Light of Passage

Flight Pattern was Crystal Pite‘s first work for The Royal Ballet in London, making her the first woman in 18 years to choreograph for the company’s main stage when the piece premiered in 2017. The monumental one-act work was met with widespread critical acclaim and received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production.

Drawing on Flight Pattern, Pite later developed the work into a full-length evening, comprising the second act, Covenant, and the third act, Passage.

Light of Passage is set to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, a work often associated with the Holocaust that explores themes of motherhood and family separation. Pite gives these themes renewed meaning in a choreography that shifts from the vast perspective of displaced communities to an intimate focus on individual lives.
The large ensemble moves as a single body, row upon row, densely packed, before one despairing couple steps out of the crowd in a searing pas de deux.
A refugee crisis is also a child crisis: every five seconds, another child is forced to flee. The second act takes the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as its point of departure, while the third act portrays the ultimate passage we all must make – from life to death.

Masses of dancers move as a mesmerising whole. Bodies, fluid and yearning, are bathed in shafts of light. A single voice emerges, a lament that distils the magnitude of human suffering. A journey begins…
Crystal Pite, in her distinctive choreographic style, grapples with themes of safe passage, displacement, community and mortality. Set to Gorecki’s affecting Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, this award-winning work is a reminder of the power of human connection in our turbulent times.
In Light of Passage, Crystal Pite reckons with the existential tensions of the human condition, masterfully demonstrating how art can move the soul and provoke thought. In the choreographer’s own words, ‘there is a profound optimism in putting something like this out into the world and connecting to each other through it. When people collaborate to create a work of art and an audience gathers to witness it, there is something very hopeful and powerful about the experience. I want to create conditions in the theatre where we can gather around what we cannot know and grapple with it, together.’