Hannah Galway with Artists of the Ballet in Procession.BRUCE ZINGER/The National Ballet of Canada
Title: Procession
Choreographer: Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber
Company: National Ballet of Canada
Venue: Four Season Centre for the Arts
City: Toronto
Year: To Nov. 8, 2025
Tragic heroes can redeem themselves after intermission. Choreographers usually can’t. A weak first act typically portends the calibre of what follows, either because the ballet’s problems are structural or the choreographer has frontloaded their tricks. But Procession, which opened the National Ballet of Canada’s 25/26 season on Saturday night, provided a breathtaking exception to this trend, with a raucously invigorating part two coming swiftly on the heels of a lacklustre beginning.
Procession is choreographic-duo Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s first work for the National Ballet. The married couple are disciples of renowned Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and his revolutionary Gaga technique, a contemporary method that prioritizes how steps feel inside a dancer’s body over how they look to an observer. It’s an anti-performative premise that makes Gaga a counterintuitive pairing with ballet, which is so obsessed with appearances.
Connor Hamilton in Procession.Karolina Kuras/The National Ballet of Canada
Critics often complain that contemporary sensibilities look half-baked on classical dancers, but I think there’s something well worth exploring in the synthesis. I watched the first half of Procession with that potential in mind. Featuring 32 dancers in black evening wear – the women in sleek gowns, the men in tails – the work unfolds on a bare stage set against a vast ivory curtain. The dancers are joined by a cellist (Coleman Itzkoff) and a soprano (Rachael Wilson) who mix languidly with the action, while playing a range of Baroque music. (The orchestra plays, too.) The cast’s movements are mostly staid and restrained; there’s a lot of walking, following and facing each other across the stage. As this continued without much punctuation or crescendo, I became increasingly frustrated by how unused the dancers’ abilities were and increasingly unsure that whatever I was looking for would materialize.
The simplicity of the movement, or even repression, suggests something of Smith’s own aesthetic as a solo performer; I remember her striking A Study on Effort at Toronto’s Luminato festival in 2016 in which the tiniest muscular contractions were somehow dramatic and fascinating. But none of that subtlety could translate in the Four Seasons auditorium; if it was there, we missed it. Instead, I felt lulled by the unwavering minimalism on stage, unable to decipher much in the way of dramatic context or narrative build. In their fine attire, the parading dancers brought to mind the work of German choreographer Pina Bausch, but without the fiery individualism that made Bausch’s troupe so captivating.
Shaakir Muhammad, Christopher Gerty and Matthieu Pagès with Artists of the Ballet in Procession.Karolina Kuras/The National Ballet of Canada
Then there was the constant shadow of Naharin’s work – pieces that Smith and Schraiber danced themselves during their time with Batsheva Dance Company. I actually rolled my eyes when the men effectively reprised Naharin’s most famous piece of choreography, a sequence known as the “chair dance” from Minus 16, in which seated men perform an intensifying synchronized routine to an amped-up Passover song. In Naharin’s version, it’s a powerful comment on religion and community. Here, without dramatic context or narrative thrust, it felt like a party trick.
Smith and Schraiber take another cue from their old teacher with Vivaldi’s haunting Cum Dederit – one of the most beautiful and underrated Baroque compositions – which Naharin used to astonishing effect in Minus 16, pairing the plaintive melody with an absolutely brutal and heartrending lover’s duet. But here we get an innocuous pas de trois between a woman (second soloist Isabella Kinch) and two men (principal Spencer Hack and principal guest artist Alexander Bozinoff). Their unclear relationship and broad movements make the whole thing feel flat by comparison to Naharin’s version.
Spencer Hack, Isabella Kinch and Alexander Bozinoff in Procession.Karolina Kuras/The National Ballet of Canada
So my hopes were low at the top of Act 2. But then everything changes. The funeral is over, the wake has begun, and the young are alive and kicking. What looks like a real car is pushed on stage, a silvery Oldsmobile hearse and, with this bizarre ghostly relic from a bygone era, the madness begins. The men storm in from the wings in twitching leaps and twists. The women’s bodies ripple and contract, as though wringing themselves of grief. A tense duet unfolds between first soloist Hannah Galway and principal dancer Christopher Gerty, as torrid and intimate as Naharin’s best. Near its end, Galway stands on Gerty’s chest and stays there frozen for an extended moment until she gasps and collapses to the ground.
The company looks fantastic as their bodies tremble and flail, giving us a sense of both hysteria and release. Principal dancers Siphesihle November and Genevieve Penn Nabity are able to infuse the madness with their trademark athletic rigour, while a duet between Kinch and corps de ballet dancer Connor Hamilton gives us the feral and sinuous undulations that make Gaga seem creaturely. The change in tone and atmosphere is augmented by music by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, whose Andalusian folk undertones lend the sense ritual. And there are satisfying inflections of humour – sensual hips, dissonant ticks, little head-bops – wrought exclusively through the movement.
This brings me back to the idea that the right classical-contemporary pairing can bring us somewhere new – somewhere where the height of a jump is matched by its emotional grounding and intensity. There’s as yet no name for this synthesis of virtuosity and interiority, Whatever it is – it’s thrilling and augers for good things.