The National Ballet of Canada, Frontiers Review

In a programme which was never less than interesting, you had to wait until the final piece to be truly blown away.

Angels’ Atlas (pictured top), was created for the National Ballet of Canada in 2020 and is choreographer Crystal Pite at her very best. A meditation on human fragility, it is danced against a striking light piece by set designer Jay Gower Taylor and lighting designer Tom Visser, a slowly shape-shifting black and white wall of light, which sometimes looks like a dissolving iceberg dwarfing the dancers below, at others just shards of ice or glass and at yet others no more than a gash of light.

Pite has a special talent for moving large groups of dancers to create both compelling movement and intense emotional climates. Here tens of dancers in loose black pants (costume design Nancy Bryant) appear anguished, torsos leaning forward, arms in ragged, syncopated movements, regularly rising up to heaven in desperate pleading.

Groups form and face each other moving in canon, or blend together in a rushing mass, before dissolving again.

At intervals crowd scenes give way to pas de deux, firstly an expansive ode to oblivious love danced on press night by Svetlana Lunkina and Ben Rudisin, and lastly a dance haunted by the inevitability of death, performed by Hannah Galway and the very impressive Siphesihle November.

Owen Belton’s original score gives way to liturgical music by Tchaikovsky and Morton Lauridsen imbuing the work with intense religiosity.

Visually stunning and emotionally engaging, Angels' Atlas is totally engrossing.

The evening opens in a lighter classical mood with Passion, by the company’s former director James Kudelka..

Larkin Miller and Genevieve Penn Nabity in Passion. Photo by Bruce Zinger. Courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada

It’s centred on two contrasting couples, one spiritual in its impeccably classical interactions (Larkin Miller and Genevieve Penn Nabity), the other more here-and-now, bringing showy sensuality to their dancing (McGee Maddox and Heather Ogden).Five women in light yellow Romantic tutus weave their way around the stage, oblivious of everything other than their pleasing classical movement – poised arms and some beautiful feet in this group drew the eye.

Danced to the first movement of Beethoven’s 'Piano Concerto Op 61A', played live under conductor Julian Pellicano with pianist Zhenya Vitort, Passion served its purpose – to showcase the company’s classical ability – but suffered from carrying on after it had said all it had to say.

The two leading women returned for a highly original duet, Emma Portner’s Islands.

Genevieve Penn Nabity and Heather Ogden in islands. Photo by Karolina Kuras

In a deliberately ambiguous piece, the two dancers start joined at the hip by their shared voluminous pants, their bodies intertwined, so that at times they appeared creatures of many limbs, at others a single individual with the torso of one and the legs of the other

Danced to an eclectic compilation of music by contemporary artists as well as original music by Forest Swords, the first section of Islands intrigued; but the second, in which the women divested themselves of those pants and become fully fledged individuals, if still mostly moving in unison, lost some of its pull.

Frontiers marks a welcome return to these shores after more than a decade away for The National Ballet of Canada now entering a new era under the fresh direction of Hope Muir.