Music and movement

BASYA LAYE

Ballet BC and Turning Point Ensemble will make sweet music together later this month. The contemporary ballet company is presenting Grace Symmetry, performing world premières by choreographers Kevin O’Day and Medhi Walerski, as well as a reprise of Wen Wei Wang’s In Motion, set to a composition by Owen Underhill. The music for all three pieces will be performed by the award-winning TPE, one of Canada’s leading chamber orchestras, which specializes in music composed during the past 100 years.

Jeremy Berkman, trombonist and co-artistic director with Underhill, spoke with the JI about the collaboration, which audiences can see Feb. 20-22 at Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Jewish Independent: I had the pleasure of seeing In Motion in 2011. I was struck at how natural it seemed to have musicians on stage with the dancers. Have there been any changes to the piece?

Jeremy Berkman: Our first rehearsals with the dancers are actually this week, so frankly, I haven’t yet seen how Wen Wei has changed the choreography, but I gather he has tweaked it. We will again be on stage and, as with the première, various members of the ensemble will again separate from the ensemble to join dancers on the stage, which I agree make for some of the most collaboratively striking moments in the piece. Wen Wei chose Owen’s composition himself after being presented with literally dozens of other choices, as he is very moved by Owen’s music. It is probably Owen who should speak to this more than I, but there are often very interesting tensions between choreographers and composers – maybe it’s about control? But with Owen and Wen Wei there is a remarkably generous and mutually inspiring artistic dialogue that I have been fortunate to witness.

JI: Does TPE perform all three pieces in Grace Symmetry?

JB: Turning Point members will be performing live with all three works on the program. The largest ensemble piece is Kevin O’Day’s choreography to music of John King, which involves our full ensemble. Medhi’s choreography is set to stunning violin and piano preludes of composer Lera Auerbach – someone I think is relatively new to even our listeners – and our pianist Jane Hayes and violinist Peter Krysa will perform this music live.

JI: Can you tell readers something about Auerbach’s work?

JB: Lera’s work is new to us – and we greatly thank Medhi for suggesting it. Lera’s music is extremely rich, inventive and beautiful – seemingly a rather direct line from the music we might associate with Shostakovich and Debussy – but clearly with harmony and rhythm that is very much of today’s musical language. Lera is herself a very fine pianist.... I must say that we also are very fortunate Lera herself is so generous, as there were some delays in receiving her music from her publisher – and so we contacted her directly, and she generously sent PDFs herself to ensure we had the music to practise while awaiting the postal delivery.... Peter is relatively new to Vancouver and is a current member of the Vancouver Opera Orchestra, as well as a member of the Pacific Northwest Ballet orchestra; we’re very fortunate that he is joining us with this production.

JI: TPE has incorporated other sensory experiences into performance – in last year’s Cinema Musica, for example. What does the experience of bringing together movement and music mean to the music end of that collaboration?

JB: I love this question as I personally feel that one of the most important aspects of music making is a physical engagement with the music one is making – and, ironically, I think musicians in general (I at least speak for myself!) are not that comfortable in their bodies – and are, frankly, often educated to channel their entire physical energy as efficiently as possible into their instrument as if it was separated from their body. To work with dancers, who are so emotionally connected to their bodies is just so, so inspiring. One can’t help but at least absorb their energy and grace and want to play music more physically – and I would like to think – with a more holistic humanity.

JI: What has it been like to work with the Ballet BC to bring Grace Symmetry to the stage? Any memorable rehearsal moments to share?

JB: Ballet BC is an extraordinary company of dancers and artistic leaders. What has struck me so beautifully about this company is the care with which each dancer is treated – there are no divas, principal dancers – a seemingly very healthy company of dancers who support each other tremendously. One has to give some credit here to their artistic director, Emily Molnar, and their administrative staff, who must also importantly contribute to that culture.

One interesting moment to share came in our reading session for the music of John King. (For new works composed for TPE, we generally have a reading session about two-three months prior to the première to allow the composer to hear what s/he’s doing and have time to change stuff that’s not working or expand stuff that is, and give us a heads up on what’s coming!) John’s piece is, on first glance, very abstract – we all are asked to make music far more individually than we’re used to. In his music, if we move together, we’re missing some of the point, yet, that is how we are trained to make music together. So, it was interesting to work through the difficulty in the session of feeling like we were unlearning our chamber music-making skills, when, in fact, we finally realized, we were expanding them – opening our ears to a greater palette of musical textures. It’s not a technical challenge musically, but a philosophical one, so the rehearsal discussions were a bit different than typical ones! We’re actually starting our intense rehearsal sequence this week, so I’m sure there will be many great moments to come even before opening night. But I am so struck in rehearsals with how excited the dancers are to work with live musicians – and are expressive of that sentiment – but also how often before and after very emotional scenes between two of the dancers – they comfort and support each other to put a very intimate frame on what they are about to or have just done very publicly.

