If Frontier is a meditation on the meaning and value of life’s existence, then PASSING is a sheer hymn to life and reproduction
Absolute darkness and silence. Dancers begin to crawl onto the stage from all directions under Tom Visser’s dim, murky light, creating a stark contrast with the music of Eric Whitacre (words by Charles Anthony Silvestri), which is heavenly, serene, and elegant. It almost feels like a Requiem by Mozart or Haydn.
First created in 2008 and reimagined in 2024, Crystal Pite’s Frontier can be read as a meta-narrative of her own choreographic journey. Invited by Medhi Walerski, the artistic director of Ballet BC (and a former dancer of Frontier), Pite revisits the work to create what she describes as “more concentrated and distilled”, yet still undone.
It is precisely this “undone-ness” that moves us and shakes us, I think. Unlike her collaborations that lean into stronger narratives, such as Assembly Hall with Jonathan Young or Figures in Extinction with Simon McBurney, Frontier is simpler, purer. Thus, it also feels thicker, more intense, and more visceral. The serene soprano fades into a woman’s whispered murmur, eerily like Shakespeare’s three witches whispering in your head. Accompanied by intense, loud beats, a pair of dancers, one in black and one in white, strike into a duet.
While Pite is best known for her masterful ensemble work, her solos and duets are by no means secondary. In this brand-new version of Frontier, the ensemble sequences and the solo/duet vignettes stand in stark contrast to each other with distinctly different textures, but at the same time they counterbalance one another profoundly. Pite’s ensemble feels like a flowing current of pure emotion, organic and primordial, like the ocean in its original state before human civilization, carrying with its own cycles of light and darkness, life and death. By contrast, the solo and duet dancers carve through such current of vast wilderness, bursting with raw vitality and burning with life force through their bodies’ entanglement, resistance, and interweaves.
Tom Visser’s lighting is the hidden MVP of the piece, whose precision and nuanced manipulation of light can make a dancer in Nancy Bryant’s dark costume disappear into absolute void without a glimpse of eye. As the sacred humming returns, these creatures crawl back to the dark void -where they come from. As Pite illustrates the piece as “venturing into unknown territory… to know about the universe and consciousness”, this version of Frontier feels intrinsically existentialist.
PASSING, on the other hand, is quite different. You don’t need to hold your breath; instead, you can sit back and let Amos Ben-Tal’s acoustic guitar guide you gently into Johan Inger’s choreographic world. You may be tickled by his humorous depiction of childbirth, where dancers slide, one by one, through a groaning woman’s legs, and later gather into a circle to do a Ceilidh-like dance. Alternatively, you may be awed by Inger’s deceptively complex choreography. In one scene, the ensemble appears to be chaotic and unstructured, which actually requires extraordinary precision in positioning and movement arrangement in order to present such well-curated casualness. He orchestrates the dancers’ bodies like instruments, playing a myriad of emotions, from despair to ecstasy, from joy to woe. At times, even without a beat, the ensemble has no difficulty finding their synchronicity.
Whatever high-level technique the company is employing, if Frontier is a meditation on the meaning and value of life’s existence, then PASSING is a sheer hymn to life and reproduction. Snow-white confetti continue to rain down onto the stage, manifesting a boundless joy and celebration of vitality.