Review: Alberta Ballet's La Sylphide beautifully ethereal yet on point with technical skills

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What would you say to a story about a young man who leaves his own wedding celebration to pursue a mythic sylvan creature whom he cannot resist but cannot touch? I would say that for any happily married man, this simply sounds impossible – therefore we must be talking about ballet and not real life.

And so, when we talk of bringing an impossible fantasy into reality, we must be talking about Alberta Ballet, because the company has reached yet another important milestone – a worthy debut of Auguste Bournonville’s early Romantic masterpiece, La Sylphide, set here to the untouched choreography of Filippo Taglioni.

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It would also seem that artistic director Francesco Ventriglia, who took up his position formally at the end of January, has wasted no time making his mark on Canada’s second-largest ballet company. He provided the most definitive statement possible to open the company’s 58th season at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium – a classic, no-nonsense, hands-off approach to the world’s first pointe ballet, sculpted down to two nimble acts. New director, new attitude, 10 new dancers, new heights to soar – yet all of it can only be built upon the foundation of old, tried-and-true technique. Enter La Sylphide.

La Sylphide Is considered to be the first-ever technical tour-de-force in the early Romantic genre. It forms the bridging point from the old schools of the more male-centred, 18th-century classical dance forms to a new and exciting emerging school of what would become a more female-dominated Romantic era art form, namely the pointe ballet.

In turn, La Sylphide set the benchmark of refined elegance, paving the way for further fantasy ballet classics such as Giselle and La Bayadère. It was due to La Sylphide that the pointe shoe took its inaugural place, supplying the kinesthetic illusion that a female dancer could look like she was floating in the air. The all-white costume including tutu followed naturally.

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The invention of the pointe shoe forced the dance world to evolve and soon embody a brand-new dramatic art form. The aesthetics emphasized pantomime, highly demanding pure technique, and the gentle délicatesse of every tiny gesture – a workshop in ballet and acting fundamentals taken to the extreme.

Bournonville ended up creating the title role of the Sylph for Maria Taglioni (choreographer Filippo’s daughter) and it fell upon her to pioneer this new way to dance and to act through Bournonville’s meticulous and exhaustive technique. Every dancer who has since taken on the Sylph wears a kind of “mantle of succession” since La Sylphide’s first performance nearly two centuries ago, and with it comes the high responsibility to honour what has emerged more and more recently as a living tradition.

Luna Sasaki distinguished herself with a preeminently graceful performance in the title role Thursday night, carrying every movement with studied elegance. Sasaki glided easily from the gentle and understated in Act I, to playful and carefree in Act II. She aimed high for a gossamer quality and held the audience’s attention whenever she was on stage. Her diagonals in Act II portrayed a necessary airy quality while her arabesques were a model of poised restraint, ethereal and other-worldly, twirling away from her Scottish pursuer James lest he touch her, always demure in tone. The supporting 16 female corps-de-ballet sylphs showcased themselves with breezy albeit congealed quiet beauty. They were gentle and other-worldly when needed, especially in the crucial death scene and the haunting walk-past, left to right en pointe, accompanying the Sylph’s spirit to the afterlife.

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For Lang “Alan” Ma, the role of James might well have been one of the most demanding he has had to perform in his career. He seemed to pull it off with a belying ease, particularly in his Act II pas de deux with Sasaki in addition to his divertissement which contains more entrechats in five minutes than just about any other ballet. Almost completely unknown to the audience was the cramp that he suffered in the middle of Act I and his determination to continue bravely, a story that will not soon be forgotten by the company. Ma’s performance, alongside Hotaru Maruyama’s Effie, embodies the rigorous athleticism these roles demand, to say nothing of the positively electric Act I solo taken by Matthew Maxwell’s excellent characterization of James’s jealous rival Gurn.

Overshadowing the story was the well-directed celebration scene toward the end of the act in which the men of the corps put on a fine display of some brash small ensemble dance, their well-coordinated leaps forming an athletic highlight of the night. What came together dramatically, if sometimes a little asymmetrically in places, was a very good corps of bridesmaids, guests, maids and a few witches for atmospheric effect. Dramatically effective, too, was Caleb Durbin’s scary Witch who provided much of the plot’s impulsive movements into momentary vengeance. Durbin might have been one of the most original witches I have seen in ballet in a very long time.

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Much of that surreal sylvan ethos was due to set and lighting designer Malgorzata Szablowska, who essentially held the production together with visual designer Italo Grassi, an effective partnership. They should be congratulated for their work in such a short time.

There were certainly occasions in the corps where it was difficult for them to keep up with absolute accuracy to the score’s many and sudden changes in meter throughout Act I. The common solution to these challenges is for the director to adjust the playback speed of the recording, slowing it down to accommodate an ideal dance rhythm for the performers. Ventriglia was having none of that and insisted that his company dance to the original tempi of the recording which aligns consistently with Herman Lovenskiold’s bright 1832 score. I applaud this decision: Ventriglia is as much a “music-first” director as he is a dancer’s director.

Adding to the Highland atmosphere were The Regimental Pipes and Drums of the Calgary Highlanders who opened the show before the curtain rose. A few in the audience even wore kilts to the performance as has become traditional for remounts of La Sylphide.

But perhaps most remarkable about the evening was the disclosure that Alberta Ballet’s La Sylphide was put together for production in four tight days and with only four weeks of rehearsal – not typical for this kind of technically demanding production. Whatever the results from this intricate and freshly presented sylvan masterpiece, the evening’s performance surely heralds many future triumphs to come for Ventriglia and his new company. And judging by last night’s reception, Alberta Ballet fans couldn’t be more delighted.

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