Chroma & Serenade & Emergence

About the Ballets

Chroma

Company Premiere

The acclaimed British choreographer Wayne McGregor revels in the amalgamation of the unlikely – and the results are never less than enthralling.

His multi-disciplinary works emerge from those experimental frontiers where the theoretical merges with the physical, and dance pushes up against and interacts with film, the visual arts, architecture, technology and science. Chroma, from 2006, is a perfect example. Set to a score by British composer Joby Talbot which includes Talbot's unique orchestrations of three songs by the rock band The White Stripes, alongside four of his own original compositions. The work pits the angular, rough-edged music and the choreographer's energetic, exacting style against a stark, minimalist architectural space, allowing the audience to see the nature of physical movement in an entirely new and invigorating light.

Serenade

George Balanchine may not have invented the plotless ballet, but he brought it to a level of perfection and gave to it a style of articulate energy that few have ever matched. His 1934 work Serenade is a distillation of his quietly revolutionary aesthetic and the distinctive poetry of his genius.

Freed from the programmatic burdens of narrative, engaged totally with the effects of the music - in this case Tchaikovsky's sumptuously elegant Serenade in C Major for String Orchestra - Balanchine gave ballet a whole new meaning by revealing the glory of its essence.

Emergence

Crystal Pite's Emergence, created as part of the company's Innovation programme in the 2008/09 season, brought audiences to their feet after every performance and went on to win four Dora Awards.

A riveting, dark-hued work that casts a swarming, scurrying group of dancers, insect-like, in an eerily subterranean universe, Emergence dramatizes, through its mesmerizing choreographic attack, the ways in which the instinct for creating social forms seems hard-wired into life itself.