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Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal at Jacob's Pillow
8.1.09
JACOB’S PILLOW DANCE
Becket, Mass.
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal
July 29-Aug 2, 2009
Program: Four Seasons and Cantata; choreography by Mauro Bigonzetti
Review by Seth Rogovoy
(BECKET, Mass., July 31, 2009) – Canada’s modern ballet company, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, was on the stage of the Ted Shawn Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow last night, but in its imagination and that of the audience, the location was Italy, as the themes, personality, setting, and music were all heavily Italian influenced, no surprise since the choreography for the evening’s two forty-minute dances was exclusively by Mauro Bigonzetti.
In that sense, the program was really a showcase for Bigonzetti’s work, although one cannot really imagine another company – other than perhaps the Aspen/Santa Fe Ballet – better suited for Bigonzetti’s uniquely muscular style and vocabulary. The Canadiens themselves are a precise, muscular troupe, and judging from Friday night’s performance, they have fully absorbed Bigonzetti’s grammar: the twisted torsos, elongated arms, sculpted held positions, and impish sense of humor.
Four Seasons, danced to the piece of that name by Antonio Vivaldi, began with two dozen dancers frozen in male-female couplings like some Renaissance rendering of a Greek orgy, setting the tone to the piece that would continue to build from a Classical base, both in terms of ballet and Greek-Classical, while manipulating the foundation to express Bigonzetti’s contemporary take on modern love and lust.
The dance, like the music, was divided into four sections (each representing a season), each section of which was further subdivided into three movements. Other than “Spring,” each season was introduced by a duo, centered by a solo, and then concluded by a group dance – single-sex in the middle two sections, co-ed in the first and last.
Solos were built out of yoga-like flexions that were held in statuary-like poses reminiscent of Classical motifs, with some influence from African and Egyptian imagery. The highly chiseled dancers – men and women alike – danced as much with their musculature as they did with their limbs. Bigonzetti favored marionette-like moves, and the choreography always abided closely to Vivaldi’s familiar melodies.
Like Vivaldi’s composition, the dance was highly ordered and symmetrical, yet it left plenty of room for individual expression of personality, both on the part of the dancers themselves and through Bigonzetti’s unique dance language.
Cantata, danced to southern Italian folk music, some recorded, some performed live by the phenomenal female vocal and percussion quartet, Gruppo Musicale Assurd, was in some ways markedly contrasting with Four Seasons, and in other ways not. Bigonzetti’s hand was clear: as in the first piece, most of the dance was built from solidly planted hips, with torsos, arms, and heads doing most of the work. There wasn’t a lot of flight, except when men and women were tossing each other over and around each other.
The piece did elaborate on hints of violence and cruelty felt only through nuance in Four Seasons. Here, men threw women into a pile. Here, women’s hands turned into talon-like claws. Here, Italian machismo was given the forefront, as was sisterly empowerment. This was a battle of the sexes (and, for my money, the women won).
Bigonzetti’s violence is as highly stylized as Quentin Tarantino’s; he draws from Punch and Judy and slapstick as much as from martial arts, and the effect is often comic. The musical troupe was fully integrated into the performance, which lacked some of Four Seasons gorgeous classical forms and balance, instead relying more on the chaos of a freewheeling party and debauchery.
While Cantata was more visceral and more immediately exciting, those formal, Classical values so perfectly executed in Four Seasons by the Canadiens were what probably would remain in a dancegoer’s memory in days and weeks to come.
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic.
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