A surreal multimedia dance premiere leads off the National Ballet of Canada’s fall mixed program

The National Ballet of Canada has scored a coup. As it opens its fall mixed program this weekend, it becomes the first North American company to perform the work of two of Europe’s most prolific and inventive dancemakers, Sol León and Paul Lightfoot. The National Ballet will dance “Silent Screen” — its Canadian premiere — a 2005 work often hailed as among León and Lightfoot’s finest.
After almost 20 years, the originality of “Silent Screen” remains startling. Its brilliant illusory use of video projection and the emotive blending of movement and music — Philip Glass’s “Glassworks” and “The Hours” — make for a work that circles through past and present, the real and surreal, with an emotional starkness that can be as spellbinding as it is unsettling and mysterious.
“Silent Screen” features a live cast of four women and seven men — an additional man and a young girl appear only on screen — but at its core is a central couple, costumed in black. The trajectory of their intense and turbulent relationship is traced in an extended opening pas de deux that occupies more than a quarter of the ballet’s 45 minutes.
The arrival of another man begins to complicate the emotional landscape, but linear narrative is not the point of “Silent Screen.” If it were, a pas de deux for another couple, costumed in white, and the unexpected arrival of a woman in a vast skirt that spreads to fill the whole stage like a billowing sea, would seem aberrant.
“Silent Screen” is akin to a dream that plays with poignant themes of loss, transience and metamorphosis. The choreographers’ daughter, Saura Lightfoot-Leon, at age 26 now a successful actress, remains immortalized in “Silent Screen” as the little girl in red who appears walking down a path in a wintry forest. A close-up of her eye transforms into the swirling vortex that sucks the ballet into its surreal realm.
Spanish-born León and English north countryman Lightfoot met in the mid-1980s as young members of Nederlands Dans Theater, universally recognized as a powerhouse of dance creativity. Lightfoot, trained at Britain’s illustrious Royal Ballet School, made his first ballet for NDT in 1989 — he claims it was awful — with León, whose dance background was Spanish folkloric, offering supportive advice. Before long the couple, while continuing to dance, also formed a blossoming choreographic partnership.
As their repertoire expanded — more than 50 works for NDT over a span of 30 years — they were formally appointed resident choreographers in 2002. Lightfoot additionally became NDT’s artistic director in 2011, a position he retained until Canadian Emily Molnar took the reins in 2020. Lightfoot and León, no longer a domestic couple but still very much in an amicable artistic partnership, continue to work as freelance choreographers.
Two choreographers working in tandem is relatively rare. In the case of León and Lightfoot, their collaboration began with the shared experience of performing with NDT, before evolving into a movement language of their own from that base. As it developed, it became more a convergence of different philosophical perspectives.
“This was particularly true when I became a mother in 1998,” León told the Star. “I began to see things in a very different way.”
Although the National Ballet is the first North American company to acquire a work by Lightfoot and León, their choreography has been widely seen on this side of the Atlantic during NDT’s frequent tours, most recently in Toronto in 2016.
National Ballet artistic director Hope Muir has been an admirer of the duo’s work for many years and was eager for the company to perform it.
“Paul and Sol are very invested with working with the dancers,” said Muir. “As a dancer, I was very spoiled because I was in a company that was constantly creating work so I was very involved with process, and that’s what I want this company to experience.”
Lightfoot and León spent a week last summer getting a feel for the company and choosing a cast. They caught up with it again in Paris during the National Ballet’s October tour and have spent the past three weeks in Toronto rehearsing intensively.
They have been aided by assistants, including Spanish dancer Jorge Nozal, who danced the male lead in “Silent Screen” for many years, a boon to National Ballet principal Christopher Gerty, who is being coached in the same role by Nozal.
“The creation of this ballet almost 20 years ago was very emotional, very intense but also very satisfying,” said Nozal.
“Silent Screen” is the kind of ballet that reverberates in the mind — a hard act to follow. Thus, the other two pieces on the program come before, starting with principal dancer Guillaume Côté performing his self-choreographed solo, “Body of Work,” followed by a belated Canadian premiere.
The work of revered British choreographer Frederick Ashton became almost a National Ballet staple from the late 1970s into the 1990s but much less so in recent decades. Now, as part of a five-year “Ashton Worldwide” festival involving more than 20 international companies on five continents, the National Ballet is adding to its Ashton catalogue with “Rhapsody.”
At the age of 75, at the suggestion of Princess Margaret, Ashton agreed to choreograph a new ballet to celebrate the 80th birthday of his friend, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Britain’s Royal Ballet, Ashton’s home base, had been angling to secure a 1980 guest engagement by ballet superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov. He agreed on the condition that Ashton would make a new work for him. “Rhapsody” was the result, a gift for a beloved queen and for an incomparable dancer.
There’s no story. It’s 25 minutes of pure ballet classicism, a visual response to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s popular 1934 “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Although it features a principal couple, supported by a corps of six men and six women, Ashton focused the spotlight on Baryshnikov, giving the Russian dancer, who defected to Toronto from the Soviet Union 50 years ago, such devilishly difficult steps that they remain a technical challenge for his successors.
As he moves into his final season as the National Ballet’s ranking principal male dancer, Guillaume Côté is not making life easy for himself. As the opener for this fall’s mixed program, he is revisiting “Body of Work,” a self-choreographed solo that he says was a physical challenge even when he performed it in 2014.
It was commissioned by the National Arts Centre to be danced in tribute to that year’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Anik Bissonnette, a dance luminary Côté had long admired and who played a role in the evolution of his career.
As a ballerina, Bissonnette was a huge star in her home province of Québec and well known to dance fans across the country.
“Anik had this special quality,” said Côté. “Her dancing was so delicate. It was almost as if she was whispering, but as an audience member it pulled you right in.”
After retiring from the stage, she became director of the Montreal-based École supérieure de ballet du Québec and from 2004 to 2014 was artistic director of the summertime Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur. Aware of Côté’s interest in becoming a director, Bissonnette encouraged him to apply for her job when she decided to step down. Her good word doubtless carried considerable weight since Côté has now held the post for a decade.
Côté said he’d always wanted to choreograph to Beethoven and when the National Arts Centre came knocking, he saw his chance. The seven-minute solo he made, structured in five sections, is almost like the phases of the dancer’s professional life.
“I wanted to explore different ways my body has moved during my career,” said Côté. “In some ways it’s like an ode to my body. It’s like showing my gratitude to this body that has given me so many years of fun and has allowed me to do some pretty magical things.”
Tariq Anwar’s arrangement of the stately, sombre second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony proved ideal. But, Côté admits, reviving the solo at age 43, a decade after its creation, has been a challenge.
“The solo is very physical and very hard. I’ve been training like an insane person, reshaping my body to be strong again, but it’s been 10 times the amount of work. The first few times I ran it in the studio I almost threw up. But I’m glad I’m doing it. It’s probably the last time I’ll dance at this level.”
“Body of Work,” “Rhapsody” and “Silent Screen”: Nov. 9-16, Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145 Queen St. W. Visit national.ballet.ca or call 416-345-9595 or 1-866-345-9595 for tickets.