Barely a fortnight before the world premiere of choreographer Joshua Beamish’s radically innovative 21st century reimagining of the classic ballet Giselle, Catherine Hurlin, the 23-year-old prodigy in the title role, finally got to meet some of her co-stars.
They included a hologram, a ‘tornado’ and a cloud of glowing monads, not to mention half a dozen vengeful female ghosts. Must’ve been a pretty striking encounter, even for an artist as preternaturally poised as American Ballet Theatre soloist Hurlin.
“Definitely weird,” she reports. “A little disorienting, too” to be dancing amidst a swirl of larger-than-life giants. “But I’m getting used to it.”
High time. She’s been readying her title role in @giselle (as the Beamish work is called) for the past three years. She’s already well acquainted with most of the more corporeal supporting players, recruited from among the headliners of topmost Canadian and American ballet companies, with whom she’ll share the Vancouver Playhouse stage at the September 5th premiere.
But her other-worldly co-stars are mind-benders of a whole different order: digitized avatars of Hurlin herself, as recorded executing Beamish’s paces in a wired-up body suit in 2017. Animator Brianna Amore then realized the motion-captured data sets into an array of projected personnae that unfurl across onstage screens and scrims, interacting in real-time with @giselle’s flesh-and-blood cast.
Beamish, Amore, the 15 live dancers and assorted techies – altogether a 30-member crew – have been assembling the production since 2015. After making his fame at the pinnacles of the dance world in New York and London, the 32-year-old Kelowna-born choreographer has come home to roost – long-term, he hopes – back in B.C.
As far as he’s concerned, there’s no better place to develop and premiere innovative new works. “I’ve had seven weeks of residencies in Mission, Chilliwack and Kelowna," he boasts.. "By the time it goes on tour, every aspect of @giselle will have been optimized in real world theatres and live-audience-tested. Try getting that in New York or London."
But the process has been piecemeal; it wasn’t until just this week that all the elements came together in tech rehearsals which brought Hurlin and the other live dancers face-to-face with their virtual incarnations. The net effect, Beamish explains, should be a hi-tech hall of mirrors.
Consider, for example, his treatment of one of the most celebrated scenes in the canon of Romantic ballet – the initial encounter between Giselle, a village ingénue, and her love interest, a rakish duke passing himself off as a simple (but dashing and mysterious) young yeoman. This classic pas de deux gets multiplied, in @giselle, into a pas de six: the male and female dancers facing away from the audience to interact with each other’s blown-up, digitised, frontal images, as well as colophon “thumbnails” of themselves.
We become voyeurs to an online courtship, peering over the shoulders of a couple in a torrid Skype clinch. For Beamish, this cyberpunk restyling is no bug – no mere detail of décor – but rather the definitive feature of the production, finding whole new layers of meaning in the 180-year-old score and scenario of the classic Giselle ballet.
After all, he points out, the story’s all about feigned identities and the murky frontier between what’s virtual and what’s “real.” Seduced by the well-born imposter, Giselle discovers his ruse and dies of a (literally) broken heart, only to be recruited from the grave by a posse of “Willi’s,” the vengeful ghosts of young virgins who’ve been fatally spurned.
That adds up to a consummate Romantic ballet, a farrago of crowd-pleasing set pieces – the exuberance of a village fair, the pageantry of a courtly hunt, the Gothic gloom of a haunted forest – all daubed in the vivid hues of a storybook folk tale.
But transpose these ingredients to today’s online world, Beamish is convinced, and the story takes on a deeper and darker salience – an urgent interrogation of how (or whether) to go on living without a grounding of mundane, baseline factuality.
Cyber Totentanz. Image: Andrzej Wojcicki
In our present “post-truth” era, such questions increasingly absorb Beamish these days. After @giselle and the ongoing pan-Canada tours of his all-male sextet piece Saudade and his solo performance Lone Wolf, the next major work he means to tackle will be something about implanted memories, as exemplified in such controversial instances as the Rekjavik Six convictions or the Loftus Lost-in-the-Mall experiment.
“Post-truth” is the only world known to @giselle’s protagonists. The lovers never even meet face-to-face, but rather through the medium of an all-encompassing cyberspace agora called The Village, a dystopian near-future fusion of all of today’s most pervasive (or invasive) social networks. Throughout Act I, we in the audience get to see them only via cellphone screens, as viewed by each of them in their isolated cubicles.
And then, in Act II – the spooky part of the story, after Giselle has pined herself to death – the locale gets even more meta: an “experiential lounge” called The Forest where the characters, quick and dead alike, go to process their Post-Traumatic Stress with the aid of (perhaps psychedelic) cocktails. The imaginary lounge, Beamish admits, is vaguely reminiscent of some of the hybrid bistro/rave/art installation spaces currently favoured by New York “creatives.”
