Ballet BC in Frontier and PASSING
Ballet BC are touring the UK in works by Crystal Pite and Johan Inger…
Pei Lun Lai in Crystal Pite’s ‘Frontier’. © Cameron Sparling.
Ballet BC
Frontier, PASSING
★★★✰✰
High Wycombe, Wycombe Swan
31 May 2025
balletbc.com
trafalgartickets.com/wycombe
Great to see Ballet BC (formally Ballet British Columbia) back in the UK and, importantly, touring outside London. If you think ballet is about 19th-century stories, tutus, pointe shoes, waif-like ballerinas and quietly noble men, then Ballet BC are here to shake you up. All their dancers kick ass — big time — and in the contemporary repertoire of today. Bravo to Dance Consortium for touring them more widely in the UK and showcasing the breadth of what ballet can be.
The company brings an interesting bill by two very established choreographers — Crystal Pite and Johan Inger. By some margin, Crystal Pite is the most in-demand choreographer in the world, and there is a long queue of ballet directors hoping for a piece from her. Pite’s works are invariably about thoughtful subjects, and she brings a wonderful humanity and beauty to the stage, be it in solos, duets, or, particularly, in groups working together. And so it is with Frontier — a work that puts the most fundamental particles in the universe under the microscope: dark matter.
Frontier is no dry, abstract look at physics. Dark matter, unseen, is thought to shape the universe we live in, and Pite shows its concept at another level, as buffeting, supporting and shaping us and our human experiences. Dark matter is realised as a flock of shapelessly black-clad and hooded dancers (in neat costuming by Nancy Bryant) forever hanging around a white-clad human. They hinder, they support, they mooch off and do their own thing in broken unison, but always with a shadowy elegance. I particularly like the way a small group uplifts and manipulates our real-world dancer — such spiritual splendour - as she is freed to float off on flights of fancy. At other times Owen Belton’s sparse ticking and muttering score is more about the doubts we get from unexpected circumstances.
There is a lot packed into Frontier’s 25 minutes, including a big-bang reference, though blink and you miss it. But there is no missing the dancing, which then becomes about the group of 24 dancers that huddle and then shape-shift into individuals against an uplifting choral score by Eric Whitacre. The movement throughout is slow, deliberate and meticulous, and while I can’t claim to understand every reference, Frontier has a stunning grandeur that keeps you wanting more.
Johan Inger’s PASSING is also about human life being buffeted by this and that, but at 50 minutes, it feels well too long. That’s a shame because Inger, perhaps best known in the UK for his work with Nederlands Dans Theater 2, has created many tens of works, and I’ve never associated him with using three words when two would do.
PASSING is dressed in casual daywear (Linda Chow) and, over many scenes, shows life in the round from birth to old age — if not in any particularly logical sequence. There is a lot of screaming and railing at times, which can be fun for a while, and a comical, never-ending birthing scene made me smile. While the Ballet BC dancers make a jolly good fist of acting, I was less convinced of their ability truly to portray the old, and at several points I was just unclear about what was happening and why. Why were there trails of ‘soil’ around the stage? Why was somebody trying to sweep up some of it with a weirdly self-standing brush? Why is the title of PASSING all in upper case? With Crystal Pite, I might similarly not understand it all, but it didn’t matter; such was the pace and interesting movement. However, with Inger’s longueurs, I just felt too many times I wanted to fast forward. But in terms of dance, Ballet BC can certainly impress, and at times Inger gave us the infectious joy of a community working together. Ballet BC continue to tour the UK and are certainly worth catching.