ENCOUNT3RS

New ballet & music creations from exceptional Canadians

            To help celebrate Canada’s 150th Anniversary the NAC commissioned the creation of a new Canadian performance that would combine both music and dance. The result was ENCOUNT3RS, which was presented at The National Arts Centre from April 20th to April 22nd, 2017.

            Three of Canada’s top young composers, along with three of the country’s best young choreographers, put their talents together and produced three 30 min. ballets which nine members of our group saw on April 20th. We all agreed that it was a very enjoyable experience and we will try to share with you some of the highlights of what we saw.

            By way of an introduction, there are a few things I would like to say first, then I will open up the discussion to the others who attended the performance. Hopefully, in this way we will be able to convey to you some of the real flavour of this ground-breaking endeavour.

            Since music is the main focus of this group, I will not pay much attention to the dancers, rather I will introduce you to the three young composers who worked on this piece, and then give you a short sample of some of their musical compositions.

          First we have composer, Andrew Staniland, who was born in Canada in 1977, and has established himself as one of Canada’s most important and innovative musical voices. In addition to two JUNO nominations for his composition, Dark Star Requiem, in 2009, he was also a National Grand Prize winner in EVOLUTION, presented by CBC Radio 2. Then, in 2016 he won the Terra Nova Young Innovators Award, as well as the Karen Keiser Prize in Canadian music. Andrew is currently a member of the faculty at my old alma mater Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he has also founded MEARL, the Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab.

            For this NAC project, Andrew Staniland worked with our famous local choreographer, Jean Grand-Maître, (born in Aylmer) and composed the music for the ballet entitled Caelestis, which I felt to be the most visually riveting of the three ballets. The dancers were rather casually dressed with the females in swimsuit-like costumes and the males bare-chested wearing calf-length tights. During the performance, the dancers confined themselves to a specific portion of the stage where they moved over a continually changing backdrop of diverse images ranging from ancient cave drawings to Euclidian mathematical formulas to modern day computer bar codes. As Staniland points out in the program notes,

““The unifying theme was that everything was related in some way to the golden ratio, or Phi” He goes on to say, “For me, Phi was a catalyst and inspiration in terms of both extra-musical beauty and literal usage in Phi-inspired melodies and harmonies.””

           Just to give you a taste of the type of music Andrew Staniland composes, here is a short excerpt from one of his pieces entitled Liar’s Dice.

         The second composer we were introduced to was Nicole Lizée. She was born in Germany in 1973 but later moved to Canada where she graduated from McGill University with a Masters Degree in Music in 2001. Also a JUNO-nominated composer and video artist, Nicole has been called a “brilliant musical scientist” and in 2013 she was awarded the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts Jules Leger Prize for New Chamber Music. In 2015 she was selected by acclaimed composer Howard Shore to be his protégée as part of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, and most recently, in 2016, she received a Lucas Artists Fellowship Award in California. Additional accolades include an Images Festival Award, Prix Opus, Dora Mavor Moore nomination in opera, and the Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming prize for achievements in composition.

            For the ENCOUNT3RS project, Nicole wrote the music to Keep Driving, I’m Sleeping, which was performed by Ballet BC. This was a very simply styled ballet where a group of rather gender-neutral dancers dressed in grey body suits, stormed across a grey stage forcing the audience to concentrate on nothing but movement and music. As the program notes point out,

““the tone and timbre of the piece are drawn from the neo-noir cinema of the 1980s & 1990s and it attempts to convert romanticized inertia into hyperkinetic neon rage.” Thus, the dancers appear to be “suspended in time by the placelessness of an automobile trip””

and we see their bodies in continuous motion, either travelling full speed ahead or careening around corners in improbable locales. It is only every now and again that they seem to hold steady as if moving along some unrelenting rigid lanes.

            To give you some idea of the kind of music Nicole Lizee likes to create, here is a short excerpt from her composition of The Kronos Quartet: Death to Kosmische.

One of the most renowned and influential new-music groups of our time, the Kronos Quartet celebrates its 40th anniversary with an exclusive evening of music and conversation at The Greene Space. For 40 years, the Kronos Quartet-David Harrington, John Sherba (violins), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)-has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to re-imagining the string quartet experience.

          The third composer of the night was Kevin Lau, who was born in Ontario in 1982. He completed his doctorate in music composition from the University of Toronto in 2012 and served as the RBC Affiliate Composer for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 2012-2015, as well as The Banff Centre in 2012. He has quickly become one of Canada’s leading young composers and his music has been commissioned by ensembles such as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Hannaford Street Silver Band, to name just a few.

            Kevin Lau composed the music for the ballet entitled Dark Angels and it was performed by the National Ballet of Canada. Of the three ballets, this is the one where the music spoke to me the most. As Lau points out in the program notes; the music for Dark Angels

““resembles a symphony in scope and form”. He then goes on to describe the piece as having “a stormy Allegro which gives way to a mercurial interlude (where an elegy featuring the solo cello is transformed into a nightmarish vista).” This paves the way to “a finale steeped in ritualistic gestures and propelled by a battery of explosive percussion.”  All the while, “a six-note rhythmic ‘hammer’ weaves its way through the score like an iron thread.””

           I’m not sure that I fully appreciated all those features of the music, but I did enjoy it and I felt that the National Ballet dancers did an excellent job of visually representing the emotions the composer was attempting to convey. They were the group that most resembled traditional ballet dancers with their more traditional costumes and their traditional ballet shoes.

           For an example of the type of music Kevin Lau creates, I would now like to play a short excerpt from his composition called Edge of The Sky.

Composed by Kevin Lau (2010) Painting by Ricker Choi Lynn Kuo, violin; Peter Stoll, clarinet; Adam Zukiewicz, piano Recorded January 31 / 2014, Walter Hall, Edward Johnson Building (University of Toronto) The title refers to the name of a popular resort located at the southernmost tip of the Hainan Province in China-Tianya Haijiao, meaning the place on the horizon where sea and sky converge.

           Now that I've introduced you to the three new composers, I would like to open up the discussion to the other members of our group who attended the performance.