TORONTO - Meteorologically speaking, at least, there's no denying it's a little on the cool side right now.
Which is perhaps all the more reason to celebrate the way the National Ballet of Canada has turned up the heat at the Four Seasons Centre with an evening of mixed programming that opened last week with a lot of sizzle and a fair bit of heat to boot.
Reviewed here in Wednesday night's performance, it begins with a new-to-Toronto work from Dominique Dumais, a one-time dancer and freelance choreographer with the company, who has gone on to success with Kevin O'Day-Ballet Mannheim, where she serves as associate director and resident choreographer.
Initially premiered in 2003, it has admittedly taken awhile for Dumais' Skin Divers to make its way to the Toronto stage for a North American premiere, but it was definitely worth a six-year wait.
Set to a fusion of two poems by Anne Michaels -- Skin Divers and Last Night's Moon -- and to Gavin Bryars' String Quartet No. 2, this is a work for four couples -- Jordana Daumec and Keiichi Hirano, Jenna Savella and Martin Lindinger, Stephanie Hutchinson and Jonathan Renna and Alejandra Perez-Gomez and Patrick Lavoie.
Together, both in a series of fluid pas de deux, and individually, they move in front of, behind, and sometimes even through an over-sized video projection of a naked female form, arrayed in barely-there costumes designed by Tatyana van Walsum, as the poet's voice intimately enlivens her own poetry.
This is a a work of both joy and melancholy, filled to over-flowing with both a sense of promise and of spent passion, a work where the dancers seem to inhabit the poetry to such a degree that it is often as though Bryars' haunting and soulful music is rising directly from their movements, instead of driving them.
As the langourous images of Dumais' work fade, Italian choreographer Davide Bombana takes centre stage to offer up his fresh, modern take on Prosper Merimee's timeless novella and the music it has spawned in a work seemingly created to underline with almost every step just how close the words carnal and Carmen might be in a dictionary of human sexuality.
In concert with designer Dorin Gal, Bombana takes Merimee's Carmen, Georges Bizet's opera of the same name (interwoven with the music of Meredith Monk, Rodion Shchedrin, Jose Serebrier and Tambours du Bronx) and adds a generous dose of contemporary sensuality and passion.
The result is a sort of cage-match Carmen, pitting Noah Long's hugely impressive Don Jose against Robert Stephen's swaggering Garcia in a mortal duel, all for the love of the smouldering lady of title, danced with calculated passion by Heather Ogden.
In addition to stand-out performances from its three principals, this Carmen also offers a showcase for the delightful delicacy of Sonia Rodriguez, cast as Michaela, the young woman abandoned by Don Jose so he can pursue his passion for Carmen, and for Jonathan Renna in a highly unusual take on the bullfighter Escamillo, which sees him played as a bull and pitted against a troupe of Toreadors in drag in an apparent sendup of Latin machismo.
This is raw, often unbridled stuff, definitely concerned more with passion than with love, offering a showcase for many of the NBOC's emerging talents as well as some of its established stars. Depending on your tastes, it may not be a Carmen for the ages, but thanks to the urgency of Bombana's choreography it is very much a Carmen of today.
Skin Divers and Carmen continue through Sunday with the support of Luminato.
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