Robert Everett-Green, The Globe and Mail
May 6, 2014
‘Enter several strange shapes, bringing in a banquet; they dance.” Shakespeare’s stage directions show that he wanted dancers in The Tempest, but he probably never imagined they would take over the whole show, as they do in Crystal Pite’s The Tempest Replica.
There are plenty of full-length dances based on Shakespeare, most of them relatively straightforward adaptations of Romeo and Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Pite’s take on The Tempest, which Canadian Stage presents at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre starting Wednesday night, looks at the play from two different angles, from the outside and then from the inside. The show’s first half is a compressed narrative presentation for whitened puppet-like dancers, with some projected text. The dancers then shed their white masks and dig into the relationships between characters in a series of duets.
From the outside, the Vancouver choreographer’s career looks like a charmed rise to international stardom. Pite’s contemporary company, Kidd Pivot, was in residence for three years recently at Frankfurt’s Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, which became her base for a two-year touring blitz of Europe. She has a long-standing relationship with the prestigious Netherlands Dance Theatre, and recently became an associate artist at Sadler’s Wells in London. At age 43, she is one of the most sought-after choreographers of her generation. […continued]
0
0
0
0
Comments