Renowned for her flowing, organic and poetic style, Crystal Pite has succeeded in bringing her surprising and innovative dance approach to a wide audience. Fascinated by familiar storylines of love, conflict and loss, and the body’s role in providing the illustrative shape of those stories, in Pite’s vision, life is an epic tale which she strives to reflect in her ballets through the viewer’s own tale.
Both of the works (Parade and Frontier) center around the theme of the Frontier – the border between what we know and what we do not know. Frontier looks outward to the frontier of the universe and explores the dark and invisible forces that shape and evolve our galaxy and ultimately, us.
Experimenting with light and shadows, Set Designer Jay Gower Taylor has established two co-existing environments – an interior and an exterior space separated by walls or scrims. The interior space contains a visible, recognizable and known world, with the relationships and story-lines that are inherent. The exterior space portrays a limitless frontier, inhabited by shadows. Pite ‘s task is to try to connect these two worlds to emphasize a sense of something existing beyond what is visible or tangible.
In Frontier, “dark matter” and “dark energy” are the terra incognita of our day. Making up roughly 96 percent of the observable universe, dark matter can be perceived and proven, but no one knows yet what it actually is and no one has seen it. What one can see is the effect it has on galaxy speeds, structures and evolution. The ballet explores the parallel between what we do not know about the universe, and what we do not know about the mind.