This all sounded frankly a bit rich for my septuagenarian blood as I briefed myself to interview Hurlin and Beamish on the eve of @giselle’s long-awaited tech rehearsal. Neither a digital native nor a New York hipster, I was none too secure in my grasp of either idiom, let alone how they might comport with the formal rigour of classic ballet. Then, too, I’ve never been a fan of Giselle’s tunefully hummable, if somewhat trite, leitmotif-laden score (by an otherwise forgettable 19th century journeyman composer, Adolphe Adam).
“Forgettable?!” Beamish seems genuinely shocked when I confess this prejudice at our meeting in SFU Woodward’s brightly sunlit fourth floor dance practice studio. “But the score is brilliant!” As far as he’s concerned, Adam’s music has all the irresistible drive of a cult-movie horror flick score.
It’s been decades since I’ve queued up for such a cult classic – probably not since I was as young as Beamish or Hurlin are now. But, as the two of them hum through snippets of the score while ironing out last-minute choreographic kinks, I catch myself gradually coming around to their view, swept along in their enthusiasm and personal allure. He, with his lupine intensity of gaze, and she, with her cervine alertness and vulnerability, irresistibly call to mind Dickey’s Heaven of Animals.
I’ve never before been privileged to view a world-class ballerina in rehearsal, so close-up and by the light of day. There’s a lot more going on, I now realize, than one ordinarily perceives from my customary ballet perch in the budget seats of a darkened auditorium.
Wild feats of technical athleticism, to be sure. But at the same time a constant flow of barely perceptible details of gesticulation, facial expression and sheer, idiosyncratic muscle tone, all together adding up to the distinctive individuality of a brilliant soloist dancing in character.
“And your personality shines through even in motion-capture,” Beamish assures her as they practice their paces. “Whether as a cloud or a whirlwind, the projections come across as unmistakably you.” It’s a joy to watch their wordless communication as they minutely tweak their choreographic phrasing. With her quirky charisma, she humanizes the seeming physical impossibility of her technical perfection.
Ballet – like all too many classical art forms – seems to draw a disproportionate share of its audience from my own grizzled demographic. That may be partly due to ticket prices tailored to mature bank accounts. But no such qualms should deter young viewers from @giselle, with perfectly good spots in the 600-seat Playhouse going for as little as $35.
And @giselle seems ideally confected for Gen’s X, Y and Z balletomanes, too. Not just for its techno gee-whizzery, nor yet for its thematic topicality. Even trendier is its gently ironic take on the Romantically earnest story line and its sly cooptation of classical ballet's gestural vocabulary.
Hurlin dances en pointe, comme il faut, but with a sassiness that might owe more to Beyoncé than to Olga Spessivtseva. She embodies the solipsistic aesthetic of the selfie, the unremittingly online performance of a watcher ever watchful of herself being watched.
For Beamish, who founded his own JoshuaBeamish/MOVETHECOMPANY dance ensemble at age 17, @giselle is “the most classical work I’ve choreographed to date.” But Hurlin pronounces it “the most ‘out-there’ piece I’ve danced so far in toe shoes.”
“How very avant garde,” enthuses Vancouver Ballet Society (VBS) Secretary Jean Orr, 90, who, as an Ottawa teenager some 71 years ago became the first Canadian to dance the role of Giselle.
Teenage Jean Orr (née Stoneham) back in the day. Photos: Vancouver Ballet Society
No such self-consciousness back in her day, she recalls. For all the psychological changes her character undergoes – from giddy puppy-love to suicidal disillusionment to being dead and exhumed – Orr simply took her cues from her then-mentor and ballet mistress, Nesta Toumine of the Ottawa Ballet Company.
“Even the great Margot Fonteyn, early in her career, feared she was ‘not ready’ for Giselle -- too deep for her,” Orr laughs. “But, at age 18, what did I know? My biggest preoccupation at the time was how to climb out of the stage-hatch of my ‘crypt’ without tripping over myself.”
JoshuaBeamish/MOVETHECOMPANY and the VBS will celebrate Orr’s “iconic legacy and immense contributions to the art form of dance” with a gala post-show reception after the premiere. Orr went on to a lustrous – but brief – career as a Winnipeg Ballet soloist, but retired from the stage at age 25 to marry and raise six children.
As a teacher and arts administrator, she’s mentored generations of up-and-coming dancers. Still lissome, bright-eyed and crackling with energy, she continues to conduct master classes at the ScotiaBank Dance Centre. She’s starred in Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, The Nutcracker and countless other classic ballets, but, after 1948, never revisited Giselle onstage.
Hurlin’s Giselle, on the other hand, could remain definitive for decades, at least theoretically, now that she’s been digitized through motion capture, Beamish points out.
“What an exciting time we live in,” Orr sighs. Back in her time, Canada was viewed as an outlying and backward frontier of the ballet world, and now Vancouver balletomanes can be the first to see a definitive, world-class interpretation of canonically iconic work. Don't miss the chance.
@giselle runs September 5-7 at the Vancouver Playhouse.