banner.gif (3613 Byte)

Corner.gif 1x1.gif Corner.gif
1x1.gif You are at: Home - Discussion Forum 1x1.gif
Corner.gif 1x1.gif Corner.gif
      
round_corner_upleft.gif (837 Byte) 1x1.gif (807 Byte) round_corner_upright.gif (837 Byte)
Old 04-03-2017, 10:35 PM   #1
imported_Next_Saturday
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 440
Default Alberta Ballet

https://albertaballet50.com/2016-17-season/our-canada


Explore the Canadian soul through the music of Gordon Lightfoot.
In the award-winning tradition of our pop ballets, Our Canada follows in the beloved musical steps of Balletlujah and Love Lies Bleeding. We’re melding two celebrations, Alberta Ballet’s 50th Anniversary and Canada’s 150th birthday into one magnificent ballet that explores our province and our country through folk and country music legend, Gordon Lightfoot.

Featuring 5 world-class designers, 30 superb dancers and impressive multi-media installations portraying significant moments in Canada’s history, internationally-acclaimed choreographer Jean Grand- Maître has spearheaded a collaboration that celebrates the Canadian soul.

The full-length ballet constructs a series of visual poems out of intimate duets and full ensemble pieces, creating beautiful and romantic moments through the marriage of contemporary ballet and Lightfoot hits like "Sundown", “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”, "If You Could Read My Mind", and the "Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald.” It’s a multidisciplinary sensation hailing our home, our geography, our great diversity and our empowered collective spirit.

Choreography Jean Grand-Maître
Music Gordon Lightfoot
__________________
"I'll see you all next Saturday..."
imported_Next_Saturday is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-02-2017, 09:39 PM   #2
ellen
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 55
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

Any chance this will be released on DVD? It sounds wonderful, but there's no chance I could attend in person.
ellen is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-04-2017, 10:07 AM   #3
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

http://calgaryherald.com/entertainme...rdon-lightfoot
A number of milestones come together for Our Canada, Alberta Ballet’s newest production. The company is marking its 50th anniversary as the nation celebrates the 150th anniversary of Confederation. Cue up a quintessentially Canadian score for the sesquicentennial dance, the music of legendary folk singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, and be prepared for ballet à la true, north, Canadiana.

At the creative helm of Our Canada is Jean Grand-Maitre, in his 15th season as Alberta Ballet’s artistic director. Arguably one of Canada’s most remarkable choreographers, he has led the provincial company to national acclaim and onto international stages.

The company has just come back from Ottawa, performing at the National Arts Centre with the National Ballet of Canada and Ballet British Columbia, in three commissioned works for Canada 150 celebrations. Grand-Maitre says seeing his dancers share the stage with Canada’s very finest ballet artists had him doing a double take.

“They looked so good. They made us so proud. Dancers like Hayna Gutierrez, Mariko Kondo, Kelley McKinlay, Garrett Groat―I realized Alberta Ballet has really grown. I think the founders would have been incredibly proud to see that.”

While he’s previously collaborated to create pop ballets with the likes of Canadian music greats Joni Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan and k.d. lang, Grand-Maitre says for a balletic homage to the nation, Gordon Lightfoot was the obvious choice.
“Of all the Canadian singer-songwriters of his generation, most left the country, but he stayed. Almost all of his songs are somehow pulled from this country, one way or another. He sings about Canada from coast to coast to coast and that launched the script.”

Like many Canadians, Grand-Maitre’s identity is complex and multi-faceted. Born in Hull, Quebec, he grew up near Ottawa, on the Quebec side of the river and considers himself more a Franco-Ontarian than a Quebecer. Surrounded by Quebecois artists and separatists in his youth, those ideas did not resonate with him. “My parents took us to the Maritimes when we were young. We went to Vancouver Island and Lake Louise. The whole country was my country.”

He says the greatest preparatory study for creating Our Canada was his time working as Director of Choreography for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.

“There were symposiums held with Canadians across the country, all walks of life, to hear what they think of Canada and what they thought was important to showcase. W.O Mitchell to Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, the Group of Seven, the whales, all those symbols that came to be a part of the opening ceremonies came from those conversations. But that was just a distillation of a catalogue thicker than a phone book of what Canadians believe as Canadians.”

