Her nonconformist approach to selecting music from many eras and styles, and fusing classical ballet with street, house and hip-hop begins to emerge, as well as highly gymnastic and aerial work on the vines and apparatuses at rehearsal. (BalletX dancer Itzkan Barbosa ‘s father Javier Dzul, an aerialist and former Martha Graham dancer was tapped to coach them on the vines.)
In a recent promotional video, Archibald says, “It’s not a story ballet, but about the themes, about how people treat each other, savagery, finding order, resistance, trust, loyalty, all the things we struggle with in our day to day lives.”
Other symbols in Golding’s book are the conch shell, the signal fire, etc. Will they be represented? Are the characters actually represented?
Symbols like the conch shell and signal fire are abstractly embodied through movement, light, and sound rather than literal props. Characters are present but not named; they emerge through physical motifs and group dynamics, allowing identity to shift and destabilize. Eli is on team Ralph, a protector and ally, and represents impulse and ignition, a kind of living spark within the ensemble’s psychological landscape.
I think I can see how Maslow's and Golding's viewpoints on human behavior are relevant to current events, in particular the chasm between the political left and right, but can you postulate on how you came to pair these two thinkers?
I was drawn to pairing Maslow and Golding because they reveal the fragile tension between hope and fear, between building and breaking. Maslow speaks to our highest aspirations, while Golding warns of our deepest instincts. That tension mirrors where we teeter between collective progress and individual power struggles. Dance became the perfect medium to hold those contradictions in motion. Maslow made it quite clear that we are always going back and forth in the hierarchy, and we can target multiple needs at the same time. For this ballet, it’s important to try to create a work that doesn’t lie in fantasy and escape. We’re just trying to challenge that formula in ballet story telling. Why can’t we make ballet that’s relevant?
You’re also premiering a new work for National Ballet of Canada later this year.
It will be a mental switch from this to that one, but I always do something with a pulse. That pulse is important to me.
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