Three World Premieres Artistic Director Karen Kain commissioned three exciting Canadian choreographers – Jera Wolfe, Kevin A. Ormsby and Alysa Pires – to create new work for the company specifically for the digital realm. These dance films, directed by acclaimed videographer Paul McNulty, will be unveiled in February, 2021.
Soul by Jera Wolfe
Jera Wolfe is Associate Artist at Red Sky Performance, a Toronto-based company devoted to contemporary Indigenous performance. A choreographer and dancer of Métis heritage, Jera has created powerful new work
for companies and festivals around the world, including Fall for Dance North, Festival des arts de Saint-Sauveur and The Royal Winnipeg Ballet. In 2019, he won the prestigious Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Original Choreography for Trace, a work inspired by Indigenous sky and star stories. In Soul, his first work for the National Ballet, Jera asks how the intricacies of private relationships manifest in the body, in movements, expressions and touch, making brilliant use of film technology to show that the full scope of a relationship can never be known from the outside. To do this, he choreographed two separate duets to the same piece of music by Max Richter. Then he
filmed roughly half of each duet and edited them together as one. The result is a gorgeous meditation on the intimacy of relationships as worlds unto themselves. “The audience will see roughly half of each duet,” Jera explains. “This reinforces that you can’t know everything about a relationship. The things that they’ve experienced privately is what makes it special and what makes them special. It’s a simple concept but very powerful.” Jera created Soul for two couples self-isolating together: Principal Dancers Heather Ogden and Guillaume Côté, and Principal Dancer Harrison James and First Soloist Ben Rudisin.
Guillaume Côté is sponsored through Dancers First by Emmanuelle Gattuso, C.M. and Allan Slaight, C.M. Harrison James is sponsored through Dancers First by Lucy White. Ben Rudisin is sponsored through Dancers First by an anonymous donor. Teagan Richman-Taylor is sponsored through Dancers First by Devida & Derek Smith. Guillaume Côté and Heather Ogden in rehearsal for Soul. Jera Wolfe. Photos by Karolina Kuras. 12
The National Ballet of Canada
Preview Fall 2020
