About the Program (NOTES

BY ALEX VARTY)

Ballet Edmonton: Music in Motion

The miracle of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, composed just over three centuries ago, is that no matter how often it is heard, it never fails to delight. A regular feature on symphonic seasons worldwide, it also contains melodies that have launched a thousand television commercials and has been used to soundtrack dozens of feature films. Its ubiquity speaks to its enduring beauty.

But you’ve never heard or seen a Four Seasons like the one that Ballet Edmonton and the Victoria Symphony and Dance Victoria will present this spring.

Well, maybe you’ve heard it. Max Richter’s “recomposition” of the score, performed by the Konzerthausorchester Berlin and issued by the venerable Deutsche Grammophon record label, was among the best-selling classical records of 2012, thanks to its combination of cutting-edge electronic technology and Vivaldi’s enduring tunes.

“We hear it everywhere—when you’re on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising; it’s everywhere,” Richter has said of his remix. “For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.”

Ballet Edmonton artistic director Wen Wei Wang’s choreographic interpretation of Richter’s sleekly digitized postmodernism will be new to Victoria audiences, however, and the tantalizing glimpses that have appeared on-line suggest a work that is both as elegant as the original and as fresh as the remake.

Wang does not intend to tamper with Vivaldi’s structure, and why should he? There is no more compelling narrative in music than the inexorable procession of spring into summer, summer into fall, fall into winter, and winter into spring. But the choreographer promises to take some innovative steps in turning planetary movement into physical form.

“We don’t have a storyline in the dance, but it has the narrative of the seasons’ feelings,” he explains. “From spring to the summer… the music already has its own transitions. I don’t think I have to show the audience ‘This is summer,’ because everybody will know that. So, it’s kind of easier for me to use that music because everybody knows it, even the new remix. It’s really easy to feel and to follow.”

“Again, it’s about emotions, about feelings, about colour,” he adds. “I use green colour, I use yellow colour, I use red colour, I use white colour to make the different seasons. But each section is quite different. The transition to the winter is when one soloist is crawling on the ground, almost like an animal going back to a cave to nest. You have that kind of image—and when the image is right, people start to feel it.”

Look for the dancers to transform themselves into a flock of birds, a fruit-laden apple tree, and a gusting blizzard in a work that, much like Vivaldi’s original, attempts to bring the natural world into the concert hall.

Listeners will have to content themselves with dancing in their heads to Associate Conductor Giuseppe Pietraroia’s interpretation of Maurice Ravel’s orchestral suite Ma mère l’Oye, which should provide a stately interlude before nature returns, with considerably more ferocity, in Métis-Canadian composer Ian Cusson’s Le loup de Lafontaine: Suite for Orchestra in Three Scenes.

Based on a real-life tale of wolfish depredation and interspecies friendship, this collaboration between Dance Victoria and the Victoria Symphony has a more explicit narrative component than The Four Seasons, and at least one additional hurdle for Wang in his role as choreographer. How can he, as an artist born and trained in mainland China, depict Indigenous culture?

“I was a little bit nervous,” he admits, noting that the story is set in northern Ontario, in a community split between Indigenous people, a Métis population, and French-Canadians. If Vivaldi has become universal, Cusson’s world is very, very specific, and his folk-inflected music reflects that too.

“I could do something completely different and just throw the story away and make something up,” Wang says. “But if people know the music, know the background story, and know the names, then they will have trouble watching the dance. So, I made a really clear decision to go with the narrative. I’m still using contemporary movement, but you can see the characters, you can see the society. And how it starts is with everybody isolated, everybody on their own, everybody fighting. Everybody has their own voice, but nobody listens. That’s the first section.”

Wang is opting to have the dancers masked, at least at first, both for visual impact and as a bridge between his own culture and Indigenous dance forms, masks being common to both. And as he began researching the dance, he found that Le loup de Lafontaine addresses other issues that are also problematic worldwide.

“It’s a way to talk about society, even the society which we are in now,” he says. “After two years of the pandemic we’re still kind of in this locked-down lack of trust. Whether you wear a mask or don’t wear a mask, people will hate you or fight over it. But this is in all our history; it never changes. You can see what’s going on in the United States, and with the war in Ukraine; we’re all fighting over who is right. So, you kind of go ‘Oh my god, history just repeats.’ So that’s how I’m looking at this story. It’s really asking ‘Are we really better than animals? Or are we the worst animal in the world?’

“That’s my question in this piece,” Wang adds, “and I want others to ask this question, too.”