Dance review: Love in all its complexity at Ballet BC’s season-closing DUSK
Powerful dancing across the board in Medhi Walerski’s striking Last light; Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s straight-from-the-heart Obsidian; and Marco Goecke’s vibrating Woke Up Blind
Ballet BC dancers Orlando Harbutt and Vivian Ruiz in Obsidian by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. Photo by Millissa Martin
Ballet BC dancers Jacalyn Tatro and Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera in Last light by Medhi Walerski. Photo by Millissa Martin
Ballet BC’s DUSK continues at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to May 10
BALLET BC’S SEASON-CLOSING DUSK captured the dazzling complexity of human relationships—the obsession, the ache, the hunger, the uncertainty, the vulnerability, the frozen-in-time bliss. Through innovative, deeply thought-out movement, a trio of diverse choreographic talents proved once again that dance can often express such intricacies far more eloquently than words.
Opening the program was a stunning new work from artistic director Medhi Walerski—one of the highlights of the seven world premieres he’s created at Ballet BC. Called Last light, its most immediate striking feature was a giant diagonal fluorescent rod that circled over the dancers, catching them like a searchlight. Pierre Pontvianne’s brilliant lighting carved figures out in relief against a grey void.
Often there was a beautiful echoing of the light element’s movement in the choreography, which captivated with revolving torsos, whirling bodies, and outstretched limbs in stiff diagonal lines. Flickering partner work unfolded against a driving, skittering soundscape by Marcus Eriksson.
The piece grew into a sophisticated metaphor for the ephemerality of relationships, and how we cycle through them over the years—suggesting, by turns, a memory we can’t shake or a partner we can feel slipping away. In a few breathtaking moments, Walerski literally slowed down time. At one point, an upended Emanuel Dostine’s straight, hoisted legs carved a crescent through the air like slo-mo clock hands; at another, Vivian Ruiz turned glacially in Rae Srivastava’s arms. The partnering was gorgeous, fluid, and heartfelt. The piece felt intimate yet artfully removed and a bit dreamlike in its cold light—allowing it to touch on vast themes of time, space, mortality, and love.
After the first intermission, curtains opened to a grand piano and a troupe of dancers staring down Vancouver keyboardist Perri Lo for Obsidian—Batsheva Dance Company alumni Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s first piece for Ballet BC. When Lo sat down to play a suite of pieces by George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann, the dancers unleashed a straight-from-the-heart surge of movement.
The duo’s choreographic language blends everything from flex-footed folk inflections to explosive, earth-rooted Gaga. But there was humour and raw sexuality to this exploration of love, too; hands grabbed greedily for buttocks, pelvises mashed, and bodies arched sensually backward. Among the dizzying innovations were Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera climbing up to hang off Srivastava’s neck like a human yoke, and Orlando Harbutt lifting Ruiz, bending her legs up backwards behind her ears in an exquisite ball as he held her chest to his own.
The result hit somewhere between the sacred and ritualistic and the raw, painfully human. It was about everything, with all the emotions.
Artists of Ballet BC in Obsidian by Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber. Photo by Millissa Martin
Amid it, a trio of strong and arrestingly charismatic male dancers—Jiménez Cabrera, Harbutt, and Srivastava—really stood out, whether sparring or partnering tenderly with equally powerful women. Sarah Pippin, in particular, made an impact, channelling an electric energy, her long hair flying in a pure embodiment of Smith’s own magnetic style of dance.
Rounding out the program was the return of Marco Goecke’s Woke Up Blind—a piece that benefitted hugely from a second look since its debut in 2022. Through trembling, isolated gestures, it perfectly captured the emotional textures of late American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley’s scat-imbued singing and near-frantic guitar-playing—specifically, two intense and moody explorations of love, “You and I” and “The Way Young Lovers Do”.
In some of its most memorable sequences, a body stood, impossibly tense, arms shaking like rubber, hands vibrating in a blur. Elbows jutted, heads lurched, and bare diaphragms sucked in and out in a targeted spotlight. The dancers committed fully to the piece’s punishing, complex demands.
Unfolding under a simple, surreal tangle of starry twinkle lights, Woke Up Blind transported viewers into a quivering, glitching limbo that felt discombobulating, intense, and suspended from reality.
In other words, a lot like being in love. 
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