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Alberta Ballet’s Our Canada made its long-awaited Canadian sesquicentennial debut Thursday night at the Jubilee auditorium before a packed and rapturous audience. Artistic director and choreographer Jean Grand-Maître’s latest profile ballet, set to the incomparable music of Gordon Lightfoot, is an ambitious one, designed to scale different artistic heights, certainly a suitable capstone to the company’s equally diverse programming of its 50th anniversary season.
The show was a tribute to both the music of Gordon Lightfoot and its inextricable relationship to our national musical heritage, a repertoire symbolic of a national identity as vast and diverse as Canada’s geography and peoples.
Taking a vignettes approach to Canadiana and with uncanny sense of narrative flow-through, Our Canada embeds the textual details of Lightfoot’s lyrical syllable stresses into multiple dance miniatures about young love, nature, nostalgia, conflict and stratified national themes of labour and rebellion, war and peace, with a recurring minstrel figure of a Gordon Lightfoot-persona, Calgary playwright/actor Eugene Stickland, wandering from time to time as a poet through the landscape.
For a work that isn’t strictly speaking a story ballet, it nevertheless does tell its own clear narrative conspicuously well, one designed from bittersweet wistfulness of many loves lost amid the power of memory for magical moments to endure. Our Canada is Alberta Ballet’s successful story ballet of us all, describing Canadians through the years as poetic dreamers personified through Lightfoot’s gentle minstrelsy.
The set makes use of an old conceit describing Canada as a contented house mosaic, albeit here skillfully and dimensionally distorted by set designer Scott Reid as a large three-sided room with three archetypal oversized doors, one on each wall. This was a production where costumes, in stunning array by Raven Hehr, lighting, featuring Pierre Lavoie’s innumerable hues and cues, and projection, by a very creatively talented Adam Larsen, were the premium disciplines equal in importance and impact to Grand-Maître’s choreography. Evoking a different city or region of Canada across the show’s twenty-two numbers, the Alberta Ballet brain trust braided together an overwhelming weave of colours and moves, designed to symbolically intercalate our complex national story.
But at the heart of it all was the reason most people came to this ballet, to hear the spellbinding music of our national troubadour. Grand-Maître’s song selections showcased Lightfoot’s beautiful high range, with a unique vowel and unmistakeably unique tone, soothing twelve-string guitar counterpoint, and supreme poetic utterance. It was an evening tantamount to a concert set to some mesmerizing ensemble ballet.
Seven Island Suite featured seven swaying ’60s hipsters of the psychedelic era under gorgeous canopied oranges splashing free-love era imagery along Lake Huron, using a freedom of movement to symbolize the “fiery autumn haze.” Knotty Pine, featuring a lyrically rhapsodic Nicolas Pelletier and Whispers of the North with Garrett Groat, dancing his inspiration in front of his Lawren Harris projection-canvas, were true highlights I shall never forget.
Freedom of movement, to live and love as one chooses, seemed to underlie much of the themes throughout. Whether it was the bittersweet Summerside of Life, the elevated tawdriness of Affair On 8th Ave., the abject sadness evoked by memories of loss in The Last Time I Saw Her or If You Could Read My Mind where the girl always walks out on the boy, the dances were all fluid, featured multiple types of lift, and stayed strictly away from too much emphasis on the sadness. Perhaps Grand-Maître was responding to the major mode of the majority of songs selected, but it seemed that the overwhelming premise was to keep the story of us uplifting, even though the songs often contained emotionally devastating consequences within their texts.
Sundown, for example, with excellent use of the Gibson sisters, Alexandra and Jennifer, who intimidate and abuse a confused Garrett Groat to perfectly-timed entry and exit effect, was set against images of the FLQ crisis. An unforgettable Boss Man took us to an underground cavern with ironically clad but entirely covered all-female dancers in miners hats. It made an extraordinary impact.
The Canadian Railway Trilogy elicited applause when the men came out complete in spike maul gear to dance the gruelling labour of building the national railway. Swinging spike hammers, it made a striking visual impression.
Many of the ensemble choreographies struck colourful poses to tell their unique stories, particularly The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, cast in beautifully frozen, undulated images of menacing Lake Superior waters, the men dancing tensile-snapping winds and wires, slashing freezing rain in life jackets and menacing waves in choppy water.
But perhaps, from the Albertan perspective, the most fun of all happened when the Calgary & District Square and Round Dancers came out for The Auctioneer. Dressed in traditional bright dresses, the clapping and stomping lifted the crowd substantially after Sundown, a great moment of programming.
All in all, 90 dancers in total were involved in this immense, cross-sectional vignette series that told the tale of Canada as a national love story, casting its long national shadow deep in our memories told as only Gordon Lightfoot and Alberta Ballet could tell it.