|
Back
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, With a Strauss Waltz and a Praying Mantis Montreal
Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, Place des Arts
10/29/2026 - & October 30, 31, November 1, 2026
Les Songes d’une nuit d’été
Guillaume Côté (choreography), Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Strauss II, Max Richter, Steve Reich, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Tommy Lunaire (music)
Kiara Felder*/Anna Ishii/Carrigan Macdonald (Maya), Maude Sabourin*/Tatiana Lerebours (Titania), Thomas Leprohon*/Graeme Fuhrman (Oberon), Anaïs Roy*/Vanesa García-Ribala Montoya (Hermia), Antoine Benjamin Bertran*/James Lyttle (Démétrius), Aurora de Mori*/Anya Nesvitaylo (Helena), Roddy Doble*/Daniel Léger (Lysandre), Maeva Marcolini‑Bowes*/Sarah Branch (Clara), Célestin Boutin*/Etienne Delorme (Ethan), Les Grands Ballets Canadiens
Orchestre des Grands Ballets, Dina Gilbert (conductor)
Michael Gianfrancesco (sets), Rémi Van Bochove (costumes), Sonoyo Nishikawa (lighting), Karine Cusson (props), Patrick Martel (puppet design)
(© Sasha Onyshchenko)
The prospect of encountering yet another choreographic incarnation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set to Felix Mendelssohn’s familiar incidental music, might initially have suggested a predictable evening. The ballet repertory already boasts such distinguished interpretations as George Balanchine’s, created for the New York City Ballet in 1962, Frederick Ashton’s The Dream, premiered by the Royal Ballet in 1964, and Christopher Wheeldon’s version, first presented in 1997. The surprise was therefore twofold: this was neither a revival of one of those celebrated choreographies nor a ballet relying principally on Mendelssohn’s score, but an entirely new creation by Canadian choreographer Guillaume Côté, conceived expressly for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and accompanied by an eclectic musical collage.
Côté’s Les Songes d’une nuit d’été was less a straightforward translation of Shakespeare’s comedy into dance than a contemporary meditation on the vicissitudes of love, the instability of desire and the fragility of human attachments. The setting was transposed from the Athenian forest to a wedding celebration, where relationships among the guests were already complicated before Maya, a mysterious healer, intervened with a magical flower whose nectar caused whoever imbibed it to fall in love with the first person encountered upon awakening. The resulting confusion sent the young protagonists into an enchanted forest, where desire, jealousy and bewilderment were allowed to run riot.
The departure from Shakespeare was considerable. The original comedy revolves around Hermia’s resistance to her father’s demand that she marry Demetrius, despite her love for Lysander. Their flight into the forest, followed by Demetrius and the infatuated Helena, brings them within the jurisdiction of Oberon and Titania, whose own quarrel concerns a young Indian changeling boy. Puck’s misapplication of the love potion, together with Bottom’s transformation into an ass and Titania’s ensuing infatuation with him, supplies the comic machinery through which the lovers’ attachments are successively rearranged. The eventual reconciliation culminates in the marriages of the young Athenians and the blessing of the fairy sovereigns. Côté dispensed with much of this elaborate apparatus, including the artisans and their play-within-a-play. Instead, Titania, exasperated by her husband’s emotional detachment, engineered a dream in which Oberon became enamoured of an enormous praying mantis. The reversal was striking: rather than Titania falling victim to an enchantment, it was Oberon who experienced an extraordinary displacement of desire.
The introduction of same-sex protagonists was another conspicuous departure, although not necessarily as radical as might initially have appeared. Shakespeare’s comedy has long lent itself to queer interpretations. Hermia and Helena’s almost symbiotic friendship, Titania’s ambiguously maternal and erotic attachment to the changeling boy, and the fairy world’s indifference to conventional romantic arrangements all provide fertile ground for such readings. Nor was this ambiguity lost on Benjamin Britten. His 1960 operatic adaptation famously entrusted Oberon to the countertenor Alfred Deller, whose ethereal vocal timbre complicated the conventional masculine identity of the fairy king and invited more elusive homoerotic associations. Côté’s innovation thus lay less in introducing an entirely foreign element into Shakespeare’s universe than in bringing to the foreground possibilities that had long remained latent in its dramaturgy. Where Shakespeare explored the instability of desire through magical transformations, and Britten reinforced it through vocal characterization, Côté made same‑sex relationships explicit within a contemporary social setting.
