A fine Ballet BC double bill

Ballet BC: Frontier/Passing 
Sadler’s Wells, London EC1; touring until 11 June

Dark figures slink through the auditorium, their faces covered in black hoods. Slowly they roll up on to the stage like a film of black oil. It’s sinister but arresting – a dramatic start to an evening of dance that covers life, death, the universe, the whole darned thing.

It marks the beginning of Frontier by the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, the first of two cleverly chosen pieces from the Vancouver-based Ballet BC, which form part of a Dance Consortium programme that is touring the UK until mid-June. Its shadowy meditations are matched by Passing, an unusually witty work about the stages of life from the Swedish dancemaker Johan Inger.

Pite’s theme is characteristically large. She’s interested in the idea of dark matter – how the whole of creation is sustained by material that is unseen and essentially unknowable. Pite links that dualism with ideas of a divided self, dark and light, conscious and unconscious, then embodies these ideas through dance that is constantly involving.

Frontier, made for Nederlands Dans Theater in 2008 though expanded and reworked here, sets white-clad dancers amid the black-covered figures who support them and carry them through space. The latter, like noh players, are never quite invisible, and their presence enables movements that are impossible without them: twisting turns upside down; impossible curving, articulated shapes.

There’s a constant sense of melancholy and questioning, underpinned by Owen Belton’s score full of whispering, and by Tom Visser’s lighting and Jay Gower Taylor’s designs, which at moments are full of giant shadows that dwarf the dancers.

Towards the close, as the music changes to Eric Whitacre’s rapturous, religiously tinged Sleep, the black-clad figures take over, moving forwards purposefully like skaters, ripples of movement spreading through their massed ranks, until finally they roll back into the theatre from which they emerged. It’s powerful and incredibly beautiful.

Inger’s Passing begins with two figures walking across the stage, tipping patterns of ash from a jar. Suddenly one falls into the other’s arms, inert. The couple begin to dance, their frames angular, their hands and feet flexing in and out. The music is jovial and folksy, the dance lively and flirtatious, bodies melting into one another in the patterns of courtship.

Love leads to the creation of life, and in a genuinely funny sequence, the woman gives birth to the entire company, who emerge through her legs and then rise up in sequence as if recreating the ascent of man. The humour continues throughout the piece, which is full of colour – the costumes by Linda Chow are a mass of subtle tones – and wry observation.

At one moment, trios of men and women take turns to laugh hysterically then return sobbing. At another, a tap-dancing man seems to threaten violence. The closeness of all emotions, of life and death, the ongoing cycle of meetings and partings creates a picture of a community in constant flux. The image of a chain, where the dancers link hands and cross the stage in a snaking line, binds them all together.

At the close, they swap their bright clothes for nude-coloured leotards, and ash falls softly from the sky as they move onwards in poetic harmony. It’s a little overextended, but like Frontier stunningly danced by the 20-strong company, whose style is at once contemporary and classical, finely shaped and extraordinarily fluid.

Ballet BC’s Passing/Frontier is touring until 11 June

Photographs by Luis Luque, Rae Srivastava