Spotlight Series

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.

For his choreographic debut with the National Ballet, Kevin A. Ormsby created an eclectic trio for First Soloists Tanya Howard and Ben Rudisin with Corps de Ballet Solo Work by Alysa Pires

Alysa Pires is a regular collaborator with the National Ballet in her role as Choreographic Associate, which she assumed in 2019 to gain experience and opportunity as an emerging creator. She has been a key participant in the company’s virtual season to date, contributing a beautiful adaptation of her piece In Between to Expansive Dances that saw her reimagining an ensemble work cinematically, as a solo. Now, member Teagan Richman-Taylor. Titled Trase Pa, the work considers the lived experiences or ancestries that dancers, musicians and audiences bring to the shared space of dance, a theme that also emerges in the music, “Traces,” by Haitian composer David Bontemps.

“David is interested in ancestry,” Kevin says. “He’s taken several musical structures and movements from Haiti to compose the work. I’m interested in in the ways in which we arrive in a creative space to do the work that we do as dancers. What are the ancestries and the things that we carry into that space?”

Kevin, who is Artistic Director Alysa is creating a new solo for one of the company’s most senior and expressive artists, Principal Dancer Piotr Stanczyk.

“Piotr and I are working with themes of decay, loss and memory,” she says. “It’s really about reckoning with the end of something – whether that’s life or career or a relationship – and all of the complex emotions that come with that: sadness, frustration, maybe even a sense of of Toronto’s KasheDance, uses a diverse choreographic vocabulary that abstracts the dancers’ natural movements and infuses them with contemporary dance and ballet. His creative process was deeply collaborative and he invited the dancers to articulate their approach to the music and choreography in writing.

“I’ve been having the best time in the studio with the dancers, just thinking about the stage as a responsive space, an observing space. How do we contemplate our own impact on the world? How do

we observe others in space?” joy or gratitude for the memories that you have.”

Alysa has set her piece to Johann Sebastian Bach’s touching “Sonata for Violin No. 1 in G Minor,” played live by Aaron Schwebel, Concertmaster with The National Ballet of Canada Orchestra. Melancholy and sonorous, the music is a fitting companion for a piece that touches the complex and universal experience of loss.

Spotlight Series is funded by The Producers’ Circle.

The Producers’ Circle: Gail & Mark Appel, John & Claudine Bailey, Inger Bartlett & Marshal Stearns, Laura Dinner & Richard Rooney, Gail Drummond & Bob Dorrance, The Thor E. and Nicole Eaton Family Charitable Foundation, Sandra Faire & Ivan Fecan, Kevin Garland & Roger Garland, C.M., Ira Gluskin & Maxine Granovsky Gluskin, The William & Nona Heaslip Foundation, Anna McCowan Johnson & Donald K. Johnson, O.C., Judy Korthals & Peter Irwin, Mona & Harvey Levenstein, Jerry & Joan Lozinski, The Honourable Margaret Norrie McCain, C.C., Julie Medland, Sandra Pitblado & Jim Pitblado, C.M., The Harry & Lillian Seymour Family Foundation, Gerald Sheff & Shanitha Kachan and The Jack Weinbaum Family Foundation.