Dance review: With Take Form, Ballet BC dancers show their penchant for dreamlike details
In prelude to full season, artists explore their choreographic side with surreal touches like a piñata head, multitasking coatrack, and bubble-wrap sculpture
Artists of Ballet BC's Take Form (Sung and Worn). Photo by Millissa Martin
Ballet BC presented Take Form at the BMO Theatre to September 13
TAKE FORM HAS BECOME an annual mini-tradition since the pandemic—a way for Ballet BC dancers to explore their individual choreographic voices; they step up to do everything from set design to marketing for the show. It’s also a chance to see these honed performers, who usually take the stage at the much bigger Queen Elizabeth Theatre, close-up—with some standout fresh faces stepping into the spotlight.
For this year’s sold-out event, the expansive 10-piece program was full of compelling, surreal touches, with works featuring everything from a piñata head to a shape-shifting piles of clothes. The dancers seem to have been inspired to mine their own subconscious by Ballet BC’s repertoire of dreamlike pieces (think hits by the likes of Johan Inger or Fernando Hernando Magadan).
Artists of Ballet BC's Take Form (Cartago). Photo by Millissa Martin
The evening got off to a strong start with Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera’s Cartago, a solo for himself that found a character in a trench coat flailing absurdly with a giant red piñata on his head. Eventually, the headpiece would come off, replaced with a classic fedora. Set to Latin rhythms and named for a province in Costa Rica (the standout Ballet BC dancer’s home country), it was a tight, bittersweet exploration of being an expatriate—the “tristeza feliz” (“happy sadness”) of being from more than one place, as he put it in the program notes.
Other highlights included a piece choreographed and performed by the magnetic Vivian Ruiz, full of twisting limbs, whisking skirt, and flying hair. The enigmatic, poetically charged portrait of female anguish and yearning was set to live music by her sister Michelle Agudo, who played a harmonium that filled the air with resonant, wheezing notes. And Joziah German’s coolly cinematic At every opening was packed with innovative, fractured movement by Kiana Jung, Kylie Miller, Kelsey Lewis, and Orlando Harbutt; it had the energy of a dramatic thriller caught in a strange limbo.
Elsewhere, Emanuel Dostine, a rising member of the company, was a revelation in Michael Garcia’s Anchors Aweigh, striking as an emotionally vulnerable partner throwing himself over and over at Garcia’s colder, stiffer persona, intertangling and holding tight, only to be rebuffed. As Garcia put it in the notes, “If you were to be the sun, I would be Icarus”—a relationship archetype that hits home for many of us.
On the opposite end of the love spectrum, choreographer Luca Afflitto presented a beautifully polished pas de deux, Out of the Blue, which he danced with Imani Frazier to the swirling sounds of Erik Satie’s searching Gnossiennes: No. 1. It was a taut, moving portrait of two people moving as one, surrendering to the unexpected rhythms and shifts of life. Ditto the expressive double duet Where did it go, with choreography by Frazier. Here, company newcomer Kylie Miller, the Modus Operandi–trained dancer who returns to Vancouver after working at the celebrated Batsheva Dance Company 2, made an expressive impact in a slightly narrative exploration of life and relationships. As for Emerging Artist Nathan Bear’s brief and so it shall be, its pas de deux tapped a more balletic beauty, set to music including Arcade Fire and danced with fellow Emerging Artist Emma Kuusela.
Things got more dreamlike as Orlando Harbutt created a chaotic delirium of club- and street-inflected dance in his dynamic work for five dancers. Featuring Dostine in tighty whities and a leather jacket and punctuated by throbbing-red spotlights, the vibe was indeed “fragile, playful, absurd, and alive”, as Harbutt put it in the program.
Harbutt was also arresting in Jacalyn Tatro’s surreal and bittersweet Sung and Worn, a big group piece that played with piles of clothes and a multitasking coatrack, ambitiously mining themes of community, love, and death. The narrative quality and from-the-gut passion was a bit reminiscent of recent work by Ballet BC guest choreographers Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, while the whimsical, everyday prop use recalled the style of Inger.
Artists of Ballet BC's Take Form (DOVE). Photo by Millissa Martin
Sidney Chuckas’s evening-closing DOVE most literally delved into dreamscapes, set as it was in an orange-y sepia glow, under a big wood, packing foam, and bubble-wrap sculpture (also by Chuckas) that suggested a headless body running mid-stride. Offbeat, vulnerable, and full of fluttery fragmented movement, it was a complex look at difference, hope, and finding your feet to run.
Like so much of the work that had preceded it, it transported viewers to strange yet deeply human new worlds—showing a curiosity and depth that bode well for the coming season. 
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