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By Deirdre Towers/Follow @deirdre.towers on Instagram
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Published on April 20, 2023
Boston Ballet in "La Mer"; photo by Liza Voll
Dance Company: Boston Ballet
Venue: Citizens Bank Opera House, Boston, MA
Date: April 14, 2023
Choreographers: Justin Peck, Nanine Linning
Composers: Sufjan Stevens, Claude Debussy
Costume Designers: Janie Taylor, Yuma Nakazato
Video Scenographer: Heleen Blanke
The Boston Ballet delivered an unforgettable program with sterling performances, triggering a staggering span of emotions. The men in today’s company dance with such freedom that one can get a visceral high from simply watching them. The two pieces presented, Justin Peck's Everywhere We Go, set to a contemporary piano solo by Sufjan Stevens, and Nanine Linning's La Mer, set to an orchestral score by Claude Debussy, evoke polar opposite reactions.
Peck’s choreography, commissioned by New York City Ballet in 2014, is a call to celebrate life and love. Here the company embraces the idea that "Everything is Beautiful at the Ballet." Linning’s work, which had its world premiere April 6, 2023 in Boston, is a call to action, focusing on our responsibility to be involved with climate change and our connection to the plight of the ocean. The yin/yang balance of the program stirs the conscious and subconscious equally, honoring neo-classical tradition and contemporary innovation.
Both pieces involved large casts, showing off the company’s polish, exuberance, superb musicality and immaculate bodies. The costuming for Everywhere We Go, as one effusive audience member explained, “makes you feel that you are in Paris.” For Peck's finale, after exuberant jumps and leaps, the dancers bring each other to rest on the stage with a gentleness rarely seen in ballet.
Linning’s La Mer submerges us into an environment fraught with disasters. And this Dutch choreographer shies away from little. In each section, her titles alone spell out her grave concerns and ambitions for the audience to consider: Extinction, The Luring Call of Greed, Oil Spill Song of the Sirens, Deadline, Turmoil of Mankind.” Sickled feet and hands claw upward. Fabric obscures the vision of one soloist. The artist says, “I see the comparison of the ocean with the body, as my own body, and its fragile, inner ecosystem.”
In a talk-back with Linning, Boston Ballet’s artistic director Mikko Nissinen and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Research Communications Director Ken Kostel commented on the surprising optimism of the scientists and their pleasure in being involved in this collaboration. At this time, we also learn that the music director, Mischa Santora, had suggested the inclusion of Debussy’s “Nocturne’s: III. Sirenes, written between 1892 and 1899, which led to the Lorelei Ensemble singing on stage with the dancers — a hauntingly effective tactic.
The company has also made great use of media to deepen the experience of their audience. A five part docuseries, La Mer, is available to watch on YouTube.
