If there are two words I cannot stand to see in print, they are “sublime” and “Kafkaesque”. There is nearly always a less pretentious way to achieve descriptive accuracy, and I’ve come to regard overreliance on those turns of phrase to be little more than laziness hidden beneath a thin veneer of pseudo-intellectualism – something I have little patience for in general. In light of this, I struggled to find adjectives that could replace these words in my review of the National Ballet of Canada’s performance of Watch her, and I’m only a little disappointed to say that I was unsuccessful.
Though I had seen my share of ballets before attending the March 1st performance of Watch her, I had never gone to a modern ballet. As a child, like most young dancers, I anxiously awaited my yearly trip to The Nutcracker (and was a little too old before I realized that the horse in the Christmas Eve party scene was not, in fact, real). I’ve seen Swan Lake more times than I care to admit, always looking forward to the Danse des petits cygnes (which I’m pretty sure is the ballet equivalent of saying that your favourite painting is the Mona Lisa). Apart from such standard fare, my familiarity with the ballet had been rather limited. It was with distinct enthusiasm, then, that I watched the lights of the Four Seasons dim as my first experience with modern dance began.
And begin it did, with the ominous pizzicato of a throng of double basses which opened Lera Auerbach’s Dialogues on Stabat Mater, the music which Watch her was set to. After the spiraling overture, Auerbach’s arrangement of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s sacred choral work settled into the immediately recognizable refrain from the original that we’ve all come to know better than we think we do. The first movement of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, entitled Stabat mater dolorosa (“The sorrowful mother stood”), occupies the sort of unique place in our collective mental registry of classical music that few pieces share: not as familiar as Beethoven’s Fifth, but just familiar enough to be immediately recognizable (not unlike Ravel’s Bolero or the second movement of Dvorak’s New World Symphony), though we rarely listen to it long or closely enough to recall the melody an hour after hearing it.
But Pergolesi’s name is worth remembering, and though Auerbach’s reinterpretation of his work is executed with sensitivity to preservation of the original’s spirit, there’s something irreproducible about the first iteration of the Stabat Mater. Written shortly before the end of his life (which came at the age of 26), Pergolesi’s work, though a sacred hymn, embodies none of the stereotypical dullness of the eighteenth century musical mass. It hardly seems like it would work: a twenty-first century reconstruction of a sacred choral mass set to a ballet that comprises minimalist set design and modern choreography. But somehow, it worked beautifully.
Watch her opens with a man sitting in a chair, his back against a wall. A single light bulb hangs over him, providing the only illumination in an otherwise darkened theatre. After shifting exasperatedly, he climbs through a lone window onto the other side of the wall. The audience watches the bare stage for a few moments (though it seemed like an eternity), after which the wall lifts up to reveal the cast of dancers, standing immovably in a harsh linear arrangement, clothed in uniform drab blazers against an industrialist backdrop of steel-grey walls with doorways carved out in lieu of standard stage wings.
As a modern ballet, Watch her abandons the traditional narrative structure of most classical ballets. Though it resists efforts to read-in any unequivocal meaning, the stark juxtaposition of stiff formality against the immediately palpable sexuality of the choreography dares the audience to become invested in the relationships that play out before them. The programme tells us that Watch her explores themes of voyeurism, situating the human body in a condition of constant surveillance and considering the emotional and spatial implications of this. The visceral though subtle evocation of these themes made for a performance that allowed for effortless emotional engagement, but remained just impersonal and anonymous enough to disconcert and unnerve viewers.
Not having worn ballet slippers since beepers were still a thing, I’ll refrain from referencing my assuredly rusty glossary of ballet terminology. With this limitation in mind, it might be hard for me to capture the spirit of Aszure Barton’s choreography, but I’ll do my best. Though an ensemble piece, the ballet did feature a principal dancer, the infallible and always brilliant Sonia Rodriguez, clad in signature crimson (apologies to fans of Ogden, but I’m ardently committed to the belief that Rodriguez is the best the NBC has). The choice to highlight a member of the corps was especially effective here, for though Rodriguez was clearly singled out, the ensemble carried the performance and without the soulless mob lurking in the shadows, Rodriguez’s ethereal movements would have been deployed to much weaker effect.
Much like the sometimes-discernible narrative, the choreography tread a perfect balance between traditional and modern elements. Certain gestures clearly referenced a dying Odette, but these were interspersed with jerky head-nods and nervous shoulder shrugs. The male dancers, dressed in Magritte-like black suits and red ties, clearly contrasted the women, who seemed to glide across the stage, always in view of the men, but just beyond their reach. As soon as such a sentiment was established, Barton flipped the gender stereotype on its head and had the male dancers drop to the floor, contorting and dragging their bodies across the stage as the women launched into a hypnotizing and vaguely menacing vignette, a sort of Rosas Danst Rosas on pointe, as unattainable as they were graceful.
The ominous mob-like image the ensemble conjured up was set against the very intentional focus on the principal and her partner (of whom there were many; make of that what you will). This pairing evoked Kafkaesque (told you it was coming) feelings of oppression and nightmarish anonymity, as if The Trial was reimagined through dance. The regimented and deliberate movements of the ensemble, paired with the somber lighting and sparse set design suffocated the graceful movements of Rodriguez, occasionally driving her offstage completely, leaving the faceless corps to march portentously towards the audience, demanding both attention and reverence.
Watch her was followed, in the second half, by the much more traditional but still enjoyable A Month in the Country. Though the ballet imagined Turgenev’s eponymous play beautifully, its structure and choreography were much more expected. Consequently, it didn’t have the heart-stopping effect that Watch her did.
Though I won’t purport to identify the single quality that makes a feat of artistic expression great, I can say with relative certainty that an element which moves it in the direction of such a designation is the ability to evoke specific feelings in the viewer while preserving a certain degree of opacity and ambiguity. If piece of music or a film feels too familiar or comfortable by the time it’s through, something is missing; an artwork should never fully reveal itself to the audience, always keeping viewers on their toes, guessing at what exactly they just bore witness to. This sentiment was especially present in Watch her, the thematic inscrutability of the ballet itself mimicking the unattainability of the dancers within it. The project of producing a work whose theme is subtle without being ill-defined, whose core is discernible without being obvious, is one which only a handful of artists achieve. And when they do, the results are sublime. Never having been moved by a ballet as I was by Watch her, it was a performance I am sure to remember for years to come.