The National Ballet of Canada present Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada Pite/ Kudelka/ Portner at Sadler’s Wells this Autumn

The National Ballet of Canada presents the UK premiere of Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada at Sadler’s Wells on Wednesday 2 – Sunday 6 October 2024. This triple bill includes works by three leading choreographers hailing from Canada: Crystal Pite, Emma Portner and James Kudelka. 

Acclaimed choreographer Crystal Pite presents her much anticipated work Angels’ Atlas, created especially for the company,which originally premiered in Toronto in 2020. The Dora Award-winning ballet unfolds against a morphing wall of light that carries the illusion of depth and a sense of the natural world. The dancing body becomes a sign of humanity’s limitations within a vast, unknowable world. The ballet is set to original music by Owen Belton and choral pieces by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Morten Lauridsen. 

Emma Portner’s islands is a sculptural duet for two women in which the dancers are joined, fusing their bodies together as one. The work is set to an eclectic compilation of music by contemporary artists as well as original music by Forest Swords, bringing together hip hop, dub, guitar loops and electronic sampling for a rhythmic, avant-garde sound.   

James Kudelka’s Passion is a love story set to the first movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano in D, Op. 61a. Two couples each stylistically unique – one classical, the other contemporary – weave within the corps-de-ballet, evoking complex relationships of passion. 

Tickets for The National Ballet of Canada Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada Pite/ Kudelka/ Portner are £15 – £85. Visit www.sadlerswells.com to book now.

National Ballet of Canada – Angels’ Atlas by Crystal Pite, Photo credit Karolina Kuras