The Fiddle and the Drum, the second detail, Five Brahms Waltzes, Etudes
Choreography by Jean Grand-Maître, William Forsythe, Frederick Ashton and Harald Lander. Until June 22 at the Four Seasons Centre, 145 Queen St. W.
Popular music doesn't suffer poets gladly. There are exceptions, Joni Mitchell being one of the most exceptional. The Alberta-born Los Angelino, always pushing beyond safe territory, has put her poetry into motion.
Alberta Ballet's The Fiddle and the Drum presentation gets its name from Mitchell's anti-war lyric ("How did you come to trade the fiddle for the drum") written in 1969, the opener in her cycle of seven songs of protest and prophecy produced over two decades. Choreographer Jean Grand-Maître entered the world of each song and strung them together in an impressive series of dance tableaux.
Mitchell's images anti-war and pro-environment are framed in a giant tondo: a giant, round opening behind and above the dancers. It is a window on the Earth from space, a full moon, scenes from our conflicted times. Grand-Maître's company is young, muscular and mostly bare-skinned, an essentially human touch. They move as a community, dancing exuberantly. This is not a ballet yearning to be Broadway. The Fiddle and the Drum is uniquely Joni, offering up her music for dance interpretation.
The Fiddle and the Drum is the finale in a star-studded National Ballet mixed program that opens with William Forsythe's the second detail.
He presents the company members, dressed in grey tights and leotards, hard at work, engaged in the serious but also lighthearted business of making movement. The ballet steps are exaggerated and almost parodied. The point of the point work is to free these postures from their 19th-century strictures and freshen up the vocabulary.
Piotr Stanczyk, Nehemiah Kish, Robert Stephen, Jennifer Fournier, Greta Hodgkinson and Rebekah Rimsay electrified the details. Issey Miyake's sculptural dress seems to be dancing Stephanie Hutchison, in a thrilling moment of controlled abandon.
Fournier's last dance with the National Ballet is a parting gift for her 22 years of contributions to the company. In red hair and a flowing dress like flames, she makes history come alive in Frederick Ashton's Five Brahms Waltzes in the Manner of Isadora Duncan. Her full-out recreation of a modern legend brought the house to its feet on Friday night. The solo is a distillation of Duncan's unfettered spirit, and Fournier dances it to perfection.
On third or fourth viewing, Harald Landers' Etudes can strike one as the balletic equivalent of a trained seals act. The Carl Czerny music is on the banal side of orchestral pop. But Zdenek Konvalina's supercharged solos lift an exercise at the barre to a spellbinding expression of dance artistry.
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