Dance artist Crystal Pite reflects on the scale of staging Body and Soul at the Paris Opera Ballet
The Vancouver choreographer has spent the past year in planned hiatus, a world away from Europe’s grand halls
Body and Soul. Photo by Julien Benhamou
Crystal Pite. Photo by Michael Slobodian
Dancehouse streams Body and Soul from February 17 to 23. The show is preceded by a 15-minute talk by the Crystal Pite and the creative team
IT WAS ONLY a year ago, but it now feels like a world away from our pandemic lock-in. Vancouver choreographic star Crystal Pite was following up on a smash opening at the Paris Opera Ballet with a bold new work at the National Ballet of Canada. The Toronto company debuted the radiant and otherworldly Angels’ Atlas on February 29. Shortly after, the planet shut down.
Pite has gone from creating theatrical dance works for the globe’s most spectacular stages to dabbling in drawing and such homemade crafts as constructing a Clonetrooper helmet for her son. And this is entirely by plan—one set out long before a coronavirus engulfed the planet, to take a year’s sabbatical after Angels’ Atlas and a whirlwind of work.
“I feel so lucky I wasn't in the middle of trying to create something and have that cut off,” Pite tells Stir from her East Van digs. “I haven't been creating anything and that’s by design, so the only things I’ve made since February or March are things I've made with my hands. I love staying home and being crafty and playful. It helps me to connect with my son. Many people during this time have had to work harder than ever, so I feel really fortunate.”
It must be a bit strange to find herself in an unforeseen world where her dazzling Body and Soul, filmed when it was staged at the legendary Palais Garnier in a monthlong run in October 2019, will now play to Vancouver living rooms. The streamed broadcast kicks off Digidance, DanceHouse’s new initiative with companies across the country to keep the art form going virtually while Canadian theatres are closed.
Body and Soul’s swarming, rippling patterns of 36 dancers across the stage are the kind of thing you can only dream of in these socially distanced times. From the beginning’s poetic vision of human yearning, it builds to an otherworldly third-act spectacle; think insectlike creatures, swathed in black latex and set against crumpled-metallic-gold panels.
“It does feel surreal,” Pite says of seeing all that move online. “We premiered the piece at the end of October 2019, and what a different world...All the challenges and possibilities of that project were so immense. I look at the video now and it does really capture that moment.
“I don’t have a lot of records of my work of that quality,” she adds of the film audiences can see starting February 17.
Looking back on the creation period that led up to Body and Soul’s premiere, Pite recalls feeling the pressure of conjuring a three-act, full-evening work in eight weeks.
She had staged her first short piece at the Paris Opera Ballet in 2016, commissioned by then-artistic director Benjamin Millepied. Called The Seasons’ Canon, it was received by wild applause. (It’s also become part of dance lore; a few of those lucky enough to witness it have described it to me as something akin to a spiritual experience.)
During that time she learned how to navigate the three-century-old institution. She also got used to working on one of the most storied stages in the world: Napoleon III had the Garnier built in all its gold-leaf Baroque glory.
“With the history and this remarkable institution, you want to live up to it and give it what it deserves,” Pite says, then adds with characteristic honesty: “You have to just keep skipping along and keep building, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have these crushing moments of doubt.”
The scope and research for Body and Soul were daunting, especially since she wanted to work on the grand scale that the Garnier stage would allow. “I find a lot of inspiration and power in a large cast,” she comments. “It’s got instant resonance and meaning putting that many people together.”
To prepare for Body and Soul, the choreographer did the same thing she’d done for Seasons’ Canon, as well as for the larger Flight Pattern at the Royal and even the National’s Angels’Atlas: she spent several weeks ahead of time trying things out on a group of 40 dance students at Vancouver’s Arts Umbrella.
Body and Soul. Photo by Julien Benhamou
“In a creation of a scale like Body and Soul, I often don’t have the time or the courage to fuss and experiment very much while I’m there. Those big complex scenes are time-consuming and labour-intensive to make, and I couldn’t do it without the students,” she says. “The Arts Umbrella students have been essential to my growth and their influence is present in so much of what I’ve created. I really love working with them—they are extraordinary dancers and collaborators.”
It helped that this was her second work at the Paris Opera. On her second time around, she felt a familiarity with the dancers that fed the work. “I knew them so much better. I knew who I could rely on for certain things,” she says. “They were a lot more accomplished and complex in the way they were able to move, bringing even more skill and mastery to it.
“But with that comes an enormous pressure as well, and you want to deliver for these extraordinary dancers,” she reflects. “You don’t want to squander opportunity. So it was exciting.”
Pite was grateful to have her Kidd Pivot collaborative team there to lean on: assistants to the choreographer Eric Beauchesne and Jermaine Spivey, as well as her set designer and life partner Jay Gower Tayor. Composer Owen Belton, costume designer Nancy Bryant, and lighting designer Tom Visser also returned to work with Pite.
“We’d all just flop down on the chairs and laugh or cry about the day,” says Pite.
For the inspiration for Body and Soul, Pite says she returned to themes of connectedness and conflict—the big, deep themes that have echoed through her entire body of work. In particular, she reveals, she went back to ideas from the stunning Emergence that she created for the National in 2009. Vancouverites got to see it here in 2011 on the National’s anniversary tour. In it, a flurry of dancers, skittering around on their toes like oversized mantises, emerges from and disappear into Gower Taylor’s gigantic hivelike set.
“I knew that it would start more human and would end up in a place that was much more of a creature world,” she says of Body and Soul.
The idea, she says, was to create a metaphorical swarm and to capture its collective intelligence through choreography. “As humans we crave unity...but we want to individuate,” she hints of the work’s themes. “Synchrony appeals to something deep inside of us. And I wondered about our separation from nature.”
She was also inspired by “a little scrap of text” that she and creative collaborator Jonathon Young used in the early stages of Revisor, the Electric Company Theatre-Kidd Pivot hit that played intricately with words and their rhythms. The precise description of two figures in conflict (“Figure one lies on the ground. Figure two paces back and forth...”) repeats and fragments in voice-over by Marina Hands, occurring throughout Body and Soul in different ways and taking on different meanings.
That text becomes a throughline in what Pite calls the “triptych” structure—all pushing toward a universal connectedness we have as humans.
These ideas seem to resonate with Pite today, as she nears the end of a yearlong break. She feels ready to reconnect with the world—to emerge from whatever transportive state this has been and return to her international hive of activity.
This isn’t the first time Pite has taken a hiatus to recharge herself amid gigs across the world. She took a similar hibernation in 2013, her way of refocusing and recharging amid a busy schedule. After training here and at the Frankfurt Ballet, she’s spent most of the past two decades in high demand around the world—working everywhere from Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal to the U.K.’s Royal Ballet to Nederlands Dans Theater over the years. She juggles those gigs with creating ambitious new work with her own company, Kidd Pivot—including her award-winning, world-touring Electric Company Theatre collabs Betroffenheit and Revisor.
It’s a beyond-busy schedule, and now, her life looks a lot different. When she’s not hand-crafting intergalactic headgear with her son, Pite is on her computer, making plans for a future when dancers can hit stages again.
“When you have any time off, you feel tremendous pressure to spend it well,” she says. “I definitely feel the urge to make something to work that part of my brain and body again. I feel hungry to connect with people again.”
Find more information about the online Body and Soul event here.
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