Crystal Pite is an extraordinary choreographer. Her uniqueness is not her talent for making dances for large groups of people that unfold with a silken energy, filling huge stages with ripples of movement. It’s not even her skill at carving dances that seem at once weightless and freighted with depth.
It is her belief, profound and unshakable, that dance can communicate emotion in a way that no other art can, as if the vibrations of the steps on stage trigger an empathy in the hearts of the watchers.
Light of Passage is a case in point. In 2017, the Canadian created Flight Pattern for the Royal Ballet to the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; now she has returned to add Covenant and Passage to the last two movements, responding perfectly to the music (conducted by Zoi Tsokanou and sung, beautifully, by Francesca Chiejina). The three sections are separate but linked by the idea of passage.
Flight Pattern itself is about refugees, people travelling without ever quite knowing their destination. That sense of an always changing but always oppressive limbo is conjured both by Jay Gower Taylor’s set, with its dark panels altering the shape of the space, but also by Pite’s choreography which creates an image of the huddled masses in straining flux, raising their heads, rolling their necks, walking onwards.
The sheer sadness of it is emphasised by gestures of compassion – arms that circle and gently embrace, hands that flicker across the face – and by moments when individuals emerge from the group, most noticeably Marcelino Sambé and Kristen McNally as a couple mourning, their agony imprinted in stretched movements of grief.
The theme of children is picked up in Covenant, which opens with a child running on the spot, impossibly frail but fiercely hopeful. Behind him, Tom Visser’s great smudges of light rise like clouds on a night sky. Around him and five other children (Junior Associates of the Royal Ballet School), 18 adult dancers, in black like puppeteers, provide the frame of a world.
The 10-minute section is inspired by the promises of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and it conjures those vows of protection by allowing the anonymous adults to be used as stepping stones and supports for the children’s movements. At one moment, each child is lifted across the stage in an arabesque, flying into life; at another one pulls the adults behind them, like a heavy chain.
The poignancy of this is heightened in the final section, Passage, dealing with the ultimate journey from life to death, and opening with two older dancers – Isidora Barbara Joseph and Christopher Havell (from the Company of Elders) in tender embraces. The set is illuminated by pillars of life and great swirls of red and black, like the aftermath of fireworks.
When the Royal Ballet’s dancers appear, they move in ways that suggest angels, but also flawed humans; the group is in a constant flow, but couples break out in sharply delineated duets, bodies flexed and curled around each other. They seem so vital yet so full of inchoate yearning. Love, loss, and life all expressed in magnificent dance.
