The works on Ballet BC’s double bill, touring the UK with Dance Consortium, are set up in conversation with each other. Crystal Pite’s shadowy Frontier is full of the unknown. Johan Inger’s Passing plays with birth and death and the brightly-lit moments in between.
Based in Vancouver, Ballet BC has a strong Nederlands Dans Theater connection – not least in current director Mehdi Walerski, who performed in Frontier as a dancer with NDT. The dancers are focused and sleek, responding to the different moods of each piece, whether coiling through Pite’s massed, rippling moves or jumping into Inger’s solo spots.
Created in 2008, and specially revised for Ballet BC in 2024, Pite’s Frontier presents a world with no reliable edges. As the curtain goes up on a dimly-lit stage, there’s already a line of bodies sprawled along the footlights. Then you realise there are more of them: climbing up from the auditorium, rising out of the dark.
That throng of dancers haunts and shapes Frontier. Pite picks out several soloists, dressed by Nancy Bryant in simple white tops and trousers. But they’re always shadowed, echoed, surrounded by the corps, who are dressed in loose black with hoods that cover their faces.
This focus on a seething mass of bodies was an early Pite characteristic. In the extraordinary 2014 Polaris, her breakthrough work in the UK, she set a huge cast moving like a hive-mind to music by Thomas Adès. In Frontier, the corps seem to act as a subconscious, the unknown lurking around and behind the individual.
In one duet, Jacalyn Tatro is partnered by one of the masked dancers, Rae Srivastava. Her fluid moves stand out, spotlit and dreamy, outlined in stark white. But he is a near-invisible figure, melting into the background. He’s like the unacknowledged, black-clad stage hands of Kabuki theatre, there and not-there. Even when he puts a gloved hand over her eyes, she doesn’t seem to realise.
Pite finds endless ways to echo, mirror, and duplicate her cast. When a dancer walks along one of the slanted curtain of Jay Gower Taylor’s set, the shadow she casts isn’t her own shadow: it’s another dancer, echoing her movements from the other side of the gauze. Another dancer in white, Eduardo Jiminez Cabrera dips and falls through a winding solo, with a masked dancer moving in unison alongside him.
Pite works with lighting designer Tom Visser to create moments that feel like optical illusions. In one sequence, a woman twitches as the dark crowd press close to her. The lighting snaps to a different angle, and she’s suddenly stock still. It has the effect of a quick change, as if she’s turned into a completely different person.
Frontier opens to choral music by Eric Whitacre, before fragmenting into a soundscape by Owen Belton. The images become more disorientating: at one point, it’s hard to tell if the spotlights or the curtains are moving, with a giddying sense of shifting space.
As the piece proceeds, the soloists fade away. Left in command of the stage, the shadowy corps flow in and out of unison: a tide of movement, with spiky counter-currents. When at last they vanish off stage, you can’t quite see how or where they go. One last ripple, and the work is over.
Johan Inger’s Passing starts with what looks like a ritual, or a burial. Two dancers shuffle across the stage, shaking out handfuls of earth. But they’re not alone: two more dancers follow the earth trails, prancing on tip toe.
Leaving the trails, they start to dance, and to get caught up in life and relationships. A man holds his partner up as she stands, groaning, in childbirth – and an adult dancer comes crawling through her legs. The first “baby” is followed by another, and another, until she’s given birth to the whole cast.
Assembled on stage, the 20 dancers are both individuals and a society. Inger sends them skipping into folk steps, walking line and circle dances. Linda Chow’s costumes suggest everyday clothes in bright colours. The mood is bright and gentle, with an easy warmth, even as people pull off in different directions.
It’s an episodic work, a series of vignettes: trios of men and women bursting into sobs or laughter, a couple dancing in their underwear. One man rips through the crowd, hurling himself into surprisingly loud twisting jumps – because he’s put on tap shoes, where everybody else is in their socks.
With so many short scenes, Passing loses momentum. But it ends with some striking imagery: more earth, falling like snow, dappling the dancers’ faces and bodies. When they leave the stage, the earth keeps falling.