Grand-Maitre says that extensive research continued to percolate in his mind long after the closing ceremonies. “What the opening night of the Olympics taught me most was to be grateful. To be born in this country is an extraordinary luck in life.”

With gratitude as his foundation, Grand-Maitre set out to create Our Canada, but at the same time, he wanted to point to the darkness in our history as well. “There was a lot of cruelty, what could be considered as genocide with the residential schools. A lot of cruelty with Japanese internments and the building of the railway. One man died per mile of railroad.”

He says the ballet has scenes drawn from his own personal memories of family camping trips on the East Coast, historical recollections of men going off to war, video projections intended to pay tribute to Canada’s Indigenous women and sceneries inspired by the great artist William Harris. For a giant dance hall moment on the Prairies, 40 local square dancers allemande left and right and do-si-do. A cast of 60 children will join the company on the Jubilee Auditorium stage for the finale.

Grand-Maitre locked himself into a little hut at the Banff Centre to set the broad movement strokes of Our Canada, but he says he needed to look no further than Gordon Lightfoot’s music, his life and what he was saying, to find the whole esthetic of the ballet.
“I went to see Gordon Lightfoot perform in Toronto just before Christmas. That was the first time I met him. He was very gracious when we met and very excited about the ballet. But the man I saw on stage didn’t really have the voice he used to have. Of course he’s in his late 70s now. But watching an artist at the other end of their career, that’s when they are the very essence of themselves. That was extraordinary. The band played more quietly than they used to but he sang so many great songs … when you study the anthology, you realize just how many great songs he wrote. You might not fully realize as you may have bought an album or two and heard the songs on the radio. But his catalogue is a masterpiece he wrote over a number of years.”

“The ballet is not a biography about Canada but a series of poems about Canada, that’s how his music evolved … From The Canadian Railway Trilogy to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, there are a lot of direct, historical songs that he wrote and they are some of his greatest masterpieces. The songs took me as poems and I decided there wouldn’t be any narrative but I did want to create the picture that Gordon Lightfoot saw.”

It took an expert team of five designers to bring those visions to the stage with video design by Adam Larsen, set design by Scott Reid, sound design by Dewi Wood, wardrobe and costume design by Raven Hehr and lighting design Pierre Lavoie.

“You can’t represent the whole country in one ballet. You couldn’t do it in 10 ballets. I hope I was respectful of Gordon Lightfoot’s impressions of the country because it’s not about my view of Canada but his view. And honestly, there was enough there for me to do 10 ballets.”

Alberta Ballet presents Our Canada May 4 to 6 at the Jubilee Auditorium. Info: albertaballet50.com
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-04-2017, 10:23 AM   #4
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

wonderful photos - http://calgaryherald.com/gallery/oh-...world-premiere
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-05-2017, 11:09 PM   #5
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

http://businessmediaguide.com/review...-our-heritage/
Alberta Ballet’s Our Canada made its long-awaited Canadian sesquicentennial debut Thursday night at the Jubilee auditorium before a packed and rapturous audience. Artistic director and choreographer Jean Grand-Maître’s latest profile ballet, set to the incomparable music of Gordon Lightfoot, is an ambitious one, designed to scale different artistic heights, certainly a suitable capstone to the company’s equally diverse programming of its 50th anniversary season.

The show was a tribute to both the music of Gordon Lightfoot and its inextricable relationship to our national musical heritage, a repertoire symbolic of a national identity as vast and diverse as Canada’s geography and peoples.

Taking a vignettes approach to Canadiana and with uncanny sense of narrative flow-through, Our Canada embeds the textual details of Lightfoot’s lyrical syllable stresses into multiple dance miniatures about young love, nature, nostalgia, conflict and stratified national themes of labour and rebellion, war and peace, with a recurring minstrel figure of a Gordon Lightfoot-persona, Calgary playwright/actor Eugene Stickland, wandering from time to time as a poet through the landscape.

For a work that isn’t strictly speaking a story ballet, it nevertheless does tell its own clear narrative conspicuously well, one designed from bittersweet wistfulness of many loves lost amid the power of memory for magical moments to endure. Our Canada is Alberta Ballet’s successful story ballet of us all, describing Canadians through the years as poetic dreamers personified through Lightfoot’s gentle minstrelsy.

