Light of Passage is a poignant slice of dance that funnels sadness and drama through the multitude of bodies that fill every inch of stage at the Royal Opera House. Crystal Pite has created a 90-minute masterpiece of movement that ever flows in grief, desolation and optimism. In a snatched space of time, the Canadian choreographer builds entire worlds—cities of bodies that break out of monotonous, cleanly formed lines, reaching, stretching, flapping like falling birds, then tumbling to the ground.
Pite puts the dancers into clusters that form like clots over a wound, only to be picked off and left pouring with emotions smattering across the stage. The powerful images that come thick and fast are at once familiar yet abstract. Scenes from news clippings, film footage of war-torn nations and displaced people come to mind as the vast number of dancers on stage at any given moment build towers of movements from trudging repetition to physical expressivity; human barricades that are felled down and trampled upon.
Pite highlights small details of movement that build emotively with genius precision. There’s an outstretched arm or thigh-clutching as if the limb may be severed. “It's a visceral physical expression of something that’s very hard to speak about,” she says.
The evening is broken into three sections during a 90-minute performance, set to the sublime score of Henryk Górecki’s "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs", conducted by Zoi Tsokanou and sung with deep sensual sadness by Francesca Chiejina.
The first piece, Flight Pattern, dates from 2017 and was inspired by Pite’s response to the refugee crisis. The curtain opens onto 36 dancers wearing oversized, grey coats bundling together, bending heads and then lifting them in unison to the light. The staging is pure and streamlined as the three lines of ballet dancers drowning in the heavy military fabric bend and sway against Jay Gower Taylor’s magnificent set of dark lines and pillars that close in on our vision as snow falls against the darkness. The momentum builds as the cast expands and contracts like a communal heartbeat, bodies moving as one.
Out of the masses emerges a spotlight on two dancers encapsulating the mood and motion of the cast. I saw Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé in a memorable duet riddled with twisted forms expressing angst and pain as they fight it out under a bright spotlight in an otherwise blackened stage. Then there’s the moment when a woman is given the job of carrying the coats as the dancers shed their layers and pass them to her, teetering under the weight. It’s a poignant instant of loss and sadness as the act in itself unearths the emotions lingering in each and every movement of the cast.
After the interval is Covenant, where the performers are children—six junior associates of the Royal Ballet School, clad in white, use the ballet dancers as a human bridge to walk over as a metaphor for hope and support offering them safe passage through childhood. Covenant has its source in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in a version actually written for children to read. “Our responsibility is to ensure that they don’t grow up in war zones or as refugees in poverty,” says Pite.
In Passage, the final 20-minute work, we see the Company of Elders (an over-60s dance troupe based at Sadler’s Wells) represent grief, loss and fragility. Isidora Barbara Joseph and Christopher Havell are the centrepiece of action—a forceful and fragile duo. Around them, the Royal Ballet dancers dart about, lit in streams of golden, flooded light designed by Gower Taylor and Tom Visser, reminiscent of the great masters with fluttering clouds and shapes of red and gold.
The evening carries weighty messages, and yet there’s a sense that, through collaborative creative expression, it exudes optimism. Humans can draw strength and power from coming together and meeting the brutal coalface of life experience as one entity. Large swathes of physicality express heartfelt messages communicated through the sheer genius and bravery of Pite’s choreography. As a dance maker, she’s passionate about the plight of humankind and is deeply committed to using her craft as a force for good. She works with her child in the room. She turns the ROH into a platform for something deeply meaningful and sincere, packed with rare, resonant, lasting imagery that digs deep.
At the end of the first act, the snow falls and the large black columns close in on our vision, squeezing what we see into a small box. The movement onstage continues, it never stops, and in a message of hope—we march forward.