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New Frontiers

Crystal Pite, Medhi Walerski and Johan Inger belong to a shared artistic milieu, and each has cultivated a significant relationship with Ballet British Columbia, directed by Walerski himself since 2020. That sense of artistic cohesion has been one of the keys to the programme’s success during the company’s four-performance engagement at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which featured three French premieres: Pite’s “Frontier,” Walerski’s “Silent Tides” and Inger’s “Passing.” There was something invigorating about Ballet BC’s presence: not simply the arrival of a major Canadian contemporary company, now in its fortieth year, but the encounter with a repertory and a group of dancers shaped by a rare sense of vitality, versatility and freedom from stylistic orthodoxy. In a capital long accustomed to distinguished guests and stylistic eclecticism, this visit felt particularly vivid, as the audience’s warm response made clear. Most of all, the evening owed its success to the dancers: to their technical command, their commitment, and the vivid individuality each performer brought to the stage.

Performance

Ballet BC: Crystal Pite's “Frontier” / Medhi Walerski’s “Silent Tides” / Johan Inger’s “Passing”

Place

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, April 17, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Ballet BC in Johan Inger's “Passing.” Photograph by Luis Luque

Crystal Pite’s “Frontier” opens with a group of dancers in black hooded jumpsuits rising from the orchestra pit and rolling onto the stage like creatures washed ashore. A woman entirely dressed in white then begins a solo of extraordinary beauty. With the arrival of other dancers in white, the piece begins to unfold as a study of the border between dark and luminous forces, reason and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible. The figures in white seem to float in the air, raised and suspended by the dark, hooded figures around them. Tom Visser’s lighting design intensifies the chiaroscuro and works in close dialogue with the score, which moves between the mechanical, electronic intensity of Owen Belton and the spiritual, harmonic breath of Eric Whitacre. The choral passages that open and close the work give it an almost ritual frame, culminating in a final image in which the dancers lie supine with open arms before rolling back down to where they came from. Pite emerges as the evening’s dominant force, commanding the stage with her distinctive compositional clarity and her mastery of both solo writing and large ensemble scenes. What is particularly impressive is her ability to combine visual, sonic and choreographic elements while investing the work with a profound, compelling sense of meaning. Frontier prompts us to reflect on inner fractures and the contradictions that shape us. It also makes us consider the unavoidable human need to venture into the unknown and confront what unsettles us.

Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera in “Frontier” by Crystal Pite. Photograph by Michael Slobodian

Eduardo Jiménez Cabrera in “Frontier” by Crystal Pite. Photograph by Michael Slobodian

Medhi Walerski’s “Silent Tides” centres on a duet of intimate exchanges, offering a suspended choreographic experience grounded in sensuous gesture and fluid physical dialogue, carried by Adrien Cronet’s reflective score. On the Friday performance, Emanuel Dostine and Jacalyn Tatro were mesmerising. The audience clearly adored the piece, no doubt drawn to its accessible poetic language of tension and tenderness, and to the legibility of its somewhat familiar contemporary vocabulary of intimacy. Walerski gives the work a unified aesthetic identity, designing the set and costumes himself: an evocative horizontal band of light suggests the shifting tide of an imaginary sea, while the dancers, bare-chested and dressed in fluid white trousers, are presented with studied simplicity. Given Walerski’s artistic affiliation with Jiří Kylián, one may be reminded of “Bella Figura,” where the bare torso serves a precise artistic purpose, neutralising gendered costume codes, revealing the anatomy of movement, and contributing to a painterly theatrical image. In “Silent Tides,” the choice felt unnecessary and somewhat calculated in its appeal, though it did succeed in hinting at the threshold between reality and theatrical fiction, which in different ways ran through the evening as a whole. The most effective idea comes at the very end: after a series of powerful exchanges, the lights fade just before the dancers embrace, leaving the gesture suspended and making us newly aware of the power of the unseen.

Sarah Pippin and Rae Srivastava in “Silent Tides” by Medhi Walerski. Photograph by Michael Slobodian

Sarah Pippin and Rae Srivastava in “Silent Tides” by Medhi Walerski. Photograph by Michael Slobodian

Johan Inger’s “Passing” inevitably invites comparison with “Impasse,” seen at the Paris Opéra last season: a jewel of layered composition and reflection, demanding and even transformative, for dancers and audience alike. “Passing,” premiered in May 2023 to a musical collage by Erik Enocksson, Louis T. Hardin and Amos Ben-Tal, feels more tentative: an exploration of movement and theatrical image that never quite reaches the structural depth or choreographic density that made “Impasse” so unforgettable. The work imagines life as a shared journey in all its dimensions, with agrarian motifs lending it a primitive, folkloric, earthly atmosphere, beginning with spirals of soil spread across the stage. One of the evening’s strangest and most memorable images, greeted with laughter by the audience, shows a woman downstage left apparently giving birth to the entire ensemble of twenty dancers, assisted by a man as she screams. One by one, they pass beneath her open legs and cross the stage along a diagonal. It is comic, grotesque, almost absurd, but not only that: beneath the parody, the image also seems to touch on the pressure society places on women, and on the female body as origin, threshold, burden and spectacle. Throughout the ballet, folk-dance inflections, vocal sounds, laughter, crying and surreal vignettes accumulate, as if Inger were trying to let raw human emotion break into ballet form. Yet the piece remains somewhat diffuse. Among its strongest elements are Linda Chow’s costumes, which bring colour, individuality and theatrical pleasure to the stage picture. The ending moves towards a romantically regressive vision of humanity stripped of social convention: under falling snow, the dancers remove their costumes to reveal nude bodysuits, while the snow gradually covers the soil.

Across the evening, passage emerged as the linking thread, appearing both as metaphor and as concrete movement through physical and social space: a force through which relations between individuals and groups are configured and transformed. Taken together, the programme seemed almost to restage the logic of the threshold described by Arnold van Gennep, moving through the phases of separation, transition, and incorporation. Pite explored the stark separation of black and white, darkness and radiance, visible and invisible worlds; Walerski inhabited the floating space of transition, tracing shifting relations of intimacy through the dynamics of a couple; Inger opened the evening onto a more social and ritual dimension of incorporation, with its gestures of aggregation, conviviality, and collective passage from nature to culture and back again. To stand at a threshold between social, psychological, or cosmic orders, and then to cross it with, or through, another, is to be reminded of one of the great negotiations of human life: that between solitude and relation. This may well have been the evening’s deepest image, and its most lasting takeaway.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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