The production’s most immediate triumph was visual. Michael Gianfrancesco’s sets were truly enchanting, transporting the audience into an imaginary, phantasmagorical world of such luxuriant proportions that it seemed more likely to have issued from a hallucinogenic reverie than from ordinary theatrical craftsmanship. Giant vegetation, insect imagery and fantastical puppetry reduced the protagonists to creatures of almost Lilliputian dimensions, exposed to the caprices of a natural world that appeared capable of manipulating them at will. Rémi Van Bochove’s costumes contributed substantially to this transformation, while Patrick Martel’s enormous puppet was particularly impressive: majestic in its dimensions, yet sufficiently disturbing to suggest that the dream might at any moment turn into a nightmare. Sonoyo Nishikawa’s lighting further enhanced the shifting boundaries between reality and enchantment.
The dramaturgy was less immediately intelligible. The identities of the protagonists were not always readily apparent, and the visual differentiation among the young couples was insufficient. One could reasonably surmise that the dancer in the blue dress, whose demeanour suggested a maternal figure, was Titania; likewise, the gentleman who became enamoured of the gigantic praying mantis could only be Oberon, now subjected, in an inverted jeu de miroirs, to the very sort of enchantment Shakespeare had inflicted upon his wife. Such identifications, however, were occasionally matters of deduction rather than dramatic revelation. Perhaps Côté considered the precise mechanics of the narrative secondary to the larger choreography of desire. Nevertheless, the praying-mantis episode would have acquired greater dramatic force had Oberon’s pompousness and emotional complacency been more conspicuously established beforehand.
Côté’s choreographic vocabulary proved considerably more assured. Combining classical ballet with contemporary movement, it offered a fascinating synthesis that resisted any rigid correspondence between the conscious and subconscious worlds. One might have expected classical technique to represent the ordered reality of the wedding, with modern dance reserved for the irrational disturbances of the forest. Instead, Côté favoured a continuous fusion of the two idioms. The vigorous, expansive arm movements of the opening sequences were incorporated with remarkable naturalness into the subsequent classical vocabulary, producing a physical language that was both disciplined and uninhibited.
Humour was perhaps the choreographer’s most distinctive asset. The most memorable instance was his treatment of Johann Strauss II’s waltz, which became a deliciously irreverent deconstruction of that graceful, ceremonious and unmistakably old‑fashioned dance. Retaining just enough of its familiar elegance to make its distortions all the more amusing, the choreography was hilarious without descending into vulgarity or mere slapstick. Côté displayed a commendable gift for comic timing, making humour an integral component of choreographic invention rather than an occasional concession to popular entertainment.
The musical conception was initially a source of apprehension. The juxtaposition of Mendelssohn, Strauss, Max Richter, Steve Reich, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and the electronic sound world devised by Tommy Lunaire might have resulted in a disjointed succession of musical quotations. Against the odds, however, the disparate materials produced a surprisingly coherent progression. The Romantic effervescence of Mendelssohn, Strauss’s buoyant rhythms, Reich’s repetitive structures and Richter’s contemporary orchestral language generally served the choreographic argument, while Satie and Debussy contributed more elusive changes of colour and atmosphere. There were moments when the collage fractured the emotional continuity, and certain transitions appeared more intellectually ingenious than dramatically inevitable. Nevertheless, Mendelssohn’s return at the conclusion, with the Adagio from his Third Symphony, provided a welcome connection with Shakespeare’s original sound world and brought the musical journey to a persuasive culmination. Dina Gilbert deserves particular credit for coordinating the orchestra with the electronic material, maintaining an admirable cohesion between live performance and recorded sound.
The more expansive conception of love underpinning Côté’s interpretation emerged naturally, without appearing imposed as a fashionable ideological proposition. Yet the relationships were not necessarily reconciled in the conventional sense. Rather than offering a neatly resolved succession of couples, the conclusion provided a snapshot of human attachments in all their provisionality, accepting the contradictory and sometimes subconscious nature of desire. Indeed, if one insists upon examining the work through a contemporary lens, one might reasonably question whether Maya’s philtre was still necessary to unleash the characters’ suppressed inclinations. In a society ostensibly more accommodating of sexual freedom and unconventional relationships, the supernatural intervention occasionally seemed to furnish an explanation for desires that no longer required such elaborate justification.
Nevertheless, Côté’s creation was a thoroughly engaging achievement. Its visual extravagance, accomplished synthesis of classical and contemporary movement, infectious humour and surprisingly coherent musical architecture made for an evening of considerable pleasure. Its dramaturgical ambiguities and occasional discontinuities did not entirely disappear, but neither did they substantially detract from the choreographer’s imaginative resources. Rather than competing with the canonical interpretations of Balanchine, Ashton or Wheeldon, Côté fashioned a distinctly personal response to Shakespeare, using the enchanted forest to contemplate sexual freedom, the fragility of human relationships and the inexhaustible capacity of desire to unsettle established arrangements. A midsummer dream, certainly; but one in which a Strauss waltz and an enormous praying mantis proved irresistible theatrical ingredients.
Ossama el Naggar
|
