Sun 10/4 @ 3PM
We have learned that contemporary ballet brings out the dance audience in Northeast Ohio, and that’s what’s in the offing this coming Sunday afternoon when the unusually glamorous, sexy and accomplished dancers of Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal (BJM) perform commissioned works by distinguished international choreographers at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron.
We spoke with the artistic director of BJM, Louis Robitaille, by phone.
CoolCleveland: What will the upcoming concert be — ballet, jazz or modern dance?
Louis Robitaille: In the beginning Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal was a jazz dance company, strictly jazz, but what they wanted to do when they started the company was to bring a classical aesthetic to jazz, which is why it’s called Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal. Today we like to say that BJM is a contemporary ballet company and even further I would say a fusion dance company in that we mix different styles of dance with various art disciplines like theater and multimedia. The evolution of dance goes tremendously fast and BJM is a mirror of what’s going on in the best creative work here in Quebec and in the world.
CC: Your choreographers for the upcoming concert are certainly a distinguished international group. And BJM performs so frequently in Europe. How can you do so much on a modest annual budget of under $2 million US?
LR: How to do miracles with almost no money?
CC: (Laughs.) What do choreographic commissions cost?
LR: They’re quite expensive. Usually a new ballet like Rouge or like Kosmos, 30 to 45 minutes long, costs around $100,000. That would include the creation and production process and part of the rehearsal process. We are not a rich dance company and that’s very transparent when we start our conversations with choreographers.
CC: Are you saying that choreographers take your annual budget into consideration when they set their fees?
LR: Of course. We wouldn’t be able to pay the equivalent of what a choreographer could get in Europe, for example. They know that from the beginning. But they also know that BJM, a well-known, well-respected company, will travel around the world with their work and it’s great exposure. That’s also part of the deal.
And, as you have probably seen on our calendar, we perform quite a lot every season. How to say this in English? Even if we cannot offer choreographers as much money upfront as some European companies, we perform so much that the royalties we pay each performance even things out in the end. It’s a balance and we do the best we can, according to our budget, of course. Then too, BJM is working with a new generation of choreographers who are very talented and popular so of course it’s more expensive than working with emerging choreographers.
CC: Although BJM has had notable success working with what were emerging choreographers; people who had not yet achieved the international fame they now enjoy, Canadians Crystal Pite and…
LR: Aszure Barton.
CC: Yes, Crystal Pite and Aszure Barton, both emerging choreographers, both Canadians. They both became big names and sought-after choreographers after BJM used them.
LR: And we still do work with emerging Canadian choreographers. To maintain an anchor in our community is very important to us. Again, it’s a balance between working with great, established names and working with new choreographers, helping them. We receive money from the government, public money, so we have obligations towards our talent. And that’s what we have done with many, many Canadian choreographers.
CC: Please tell our readers about each of the three dances in the upcoming concert. Tell them about Closer, the pas de deux.
LR: Closer is a little jewel. It was created especially for Céline Cassone, an artist of BJM, by Benjamin Millepied, who is also a very well-known person in the dance world. [Our readers may remember Millepied as choreographer and actor in the movie Black Swan. More recently he became director of dance at Paris Opera Ballet.] What’s nice about Closer is, first of all, the particular, intimate relationship between Céline and Benjamin. They’re good friends and close artistic associates. (See Cassone’s bio for the thick, overlapping connections to Millepied.
In 2006 they got together in New York and created Closer, which is an unusual duet in a number of ways. First, it’s 18 minutes long and usually duets are between 5 and 10 minutes long. And it is so personal to Céline. She’s an incredible dancer, a wonderful artist, and we’re very pleased that she’s dancing for BJM.
Another thing that I love about Closer is that it’s pure dance. Benjamin is a great dancer who could easily have fallen into the trap of spectacle and circus tricks but he avoided that. His choreography corresponds so closely to the mathematical, minimalist music of Philip Glass. Closer is sophisticated yet very emotional, totally pure within the classical world, only the beauty of dance.
CC: Thanks for that description of Closer. [See the entire dance on video HERE.] Which dance should we talk about next?
LR: Maybe we can talk about Rouge, which will open the show. Rouge was created for BJM by Rodrigo Pederneiras who is a fabulous creator, the resident choreographer of Grupo Corpo, a Brazilian company we have a long-standing relationship with. Rouge is Rodrigo’s 3rd creation for BJM. In it I wanted to pay tribute to the native people, the First Nations of North America. We began by immersing ourselves in the music, but we had a lot of difficulty finding the right composer until we met the brothers Grand, two very talented composers who had done a lot of musical collaborations with native people. What they proposed was exactly what I had been looking for because they had all this knowledge of the real music of First Nations but they brought that music to a place that is very contemporary. The music, a score composed especially for BJM, by itself gives you goosebumps, so it’s a great part of the success of the ballet.
CC: If the concert begins with Rouge and continues with Closer, that must mean that the concert ends with Kosmos, choreographed for BJM by Andonis Foniadakis.
LR: Yes, with Kosmos we come to something that is very European. Kosmos is all about the craziness, the rhythm, the energy of the big city. It’s about the challenge of setting goals every day, trying to go further, producing like a machine. Kosmos is unbelievably powerful, but it is a challenge for the dancers; they are completely dead by the end of this dance.
CC: (Laughs.) That’s why you end the concert with Kosmos. [Cleveland dance audiences may remember when Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet performed other choreography by Foniadakis. We’ve only seen brief video excerpts of Kosmos, but we wonder if it finds resolution for all that frenetic movement.]
LR: You know the feeling of being on a quest and succeeding when you thought you would fail? To me, Kosmos is all about that.
CC: We remember seeing BJM in Cleveland years ago. They were a beautiful, sexy company then and according to everything we’ve read and seen on video, they still are all that even though the company has shifted away from its emphasis on jazz. Tell us about your dancers now. What do you look for?
LR: Something that was really important to me when I became artistic director of BJM was respect for the heritage of the company, and part of that was the way the dancers have always been the essence, the most important part of the company. So the dancers are very precious to us and we are very selective. We are looking for dancers with great training, great talent, great versatility. Great flexibility in the feet. They are strongly united as a group of people but each one of them has a strong personality that you can see onstage.
The foundation of all the work of BJM is classical ballet but versatility is also very important. They have to dance in many different styles and they also have to be actors and musicians. What the choreographers ask for in the creative process is almost insane. They push the limit all the time.
Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal will be co-presented by DANCECleveland and the University of Akron’s Dance Program Sun 10/4 @ 3:00pm at Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall. Tickets are $25-$55 at dancecleveland.org or call330-253-2488.
[Written by Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas]University of Akron, Akron, OH 44304