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Royal Ballet's Crystal Pite: ‘Through dance, I’m able to express the inexpressible’

Crystal Pite has turned her one-act Flight Pattern into a full-length work - JOEL SAGET / AFP via Getty Images
Crystal Pite has turned her one-act Flight Pattern into a full-length work - JOEL SAGET / AFP via Getty Images

Why on earth would you mess with perfection? That was the baffled response of many to news that the leading contemporary choreographer Crystal Pite, whose sublime one-act Flight Pattern for The Royal Ballet received ecstatic reviews and an Olivier Award in 2018, was revisiting the piece and turning it into a full-length work. But when I put the question to Pite – who chats to me over Zoom from her home in Vancouver (back, between rehearsals, with her set-designer partner Jay Gower Taylor and their 11-year-old son, Niko) – she is quick to reassure doubters that this has always been the plan.

“After Flight Pattern premiered, Kevin [O’Hare, director of The Royal Ballet] immediately invited me to come back and make something else for the company. I thought right away that I would like to try choreographing the rest of the symphony.” Flight Pattern used the first movement of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs; this new long version, Light of Passage, adds the second and third movements.

It’s the latest major premiere for the British Columbia-born choreographer who, over the past 10 to 15 years, has delivered a remarkable run of five-star, blisteringly original work: pieces such as Emergence (2009), which turned the dancers of the National Ballet of Canada (and later, of Scottish Ballet) into swarming insects; 2015’s Betroffenheit, an astonishing reaction to a friend’s devastating personal loss, created for her own company, Kidd Pivot; and Revisor (2019, also for Kidd Pivot), a trippy, mind-blowing adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 anti-corruption farce The Government Inspector.

At 51, Pite looks in impressive shape when I watch her in rehearsal with the Royal Ballet, a week before our interview. On Zoom, I tell her I was impressed by her calm demeanour – she combines something very like creative genius with a generous, collaborative approach. “That’s funny,” she says, laughing. “I’m glad it appeared like that. I love working with them, so it’s not untrue, the joyful feeling. But I always feel like I’m vibrating with tension and stress to just keep up with the project.”

And what continues to motivate her as a choreographer? “Usually it’s that question of, ‘How can I translate this idea into movement?’ I tend to gravitate more towards big, unanswerable questions lately just because I find myself compelled and motivated, more so than if I was just making a pure dance work. I can never dig deep enough with that. I feel like I have to be pushed by something, whether it’s the mental challenge of a work, or really trying to express the inexpressible.”

Choreographer Crystal Pite with members of The Royal Ballet in rehearsal
Choreographer Crystal Pite with members of The Royal Ballet in rehearsal

Lockdown inevitably presented an extra, temporarily insuperable challenge, in that her plans to expand Flight Pattern had to be mothballed. Now that the idea is finally coming to fruition, does she feel nervous about the reception it will receive? Pite, who weighs every question with real thoughtfulness, leans forward and admits: “I feel like I’m building something from scratch.”

Górecki’s mid-1970s symphony (his third), which many believe was a response to the Holocaust, and which Pite powerfully applied to the European migrant crisis in Flight Pattern, is an austere choice for a longer dance work. But Pite argues that each movement “has its own character, although they do share that minimal aspect: it’s quite repetitive, and it builds slowly. Throughout, I feel in my own body this rocking action, this swaying, so I’ve kept that as a motif. But I do think of them as three distinct pieces.”

Sadly, the refugee crisis is, if anything, more urgent than ever. However, Pite is keen to encompass other elements in her ambitious vision, which revolves around the theme of passage – whether moving between places or states of being. “I want to speak about something very human, and these big questions of borders and thresholds,” she explains. “One thing that really struck me, watching world events unfold, was the question of children in all this. I wanted to get at our duty and our responsibility to protect them and to take care of their world. So I always had it in my mind that I wanted to have children in part two.”

That she does: two casts of six dancers aged between nine and 11, plus three covers. These are junior associates – too young even to be training at The Royal Ballet School’s White Lodge. (“Some of the most joyful hours I’ve ever spent in a studio have been working with them,” enthuses Pite.) The inspiration for this section is the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Pite quotes from a child-friendly version of the text, lines like: “Article 6: you have the right to life”, “Article 35: no one is allowed to kidnap or sell you”, and “Article 12: you have the right to an opinion and for it to be listened to and taken seriously”.

As for the third movement, which features 36 company members – as well as two elders – Pite is focusing on “the ultimate border crossing, which is moving from this life to whatever is next. That sense of separation from ourselves and our loved ones, that pain of not knowing.” She pauses and catches herself with a wry laugh. “All of this just sounds so heavy, doesn’t it? Why would I watch this in a theatre? But actually it’s quite joyful. I want to show the dancers of The Royal Ballet at full strength, just at their most exuberant, most virtuosic, most healthy. What you see on stage is their defiance of death – that heightened sense of the present moment that you only get with dance.”

Members of The Royal Ballet in rehearsal
Members of The Royal Ballet in rehearsal

Rather more dispiritingly, Pite, whose Flight Pattern was The Royal Ballet’s first new main stage work by a woman in 18 years, is still one of few female choreographers given such opportunities. Why the glacial pace? “I didn’t grow up in the ballet world,” she hedges. “Certainly in the contemporary world there’s no shortage of female choreographers; the disparity’s not nearly as stark. So I can only guess at what the ingredients are to this glacial pace you’re talking about. I know it must start early on in the schools, making sure all kids have an opportunity to choreograph and are facilitated and supported.”

Classical dance is also being forced to grapple with the “problematic” elements of its repertoire, such as unfortunate racial representation. But is contemporary dance having an easier time of it? “I think the whole world has to grapple with it, whether we’re artists or whether we’re just human beings in our society,” Pite says firmly. “Contemporary dance has it easier because we’re not tied to all kinds of expectations and traditions, and we’re not selling out a theatre because people want to come see that particular story done that particular way. But that said, there’s still lots of deep, deep work to be done.”

Does Pite have the freedom to make changes, when she’s commissioned by another company? “That remains to be seen, actually. I am presented with the company as it is and I’m working within what’s there. Of course I’d like to see greater diversity in The Royal Ballet, I think everybody would. That’s not the question. The question is: so, how do we get there? I do wonder about my role in all that: what can I do to encourage the change that’s already happening? How can I help it to move more quickly?”


Light of Passage is in rep at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 from Oct 18-Nov 3. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk