#crystal pite

THE SEASONS' CANON by Crystal Pite

With the Étoiles, Premières Danseuses, Premiers Danseurs, & Corps de Ballet of the Paris Opera Ballet (2025/26 Season)

that one part of Emergence where u can actually tell which one is Ashton Edwards (middle of the trio!)

Paris Opera Ballet

The seasons' canon

Angels’ Atlas

Choreographer: Crystal Pite

Performance still from Simon McBurney with Crystal Pite, Figures in Extinction [2.0] but then you come to the humans, 2024. Photo by Rahi Rezvani.

Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney

Performance still from Simon McBurney with Crystal Pite, Figures in Extinction [2.0] but then you come to the humans, 2024.

Performance still from Crystal Pite with Simon McBurney, Figures in Extinction [1.0] the list, 2022.

‘Kunstkamer - a reflection’

Ian Bell

21 June 2022

The gestural language of human bodies is fascinating even inspiring[1]. It can intimate moods and all kinds of scenarios and dilemmas. Spacing and pacing as well as artful coordination of speed and athleticism may produce especially notable episodes. This language is omnipresent in all human settings whether households or the arenas of work, consumption, sport, art and more. Crucially, it is expressed (and sometimes overtly formulated) at the boundary of inner subjectivities – conscious and sub-conscious - and externalised identities enacted in social settings.

A professionally, choreographed dance work is one example of an overtly formulated and charged distillation of such a language. In this case, the gestural possibilities are amplified when formal cultures of choreography and story-telling are combined with specific narratives, fashions and costumes, sets, lighting, music and film.

In a recent season of the long work, Kunstkamer, the Australian Ballet (AB) has reworked all these elements. First created by four choreographers of the Netherlands Dance Theatre (NDT) in the period up to late 2019, and ‘steered’ by Paul Lightfoot, it was a work designed to celebrate sixty years of the NDT, and the myriad possibilities of dance[2]. Paul Lightfoot describes it as “a beautiful monster”.

After its opening in 2019 in The Netherlands, a European tour was cut short by the covid-19 pandemic. This adds to the significance of the Australian Ballet’s full staging of the work across multiple, Australian cities in the period April to June 2022.

Kunstkamer means an art room or cabinet of curiosities. Renown in Europe from early modern times as collections of unusual or foreign artifacts, especially those yielded-up by nature and exploration, cabinets of curiosities were the forerunners of museums[3]. Indeed, in some cases they furnished the founding collections for the same. For the NDT, a specific inspiration arose from the C18th works of one, Albertus Bela, especially the latter’s four volume book detailing his collection.

Here the ‘cabinet’ metaphor translates to a series of vignettes rather than an integrated, narrative work. These explore different possibilities of dance and gestural language creating a museum-like experience. The set reinforces this with large, grey, moveable, wall-like structures composed of myriad doors that usher dancers and scenes in and out. The set lighting works precisely to support fluid movement between effects and scenes.

The work, then, eschews narrative apart from micro-stories in vignette but adds singing as well as spoken word with allusive and evocative effects. Each scene is supported by different musical extracts. Some parody particular dance forms in a humorous fashion; for instance, stiff, Strauss waltzes that can sometimes be stifling and class-conscious. Others affirm and take seriously more marginal modes of being: the individual seemingly at the end of their tether or, alternatively, facing a long trek on a road to somewhere unclear.

Most ambitiously, and harking back to Bela’s collections and taxonomies, Kunstkamer begins with, and works from, the premise of a shared capacity for bodily movement and gesture across species; as the AB’s synopsis puts it – across “art and science”. This concern with shared capacity is set from the start via flickering video images.

As one would expect there are strong solo performances as well as pas-de-deux. But what impresses here is the strong, collective structure and organisation as individuals and sub-groups merge into very large ensembles for difficult, extended scenes[4].

Pacing and timing here deserve particular notice; they are radically polarised. The second half, for instance, opens with a stylish and funny, immobile performance supporting posing and day-dreaming. By contrast, most of the scenes feel frenetic, and the shifts between them sometimes “violent”[5]. Overall, I was left entranced but also somewhat exhausted and dizzy by the end.

Nonetheless, as whole, the work is inspiring. The sheer number of forms and the array of music are rarely experienced in one work. At times the nerve-endings around my spine were electrified with the senses firing salvos right through my inner world. Kunstkamer, then, achieves its goal of a celebration of dance and artful movement. It inspires us to continue our own journeys of embodied movement with and for others, and for ourselves.

Copyright: Ian Bell

[1] The writer approaches the issues both from an outsider’s aesthetic love of dance language and music, and the experience of movement as a life-long yoga practitioner.

[2] In addition to Paul Lightfoot, the choreographers included Sol Leon, Crystal Pite and Marco Goecke. Lightfoot discusses the steering process in his interview with David Hallberg, Australian Ballet (2022), ‘A beautiful monster|Hallberg in Conversation with Paul Lightfoot’, 19 April, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdCqIq53BT0, viewed 9 June 2022.

[3] Rooms or cabinets of curiosities had mixed reputations. In some hands they were like trophy cabinets representing the spoils of conquest and colonialism. But in others’ they represented an effort to conserve and document nature, and to promote new, less exploitative attitudes towards it.

[4] Intimations of this difficulty are illustrated by the preparatory videos shared with the public: Australian Ballet (2022), ‘Journey to Opening Night|Kunstkamer’ 21 April. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0vUt23GLNY&t=80s>, viewed 9 June 2022.

[5] This descriptor is Tim Brynes’ in his 4 June 2022 Guardian Australia review: ‘Kunstkamer review: this fiendishly, complicated ballet is astonishing’, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/jun/05/kunstkamer-review-this-fiendishly-complicated-ballet-is-astonishing, viewed 13 June 2022.