The National Ballet of Canada's Genevieve Penn Nabity in Flight Pattern.Ted Belton/The National Ballet of Canada
Flight Pattern / Suite en Blanc
Choreographer: Crystal Pite, Serge Lifar
Company: National Ballet of Canada
Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
City: Toronto
Year: To March 6, 2026
Dance can be purely about form; it can also be primarily driven by theme. If you are looking for two short works that epitomize these extremes without any overlap or connective tissue, you’re unlikely to find a more apt pairing than the National Ballet of Canada’s latest winter mixed program.
The evening’s marquee work is Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern, which premiered at the Royal Ballet in 2017 to nearly unanimous acclaim. I reviewed that production at Covent Garden and was not only moved by Pite’s emotional depiction of the global refugee crisis, but also impressed by her unorthodox material. There aren’t many ballets about geopolitical problems, and Pite’s determination to tread on terrain both topical and evolving felt new for the form – and exciting.
Everything that I found visually breathtaking in 2017 is still there in the Toronto production. Clusters of bedraggled dancers form collective shapes that suggest human suffering en masse. The chiaroscuro lighting (designed by Tom Visser) turns a sea of naked arms into a configuration of bird wings, seemingly soaring beyond despair. Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, with its fleeting soprano solo (sung beautifully by Measha Brueggergosman-Lee), evokes wordless shades of grief.
Aidan Tully and Ben Rudisin in Flight Pattern.Ted Belton/The National Ballet of Canada
So why wasn’t my breath taken this time around? I’ve been experiencing diminishing returns with Pite’s choreography, whether revisiting specific works or considering her oeuvre as a whole. It’s partly the repetitiveness of her vocabulary – rippling bodies, rocking torsos, shaking heads – a minimalism that doesn’t offer more on second viewing or leave space into which a new cast can breathe fresh air.
Her creations also rely on the heavy layering of the same ingredients: a sombre classical score; bleak lighting; a constricted set; a sea of bodies pulsing and heaving. It starts to feel a bit like prepackaged doom and gloom.
Flight Pattern is almost entirely an ensemble piece, with one couple – Hannah Galway and Siphesihle November – breaking from the group to perform a more complex and virtuosic pas de deux. Pite has seized on Galway and November as her go-to couple in the company; they also danced featured roles in her 2020 ballet Angels’ Atlas.
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Her choice is understandable; they are two intense, dexterous dancers with an instinctive understanding of a contemporary vernacular, but their previous casting in similar material added to the overall sense of déjà vu. And then their performances are better in Angels’ Atlas because the choreography gives them more to do, with a richer tug-of-war dynamic and more demanding partnering.
But what I found most difficult about revisiting Flight Pattern was the sense that a single reaction was being elicited from me. The piece exists to move us, and our emotional compliance feels baked into the structure. It worked for me in 2017 but, this time, unable to applaud the intensity of my own reaction, I wasn’t sure what else to admire.
The work wasn’t helped by pairing it with Serge Lifar’s 1943 neoclassical Suite en Blanc, a ballet that is unashamedly just about the steps. Maybe programming these opposites back-to-back was meant to suggest a Manichean world of light and dark, or give us dichotomous approaches to dancemaking. I found the conceptual whiplash a bit like being rear-ended by a Land Rover while riding a bicycle.
Artists of the Ballet dance in Serge Lifar’s 1943 neoclassical Suite en Blanc.BRUCE ZINGER/The National Ballet of Canada
Happily, Lifar’s work, which opens the evening, isn’t marred by the retrospective clash. Lifar’s ballets are sometimes regarded as Balanchine-lite (he began his career at the Ballet Russes performing Balanchine’s earliest creations), but this dismissal seems unfair when watching this elegant 45-minute piece with its jaw-dropping ensemble tableaux and endless technical trickery.
Set to Edouard Lalo’s playful, Spanish-inflected Suite from Namouna (1882), the ballet is made from the most basic studio ingredients – clean technique and nimble musicality – then dressed for the stage in crisp white tutus and unfaltering synchronization. It’s all for show but never showy.
Like Balanchine, Lifar had a keen ear and wanted to do justice to the music’s intricacies and vagaries, often choreographing every note. He knew that playful pointe work, replete with teases and flourishes, could be more dramatic than bravura jumps. And then Suite en Blanc was made for the Paris Opera Ballet when he was the company’s director; the goal was chic, not circus.
Peng-Fei Jiang, Beckanne Sisk and Chase O'Connell in Suite en Blanc.Karolina Kuras/The National Ballet of Canada
To further our enjoyment, the opening night cast was loaded with new principal dancers and rising stars. Agnes Su, who joined the company from the Stuttgart Ballet at the beginning of the season, brought an ethereal calmness to both her solo variation and her pas de deux with Christopher Gerty, showcasing pristine turns and lines with an intriguing aloofness. One sequence demanded intricate co-ordination between the head’s direction and the placement of the feet, which she relayed effortlessly.
Beckanne Sisk, a new principal dancer from Houston Ballet, brought confidence and energy to her trio variation (with fellow new principal Chase O’Connell and first soloist Peng-Fei Jiang), which required difficult balances, turns and endless arabesques penchés. Second soloist Isabella Kinch, whom we’re seeing increasingly in large roles, danced mellifluously through her tricky footwork and chaîné sequences. I particularly enjoyed principal dancer Genevieve Penn Nabity in Valse de La Cigarette, a variation with effervescent flair.
Lifar was no choreographic visionary, and Suite en Blanc doesn’t pretend to offer drama or emotion. Ironically, I found it the more interesting of the two works. It allowed the dancers space to breathe and perform which, in turn allowed me comparable space to absorb and ingest.