JI: How does working within a contemporary ballet milieu fit into TPE’s mandate?

JB: Actually, Ballet BC is really a chamber dance company. The national powers that be have decided we can afford only three full-size ballet companies in Canada: Royal Winnipeg Ballet, National Ballet and Grand Ballet Canadienne – and the others, like Ballet BC and Alberta Ballet, are actually half-size companies....

Turning Point is actually a sinfonietta, a chamber orchestra. [Just] as Ballet BC isn’t looking to present half-sized works, [TPE ...] tries not to present music that showcases our lack of size, but rather programs to our strengths, which, like Ballet BC, showcases both the grandeur one can get with a larger company (we’re 17 instrumentalists and Ballet BC is about 16 dancers, with some added apprentices sometimes) but includes the intimacy the big companies can’t get, but we do with a large chamber ensemble feel and culture.... We wish there were additional opportunities to work with Ballet BC to present 100 years of composition but, given this special and infrequent collaboration, our music-making with Ballet BC highlights that aspect of our mandate, which is to nurture great music-making of our time through multiple and interdisciplinary performances – and nurture a more expanded relationship with the composers with whom we work....

JI: How has King’s composition been assimilated into O’Day’s choreography?

JB: Kevin and John have been collaborators before, and it was Kevin who brought John to our attention. As they have worked a lot together, and know each other’s work so well, I think in this case the chicken and egg both came first! We did specifically ask John to write his composition for our entire ensemble, as the other two works on the program featured smaller subsets of the group.

JI: When did you start to play music?

JB: When I was 11, growing up in Amherst, Mass., and knew the band director was coming to my school to introduce the possible instruments to play, I was torn between wanting to play two different instruments inspired by music I’d heard. Judy Collins had released Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” with the stunning English horn solo, and my parents always seemed to have Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra on the record player, and I liked the part where the trombones were featured the best. The band director told me an 11-year-old was too young to play English horn, and I would need to play clarinet first, so I chose trombone.

JI: Can you talk about your role as co-artistic director? What’s next for TPE, you?

JB: Owen’s music was the inspiration for me to form Turning Point – as he had composed an amazing chamber opera (Star Catalogues, we have to re-mount it!) that I was extremely fortunate to play. I commissioned him to compose a work for trombone and string quartet (which I recently toured and recorded with the Bozzini String Quartet) that ranks to me as the finest chamber composition for trombone in the repertoire, so I wondered about forming a group similar to Peter Maxwell Davies’ Fires of London [which is devoted to Peter’s music] but Owen wanted instead to create an ensemble that would play music of other composers. (He’s got a very well-contained ego for a composer!) So, we plotted, and June Goldsmith (with whom I was working at Music in the Morning) offered to present our first concerts.... My role as co-artistic director is largely in contributing to the programming and planning decisions, community outreach, designing and implementing our educational programming and endlessly fundraising! Emotionally, I take my role with the ensemble as trying to lead the creation of a positive and healthy culture of a music-making organization that I wish every organization could have – ensuring that the organization does what it can to the best of its capacity – but always in the more primary role of serving the music and the listeners rather than falling into the trap of primarily serving its own profile.

I’m very active with many groups, one of which, the Peggy Lee Band (led by cellist Peggy Lee) was just nominated for a Juno Award! Others include the Vancouver Opera Orchestra, a Touch of Brass Quintet, the Jill Townsend and Fred Stride Big Band. And, as a freelancer, I’m fortunate to play and record with a wide variety of our community’s great musical artists.

What’s next? The remainder of our season is so exciting, with collaboration with musica intima and Nu:BC in March, and exploring the tensions of and possibilities of working with innovative technology in May. In August, we’ll remount Barbara Pentland’s 1952 opera The Lake, in Westbank, B.C., on the grounds of Quails’ Gate Winery, where still sits the cabin of the opera’s 19th-century protagonist! As part of the production, we are collaborating with Westbank First Nation artists to explore their contemporary and historic relationship with Lake Okanagan, It is, frankly, a thrilling and deeply moving collaboration. Our ongoing educational work, Creating Composers ... will continue with residencies in schools throughout Vancouver, and this is likely as important an initiative as any of our higher profile public events.

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