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How Can Everyone Eat Ice Cream at Intermission Without Wanting to Force Feed it to the Dancers?

Posted by Candice on November 10, 2008 at 10:06 am

Coincidentally, last Thursday three people, who don’t even know each other, informed me of this great program the National Ballet has for students. Basically, students can get rush tickets for $20.00. Because the Ballet was doing a piece by Twyla Tharp this week, I decided I had to check it out. Tom and I got tickets for Saturday night, got dolled up and headed to the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts (a very impressive location).

The evening began at 6:45 when principal dancer Guillaume Cote (sidelined with an injury) hosted a pre-show talk in the lobby. He discussed his experience with performing the pieces and gave a brief history of the choreography and music. It was nice to have that contextualization.

We then took our seats, which I thought were pretty good at four rows back and all the way to the left. The program began with the projecting of a trillion cell phone rings to remind people to turn their phones off and to be able to do it without being embarrassed of the noise it would make. I thought it was quite clever.

The first piece they danced was Balanchine’s “Symphony in C”. It was okay, though certainly not performed the way it was orignally staged, or even as today’s NYCB would have done it. There were fingers and eyes out of place in the chorus and many of the girls were about an inch too short! The costumes were awful. The bodysuits were satiny but lumpy and really distracted from the movement. However, the novelty of the piece was Ethan Stiefel (aka Cooper Nielson from “Centre Stage” - oh, and there’s going to be a Centre Stage 2. I’m pumped) danced the male lead in the third movement. He was incredible. A whole different caliber of performance. There was an intermission after that and we discussed our impressions of the piece.

Next they performed Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” accompanied by  a single pianist playing ten unique polyphonic pieces. There were 8 dancers who performed the ten movements in various combinations. This piece featured a really cool “underwater” style dance, and some interesting lifts. We opted not to try them in the lobby during the next intermission.

The final piece of the evening was Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room.” It was incredible. The choreography is intense, physical, and mind blowing. Here is a link to an excerpt of some other company doing it. Though this really doesn’t do the choreography or the dancing justice. I was captivated the entire time. It was like ballet, tap, boxing, cardio spectacular with people appearing and disappearing all over the place.

The experience was great. Though the whole set-up of the National is quite, ummm, interesing to me - studying Canadian ballet and politics of difference - it was wonderful to be able to go and see that caliber of dancing. I need to do more dancing.

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