Ballet BC: Frontier, Passing

Sadler’s Wells, London
May 21, 2025

This double-bill from Vancouver-based Ballet BC, now touring the UK, opens with a real stunner of a work. Crystal Pite’s Frontier takes the audience on a fabulous thirty-minute journey to a place somewhere between conscious and unconscious, on the edge of being, a place of shadows and whispers, a no man’s land between sleep and awake. Created in 2008 and revised for Ballet BC in 2024, it is beautifully structured from start to finish. It is thirty minutes of utterly enthralling dance.

Frontier opens unusually. Figures in black, hooded, every inch of skin obscured, quietly move through the auditorium and onto the darkly lit stage, home to a single woman in off-white, prone, unmoving, but who is nuzzled to some sort of at least semi-consciousness by one of the shadows. They move together but the shadow is now hers. It has a life of its own. When she disappears under the slightly raised backdrop, a man is spat out.

And so it continues. The marvellous short dances keep coming: solos and duets from those in white, always accompanied by shadows in black. At times, the barely visible latter lift, carry and support those in white making it appear as if they are flying, gliding, surfing through a dreamscape. Those in white seem helpless. Even if they wanted to escape, they cannot. At other times, the shadows loom ominously like ghosts or fears, or scurry across the stage and through the gloom like rats.

The twenty-four dancers, including four from the Rambert School, are outstanding, whether moving slowly or with fizzing speed. Precision and control are very much to the fore.

Pite’s trademark sweeping ensemble choreography comes to the fore in the final stages as the shadows multiply. In the closing moments, the now sea of shadows floods like a black tide, some slipping off the front of the stage, leaving just one dancer upstage, under a light, moving agitatedly.

Throughout, Jay Gower’s scenic design and Tom Visser’s lighting suggests an eerie underworld. That mood is emphasised by Owen Belton’s original composition and music by Eric Whitacre and others including choral music by Polyphony that adds a spiritual element.

Frontier is, quite simply, dance magic.

The second work, John Inger’s Passing, created for Ballet BC in 2023 takes the audience on a journey through life, honing in on a few landmarks as it talsk about love, birth, death and everything in between.

It similarly gets off to a cracking start with folksy music and movement, the choreography, full of circles and linked arms having a distinct barn dance feel. There’s even some tap dance. It projects a real community, with Linda Chow’s, individual, colourful costumes adding to the picture.

There’s wit and humour too, most successfully in a scene that sees one of the women, with her partner alongside, ‘give birth’ to the remaining eighteen cast members, all accompanied by appropriate vocals. Having emerged from between her legs, the form up in a sort of parade that cannot be seen as anything but an homage to the late, great Pina Bausch. An extended sequence of small groups of dancers laughing takes absurdity too far, however and is too long and rather tiresome.

But then, about halfway through, city noises cut into the soundscape and things start to go a little awry. From community, together in a small place, to alone in a big place as the dancers cross like people in the street, oblivious to the others. Suddenly, in the middle of the throng, appears a sort of Adam and Eve couple in underwear that makes them appear nude.

More and more dancers reappear in skin-coloured costume. A mournful a cappella song goes on for way too long. And while the closing shower of white ash (a contrast to black ash spread by two dancers at the beginning) is undoubtedly beautiful visually, what I presume is its message about the vulnerability of human life is a little lost.

But don’t be put off. Ballet BC are a fabulous company on terrific form. Do catch them on tour if you can.

Ballet BC is on tour until June 11, 2025. Check out the Dance Consortium website for dates and venues.