Powerful and empathetic storytelling in Citie Ballet’s ‘Reflections: Ghosts and On the Edge’

Citie Ballet’s Reflections: Ghosts and On the Edge
Timms Centre for the Arts
Feb 24 – Feb 26

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It’s often said that good art tells a story. While both the idiomatic jury and myself are still out on the question of the primacy of storytelling in art, narrative does provide an entry point for untrained audiences to engage with creative works. Luckily for me, Citie Ballet’s recent Reflections spun two powerful and moving stories (pun absolutely intended).

Reflections was the second set of Edmonton-based Citie Ballet’s fifth professional season and presented two world premieres: Ghosts and On the Edge. Yukichi Hattori’s Ghosts explores what it means to be alive through an incursion into the afterlife while Kiera Keglowitsch’s On the Edge invites viewers to reflect on the precarious condition of glaciers given current climate trends.

Ghosts

Choreographer Yukichi Hattori masterfully conjures up a desire to explore beyond the constraints of life and into a timeless, spaceless spiritual existence. The accompanying music — richly-layered compositions by Edmonton-based experimental sound-artist duo Nulle Part (Ben Good & Jason Troock) — evokes a sense of spatial and temporal displacement fraught with melancholy.

Ghosts opens to a dramatic scene that sees the realms of living and the dead divided by clever use of blocking and costume and lighting design. This separations are soon revealed to be tenuous as ghostly pale apparitions rush the stage. Their movements oscillate between fluid, uncanny grace and the irregular spasms one might associate with languishing zombies. Here Hattori’s choreography reflects a keen understanding of the uncertainty of existence beyond life and contradictory cultural views on death. Hattori’s ghosts are ambiguous, at once noble and capricious spirits; they exist in resigned and stoic isolation, yet they tease and exert their power over the living.

The living are not altogether unaware of their counterparts. Dancer Kiera Keglowitsch shines in her role as a woman possessed by spirits. From ghostly incursions into her space to total transformation, her gradual transition into the afterlife captivates the audience. Through its exploration of life after death, Ghosts also asks “What does it mean to be alive?” and “What constrains our existence?”

On the Edge

Emerging choreographer Kiera Keglowitsch’s On the Edge adopts glaciers as a motif to tackle the heavy theme of anthropogenic climate change. The performance builds a narrative of awe and empathy by juxtaposing the immensity and power of these icy formations with their vulnerability under rising global temperatures.

Projected footage of glaciers and icebergs serves as the backdrop for the dancers. The latter are clad in classic long-sleeve white leotards and flowing pants with light blue accents designed to visually recall ice and the paradoxical dynamism of glacial bodies. Dancers, music, and scene appear to be organically coordinated in increasingly unpredictable patterns of balance and collapse. Keglowitsch’s keen use of gestural language animates and humanizes the choreography; a waving arm becomes fluid arctic water becomes a bitter farewell. At times a dancer’s shadow falls on the projection screen, darkening the image as if in subtle recognition of the human-made nature of global climate change.

Spoken excerpts by such environmental artists, scholars, and activists as Zaria Forman, David H. Grinspoon, John Muir, Carol Browner and Al Gore punctuate the performance with statements on the ecological peril of glacier loss. It is during these moments that the work adopts a didactic tone which occasionally undermines the subtlety of its choreography.

On the Edge adds to an increasingly large body of artistic works calling for meaningful action to counter anthropogenic climate change. May we listen and act.