The National Ballet of Canada has scored a coup. As it opens its fall mixed program this weekend, it becomes the first North American company to perform the work of two of Europe’s most prolific and inventive dancemakers, Sol León and Paul Lightfoot. will dance “Silent Screen” — its Canadian premiere — a 2005 work often hailed as among León and Lightfoot’s finest.
After almost 20 years, the originality of “Silent Screen” remains startling. Its brilliant illusory use of video projection and the emotive blending of movement and music — Philip Glass’s “Glassworks” and “The Hours” — make for a work that circles through past and present, the real and surreal, with an emotional starkness that can be as spellbinding as it is unsettling and mysterious. “Silent Screen” features a live cast of four women and seven men — an additional man and a young girl appear only on screen — but at its core is a central couple, costumed in black.
The trajectory of their intense and turbulent relationship is traced in an extended opening pas de deux that occupies more than a quarter of the ballet’s 45 minutes. The arrival of another man begins to complicate the emotional landscape, but linear narrative is not the point of “Silent Screen.” If it were, a pas de deux for another couple, costumed in white, and the unexpected arrival of a woman in a vast skirt that spreads to fill the whole stage like a billowing sea, would seem aberrant.
“Silent Screen”.