The set makes use of an old conceit describing Canada as a contented house mosaic, albeit here skillfully and dimensionally distorted by set designer Scott Reid as a large three-sided room with three archetypal oversized doors, one on each wall. This was a production where costumes, in stunning array by Raven Hehr, lighting, featuring Pierre Lavoie’s innumerable hues and cues, and projection, by a very creatively talented Adam Larsen, were the premium disciplines equal in importance and impact to Grand-Maître’s choreography. Evoking a different city or region of Canada across the show’s twenty-two numbers, the Alberta Ballet brain trust braided together an overwhelming weave of colours and moves, designed to symbolically intercalate our complex national story.

But at the heart of it all was the reason most people came to this ballet, to hear the spellbinding music of our national troubadour. Grand-Maître’s song selections showcased Lightfoot’s beautiful high range, with a unique vowel and unmistakeably unique tone, soothing twelve-string guitar counterpoint, and supreme poetic utterance. It was an evening tantamount to a concert set to some mesmerizing ensemble ballet.

Seven Island Suite featured seven swaying ’60s hipsters of the psychedelic era under gorgeous canopied oranges splashing free-love era imagery along Lake Huron, using a freedom of movement to symbolize the “fiery autumn haze.” Knotty Pine, featuring a lyrically rhapsodic Nicolas Pelletier and Whispers of the North with Garrett Groat, dancing his inspiration in front of his Lawren Harris projection-canvas, were true highlights I shall never forget.

Freedom of movement, to live and love as one chooses, seemed to underlie much of the themes throughout. Whether it was the bittersweet Summerside of Life, the elevated tawdriness of Affair On 8th Ave., the abject sadness evoked by memories of loss in The Last Time I Saw Her or If You Could Read My Mind where the girl always walks out on the boy, the dances were all fluid, featured multiple types of lift, and stayed strictly away from too much emphasis on the sadness. Perhaps Grand-Maître was responding to the major mode of the majority of songs selected, but it seemed that the overwhelming premise was to keep the story of us uplifting, even though the songs often contained emotionally devastating consequences within their texts.

Sundown, for example, with excellent use of the Gibson sisters, Alexandra and Jennifer, who intimidate and abuse a confused Garrett Groat to perfectly-timed entry and exit effect, was set against images of the FLQ crisis. An unforgettable Boss Man took us to an underground cavern with ironically clad but entirely covered all-female dancers in miners hats. It made an extraordinary impact.

The Canadian Railway Trilogy elicited applause when the men came out complete in spike maul gear to dance the gruelling labour of building the national railway. Swinging spike hammers, it made a striking visual impression.

Many of the ensemble choreographies struck colourful poses to tell their unique stories, particularly The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, cast in beautifully frozen, undulated images of menacing Lake Superior waters, the men dancing tensile-snapping winds and wires, slashing freezing rain in life jackets and menacing waves in choppy water.



But perhaps, from the Albertan perspective, the most fun of all happened when the Calgary & District Square and Round Dancers came out for The Auctioneer. Dressed in traditional bright dresses, the clapping and stomping lifted the crowd substantially after Sundown, a great moment of programming.

All in all, 90 dancers in total were involved in this immense, cross-sectional vignette series that told the tale of Canada as a national love story, casting its long national shadow deep in our memories told as only Gordon Lightfoot and Alberta Ballet could tell it.
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-05-2017, 11:55 PM   #6
T.G.
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 671
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

EPISODE 3
T.G. is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-06-2017, 10:08 AM   #7
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

EPISODE 2
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-06-2017, 10:09 AM   #8
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-06-2017, 10:53 AM   #9
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

EPISODE 1
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-07-2017, 10:40 AM   #10
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

NEIL HUTCHINSON review -

Our Canada” - Alberta Ballet - Calgary. May 5 2017.

Hi Gord fans - Here are my impressions and a set list from last night’s show. This is my personal take from a huge Gord fan who also likes ballet . I was fortunate to see this show - I live in Ontario but my sister is in Calgary so she got the tickets I arranged three days of business meetings in Alberta and my wife flew out to join us at the show.

