How reflected light inspired powerful collaboration between Crystal Pite and National Ballet

It's a large-scale work featuring dozens of the country's most elite dancers, but the inspiration behind Crystal Pite's highly anticipated new collaboration with the National Ballet of Canada was far simpler: light reflecting on a surface.

Pite had been working closely with set designer Jay Taylor, who developed a system that allowed him to manipulate reflected light. In Angels' Atlas, however, the creators took the idea to a whole new level.

"What it creates on the surface of our backdrop is this kind of ephemeral, morphing, beautiful landscape of light," says Pite in a Q interview with Tom Power.

"Looking at that wall of reflective moving light, it looked to me like a portrait of the unknown. It looked to me like something benign and intelligent and otherworldly. It looked like a frontier or a portal."

To Pite, that light also echoed the fleeting natural of dance itself, something she calls a "disappearing, ephemeral, impermanent form."

"A dancer embodies both the dance and its disappearance, so you're always watching something that is in a state of vanishing. And I like that. I find that potent and powerful, and it brings a heightened sense of the present," says Pite.

"So I wanted to connect to those ideas, and to bring something to the stage that speaks of our impermanence, and at the same time voices our defiance."

'An emotional resonance in our bodies'

For decades, Pite has been one of Canada's most revered choreographers, creating more than 50 works for companies including Paris Opéra Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Nederlands Dans Theater 1, Ballett Frankfurt, The National Ballet of Canada, and Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal, where she was resident choreographer for several years.

In 2002, she formed her own company, Kidd Pivot, in Vancouver. Recent works co-created with Jonathon Young include the political corruption-themed Revisor and Betroffenheit, a breathtaking work about trauma and grief that The Guardian called "our best show of the 21st century."

But despite the remarkable complexity of her work, and the rich themes that snake through it, Pite says she is always drawn toward people's natural ways of moving — and against the appearance of effortlessness in classical ballet.

"I'm interested in things that are from the natural world. Also real human movement, authentic human pedestrian movement that gets kind of pulled out and abstracted and it becomes extreme, it becomes something else through the process of choreographing it. I like that the audience can recognize themselves onstage in a dancer," says Pite.

"As human beings, we all have bodies and we all know what it feels like to reach for something or to retreat or to collapse or to falter. So these things have an emotional resonance in our bodies, and I think we have a visceral response when you see dancers taking those kinds of movements and making them as extreme as they are accessible."

'A pulse of life'

For Angels' Atlas, Pite wanted to create a counterpoint to the idea of disappearance and mortality, and imbue the dancers' movement with what she calls "a pulse of life."

"So there's a lot of movement in the piece that has a pulse — they kind of pop and repeat, and they kind of thrum with an urgency and an aliveness," says Pite, who adds that there's something especially powerful about seeing dancers in a state of effort and striving.

"This is another thing people can identify with inside their own bodies — that feeling of striving. They're working hard and I don't try to hide that. I don't try to make it look effortless. I try to make it look like it's full of intent and urgency. And I find that very moving. I find it very beautiful."

Now just days away from the world premiere of Angels' Atlas in Toronto, Pite says she's putting the final finishing touches on the piece, and looking forward to seeing it come alive onstage.

She also jokes that she's already feeling a little nostalgic for her time working with the National Ballet dancers — even though it's not yet over.

Pite says that, like any art form, dance is able to distil enormous concepts like love and suffering into something we can gather around and reckon with — even if we don't necessarily find concrete answers.

"I am more and more convinced about the attempt. All the work I do, I recognize the impossibility of transposing these ideas into an artwork, but at the same time I feel like I can meaningfully and earnestly spend my life in the attempt," she says. "And that's just a beautiful opportunity."

Written by Jennifer Van Evra. Produced by Cora Nijhawan.