold, clean but
complicated, very contemporary, but ever so much more warmish than the works of
last year’s Cedar Lake Dance that I saw at the Vancouver Playhouse. Best of all Molnar cleared the whole Ballet BC bench. It was extra nice to see so many dancers, all at the same time in the spacious Queen Elizabeth stage.
As contemporary as it was it did not go
over the top of my Lauren. But then she is being trained to dance at Arts
Umbrella.
I am now forced to bring back the memory of
the man, a former Artistic Director of Ballet BC. That is John Alleyne. Since I
never had to work with him as dancers did I liked the man and I respected many
of his views. But I had a bit of problem when he summarily let go one of the
best dancers that Ballet BC ever had which was Lauri Stallings. Stallings was so
unique that I could watch her dance from her ankles down and I knew who it was.
I would seem that Alleyne wanted a team of dancers with no personalities and with no exception.
He must have gotten up on the wrong side of
the bed that day (aren’t we now glad?), soon after Stallings was gone, when he
decided to recruit dancer Emily Molnar. The rest is
history.
