Sliding comfortably into Alberta Ballet’s invited guest company slot, the renowned 20-member ensemble presented two of choreographer Dwight Rhoden’s signature works – Woke , a smart and seamless current issues piece, and Love Rocks, their recent title work, a smooth fusion number set to some of the most popular tracks by Lenny Kravitz. It has won accolades that could be the envy of almost any other contemporary dance company.
We can believe Complexions Ballet’s statement that it stands for diversity – it certainly wears that monicker on its sleeve. The first most noticeable attribute of the company is its many out-front contrasting movement signatures and juxtaposed styles. Bodies appear together that are completely physically contradictory to each other, but the corps is so good that absolutely anyone can dance well with anyone else and with never a moment’s visual dissonance.
Complexions cajoles and leaves us confronted with our own daily meanderings through a fine-line razor’s edge of digital violence. But the company offers us a choice we are inevitably forced to make if we truly want that welcome, if uneasy, peace which we crave. And the solution to how we reach that peace must always come through music and dance.
The music for this ballet was well selected. And the dance was superb throughout. Yet, there were times when I could not sense the same vibrancy of bodies in movement space functioning in counterpoint with one another. The use of space often felt confined with too much unused peripheral darkness predominating over many of the early scenes, an effect which subtracted from the total ensemble energy.