This is the most recent in a series of shows done by Alberta ballet that celebrate modern, mostly Canadian, popular music. They started with Joni Mitchell, and have done Elton John, kd Lang, Sarah McLachlan and are tackling The Tragically Hip for 2018. Personally, I hope they are still touring “Our Canada” next year.

Act 1

The Old Man - a Calgary actor, Eugene Stickland, with a moustache and shoulder length, wispy hair, looks much like Gord does now, with a black Martin guitar case across his back wanders onto the stage - a large, high ceilinged room with 3 large doors - I saw it as a large room in Gord’s Rosedale house. The Old Man walks into and out of each song and interacts with the dancers. The silent narrator.

If I Could - what a pleasant surprise - I have always loved that song. I was not sure what I was going to see so I sat back and enjoyed.

Seven Island Suite - okay, I will stop saying it but this is one of my favourite songs - orchestral in sweep, like the Railroad Trilogy. The three walls come alive with projected images of Georgian Bay and colourful autumn forests and the troupe of dancers have lots of hedonistic fun - Gord in the 70s?

Beautiful - A playful couple dance a wonderful pas de deux in front of projected images of old Quebec City - very romantically done and the history of Quebec City makes it a very romantic place. I saw the Alberta Ballet’s Elton John show several years back where the sexuality was all raw humping between dancers and got tiresome - Gord has always been subtle in his writing of romantic love and this captured it “Beautiful” ly.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - I was nervous about how this would come off - no need - very well done. It starts with a black and white video of the launching. The ballet is danced against images of increasingly stormy waves on all three walls and the ceiling - at times the dancers are on the waves, at the end they are beneath them. The old cook dances through the crewmen handing out life jackets which are later shown floating on the waves. Towards the end a projected image of “The Old Man” (Gord) is seen surveying the scene from the top of the stage as video footage shows someone ringing a bell while another reads out names…

Affair on 8th Avenue - Great choice of a song and well suited for another pas de deux in front of an old bed in a tawdry apartment in some old high rise. Langourous and sexual. Worked very well.

Sundown - This was a surprise take on the story line. It starts with video footage of Pierre Trudeau (Our PM in 1970 and father of our current PM for our American followers)- invoking the War Measures Act - suspending freedoms nation wide to address a kidnapping and murder by separatists in Quebec. Two identically dressed dancers (in short satin dresses of course - they look alike and it took me a while to realize there were 2 - the program says they are sisters) ) take turns dashing in and out of the three doors and tormenting the male dancer - obviously they are jealous and angry at him - he is the two timing cad where, in the song, the woman is portrayed as the loose one. In the end they are both gone and he is left alone.

The Auctioneer - This is western Canada. The walls project a cow walking across a field as 40 some odd square dancers in western garb come on and do a square dance set, called by the caller over The Auctioneer. Of course we all remember that Gord got his start as a square dancer on CBC’s “Country Hoedown” in the early 60s don’t we? One male soloist takes front and centre stage on each chorus and does his solos - the first one an extended series of leg whipping pirouettes. It was a nice comic change - for the same reason I suppose that Gord uses the song in his set list. One dancer has his hair slicked back and looks very much like Gord on the cover of his first album.

Steel Rail Blues - one soloist dancing on a backdrop of a road in the country. Good but not much else to say about this - it would have made a great segue into “Carefree Highway”.
Pussy Willows Cattails - when I heard about this production, this was the first song that I thought would work well as a ballet - I think of it as Gord’s version of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” which is a classical ballet standard. Alternating pairs of two dancers (male and female) for each verse against photo backdrops of the different seasons.

Summer Side of Life - This worked well on its own but the meaning became more clear as it segued into “Waiting For You”. It was set in the Maritimes with 12 dancers coming on stage in “Riverdance” type Irish moves. Gord says he wrote “Summer Side of Life” about young men going off to Vietnam and, in concert, introduces “Waiting For You” as a song about “making babies in the north” so I was a bit confused to see it played against a backdrop if WW1 footage and men going off to war. Midway through the song (in which a clothesline of large white sheets on which the war images are projected appears), the men move offstage and the women are left to wait as the men, all but one, come back home in bandages to the domestic scene of the laundry and the women waiting. “Waiting For You” indeed.

The Last Time I Saw Her - another symphony waiting for the ballet. A pas de deux of two lovers remembering the times they enjoyed. She leaves the stage and, as he tries to pursue her is met at the door by The Old Man who clearly blocks his way - “You’ve lost her bud”.

Intermission - I notice the crowd has lots of young people - especially young women - dancers or Gord fans? I ask the young woman beside me (not the other youngish woman, my wife Barb, on the other side) and she says “Granddad”. She was a dancer but her granddad is a Gord fan who saw him solo in coffeehouses as an undergrad. Everyone is talking about how much they enjoy it and offering different interpretations and insights. One thing I liked was the music was loud enough to be powerful but not overwhelming. Gord’s concerts ( I’ve seen over 20 over the years) are always note for note perfect but I have sometimes thought a bit more volume and power would have been appreciated. But hey - I also went to concerts by Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits and U2 over the years, as well as many performances of Swan Lake -which also has incredibly powerful music.

ACT 2 - next post
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-07-2017, 10:40 AM   #11
charlene
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2000
Posts: 15,877
Default Re: Alberta Ballet

Act 2

Something Very Special - a party scene with dancers in couples. All but The Old Man, Gord, at the back of the stage. He is dancing with two young women…
Canadian Railroad Trilogy - 8 men, the navvies, dance all but the last section, swinging large hammers in unison as the screen shows scenes of moving tracks and footage of railway construction. The timing of the dancers was impressive. In the last section (The Song of the Future…”) we revert to a modern train station as a family waits for and boards a VIA train, followed by The Old Man. One has to be careful interpreting a classic but the whole thing worked well and had the most extended applause of the evening.
Sequed directly into

Boss Man - 12 women dancing in a foggy underground of a mine with miners lamps on, the discordant strains working well with the choreography and the rhythm - for the first time I noticed that the discordant orchestral strains that precede the final verse sound a lot like the ascending orchestral chords at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”. Not sure which album came first: “Sgt. Pepper” or “Did She Mention My Name”?

Whispers of the North - pleasant surprise and worked well. One dancer, a painter in front of an easel with a canoe projected overhead and various Arctic scenes moving around him as he paints Lawren Harris stylings on a large canvas. Barb says that, in spite of a 28 year diet of Gord, she does not recall this song. Hmm. I only have “Salute” on vinyl - and though I still have a good turntable, I usually revert to CDs. Must finish my collection on CD.

Peaceful Waters - danced in front of a series of Group of Seven images.

The Way I Feel - Done to the original version (my preference). Seven dancers in white clothes that look like First Nations stylings. The piece begins with lush forests and ends with dead and burnt forests and the dancers exits blocked by closed doors - a take on our treatment of First Nations?

Knotty Pine - never one of my favourite Gord songs but danced well by a soloist in forest green First Nations garb.

If You Could Read My Mind - this was a confusing arrangement - well danced by a couple but too upbeat with smiling and playful dancers when, to me, the power of the song is in its gothic mansions and ghosts. I always liked the drug store paperback novel reference.
Too Late For Praying - this was the closing piece and powerful - my sister said she was moved to tears - it says so much about the worldly troubles we witness these days - mostly from the safer confines of Canada. Twelve children from the Alberta Ballet School (the children of today) made a powerful counterpoint dancing around the rest of the ensemble.

So, overall, a thoroughly memorable and powerful evening, with over 90 dancers. Great costumes. I had to remind myself that it was also intended as a celebration of Canada - which explains so much of the projected imagery, though I saw it as a celebration of the great music of Gord that I have loved since the opening bars of “Rich Man’s Spiritual” on Side 1 of his first album which my older brother brought home in 1966.

So I would go to see it again in an instant - but can I? It plays once more in Calgary tonight and next weekend in Edmonton. There are apparently agents from other cities coming to the Edmonton shows and any touring will depend on their reactions - I can’t see how they would not take this across the country. Last night’s show was a sell out and standing ovation - it is our 150th birthday and we need to celebrate this great music with this fine production. So power to the Alberta ballet, take it on tour and, while you are at it - put it on DVD.
charlene is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 12:41 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.
downleft 1x1.gif (807 Byte) downright