It ends with one dancer rocking another, presumably dead, on an empty stage. There are forlorn duets juxtaposed against groups of bodies that brush across the stage like a plague overtaking a village. “Angels’ Atlas” is full of simulated angst. Soon, in this sizable company work, others join in like a twitchy choir. ![]() (The costumes, by Nancy Bryant, feature striking pants with a slit just above the knee.) Death is in the air after one dancer collapses, another starts to sway and quiver, holding her hands, fingers splayed, in front of her face and chest as they pulsate in and out. Set to original music by Owen Belton, which evokes sounds of the natural world, along with choral selections by Tchaikovsky and Morten Lauridsen, “Angels’ Atlas” is ominous and somber with bare-chested men and women in buff-colored leotards pulsating in earthy unison. The dancers, whether writhing or thriving in Pite’s throbbing ecosystem, sweep along, at times crouching like rocks, at others twisting away like ringlets of water. The lighting, not the dance, is the star - specifically that reflective backdrop, designed by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser. As the work progresses, the backdrop grows taller like the way a wave shoots up sheetlike from the ocean to pause for a glistening instant. In the distance, at the back of the stage, a wall glows with wisps and slivers of light in formations evoking icicles or feathery cobwebs. Eventually, they arch their chests as one their heads stretch back as their eyes gaze out. “Angels’ Atlas,” which had its premiere just before the coronavirus closed theaters in 2020, opens with dancers lying on their backs. More often, they’re earthbound, the stage a landscape of churning sameness. Can viewers feel as if they’re floating in the cosmos? Staring into the void? Vaguely. Pite’s choreography rides on flow - a willowy stream of energy that sends the body bending and curving through space. Sadly, though, it wasn’t nearly as mystical. ![]() ![]() There were similar sensations at play when the company, led by its new artistic director, Hope Muir, performed the dance at New York City Center. “It felt like I was falling within the vastness of it all.” “Sometimes I would experience a dizzying thrill in brief moments of embodied comprehension,” she writes in reference to her piece “Angels’ Atlas” on the National Ballet of Canada’s website. When the choreographer Crystal Pite was a child, her father and uncle talked to her about the cosmos.
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