THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Clever choreographers usually duck big ‘iconic’ pieces of music, especially pop songs, which carry too much baggage. With so much to overcome and even fight against in the public’s imagination, the dance maker can be overwhelmed.
In this exquisite translation of Leonard Cohen’s legendary songs to the dance stage, they solve this by just including the big hits - ‘ Hallelujah’ and ‘So Long Marianne’ - as vocal interludes, albeit beautifully sung. You can’t gild a lily. It exemplifies how this project gets so much right and the resulting show is one of the best modern dance pieces set to rock/pop classics since Christopher Bruce’s treatment of Rolling Stones songs in Rooster.
Marrying the songs of Montréal’s most famous son with the talent of Ballets Jazz Montréal was an obvious move and Cohen even gave them his blessing but sadly he didn’t live to see its premiere in 2017.
Artistic director Louis Robitaille and director/dramaturg Eric Jean have produced something wonderful here by using a bold dramaturgy to unite the work of three choreographers. There’s the Greek Andonis Foniadakis, the Columbian-Belgian Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and the British-Swiss Ihsan Rustem. They all treat the songs in in their own way, but all seem grounded in a similar muscular acrobatic style which fits this great ensemble like a glove. While some might argue that their different styles risk getting submerged by the concept, instead the effect is to give the piece a stylistic coherence, which typical mixed bills of modern dance often lack. The piece is invested therefore with an emotional heft which might otherwise be lacking. It is all beautifully calibrated.
The scenography, lighting and video design of a team led by Pierre-Étienne Locas reinforces this unifying approach, producing one arresting tableau after another. There are for example lines of typewriters, stark silhouettes, a dislocated mouth humming a chorus (very Beckett) and a blue-lit flume of spiraling snowflakes which evoke Cohen’s wintry New York. The piece is framed, too, by a ghostly apparition of an archetypal Cohen figure, clad in his characteristic dark suit and trilby hat.
Cohen’s themes of love and faith, despair and exaltation, solitude and connection lend themselves to the lyricism of dance and the mood here ranges from an aching sense of longing to a mordant wit. Cohen’s lyrics, so often, were never very far off a punchline.
In ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ (Rustem), a particular highlight, a male dancer entwines himself with partner after partner with each duet unfolding as if it’s a condensed relationship. The musicality here is spellbinding, with the dancers’ movements totally at one with the cadences of Cohen’s voice. The shifting tempos envelop us like a billowing summer breeze.
Those who consider Cohen as mere melancholy are way off the mark. Here, the sheer tonal variety of his music is on display. His famous World Tour live recording is used for some songs and those big arrangements opened minds afresh to the musical potential of the songs. There is light and harmony in some numbers, a bracing up tempo energy in others such as ‘Nevermind’, and, of course, there’s the bittersweet waltz-time of his best ballads, and what could be a more perfect fit for the lyric art of ballet.