Murmuration was co-presented by Fall for Dance North and TO Live from April 25 to 28 at Leaside Memorial Community Gardens Arena in Toronto. This was the last performance of a 2024 tour that included presentations in Sweden, France, Italy and Montreal. Murmuration had its world premiere in France in 2022.
Le Patin Libre makes dance like you’ve never seen. In Murmuration, the latest piece by the Quebec-based company, though the cast is almost entirely made of trained figure skaters, there is nothing routine-like in this performance; instead, the craft and athleticism of skating are harnessed in service of genuine theatrical innovation.
Early in the piece, all 14 performers slowly glide from the rink’s outer edge towards its centre, upright and still, as if pulled by some invisible force. If you look closely, you can just make out the faintest carving of their skates, nudging them forward.
Abruptly, the skaters pivot and scatter themselves in a haphazard pattern before converging in a ring that seems to generate its own speed, again despite the relative immobility of their bodies. Soon the swirling becomes frenzied, loosens and falls apart into formlessness, with limbs flying and torsos twisting. It’s a moment of exhilarating release, the first of many.
The paradox of Alexandre Hamel, Pascale Jodoin and Samory Ba’s choreography is that they capture a sensation of suspension – the weightlessness and stillness of a tossed object at its peak – while in motion. Gliding is a feature unique to dancing on ice, and they exploit it brilliantly in this piece inspired by murmurations, the hypnotic mass movements of bird flocks.
The work’s ingenuity is in marrying artistic form and central metaphor, using the idea of murmurations to explore a poetics of momentum: its instigation, disruption, maintenance, reversal, redirection and amplification. Momentum brings objects into relation, and their interactions influence both individual and collective trajectories.
Unsurprisingly, for a piece concerned with group dynamics, Murmuration features mesmerizing choreographic configurations. Consulting with academics, the company looked at algorithmic principles of murmurations, which show how individuals follow a set of simple rules that dictate movement, based on the behaviour of nearby neighbours.
This mathematical approach yields truly beautiful forms where moments of seemingly random movement coalesce into something co-ordinated yet unpredictable. As skaters swoop and lean in unison, arms flung behind them, one performer goes rogue and peels off. They’re noticed by another, who follows and creates a larger following. The structure changes. A new form is always emerging.
In Murmuration, the structure is never static, and the anticipation that builds naturally out of this continuous change is a clever way of sustaining tension and interest. I find myself breathlessly alert, scanning for a signal that might indicate what shift is to come, how the divided group will reunify. It really is like watching a natural phenomenon, something transcendent and alien in the singularity of its operational logic.
The piece’s tone and choreographic style are more varied than the harmony the title suggests. Moments of ominous groupthink are depicted through precise drills with flexed legs slicing the ice. In another section, fluidity is traded for the strain of two performers hauling a huddle of others behind, their toe picks digging in for a foothold.
There are moments where performers’ speed becomes dizzying, with rotations that threaten to collapse and flat-out sprinting that can shift from playful and ecstatic to predatory. The technique is uniformly exceptional.
Some scenes examining conflict feel less arresting or veer into the didactic, such as when group members lunge towards an outlier and stop short, covering the lone figure in ice shavings. The social observation that we often ostracize and mistreat others isn’t particularly deep, but the scene is given some heft by the potent physicality required to humiliate, along with its result: a bent body, ankles twisted unnaturally, sapped of any figure skater poise. And it leads to an unexpected and stirring breakdance-style solo from this performer.
Yoann Tivoli’s lighting does a fine job playing with levels of illumination, including moments of complete darkness where the only perception is the sound of crisp blades on ice. The music, by Jasmin Boivin and Philippe Le Bon, is a simple and effective arrangement of mainly ambient textures that lets the choreography feel expansive, not confined to a particular rhythm.
Murmuration is a dynamic exploration of what it means for us to be with others, using a plurality of configurations and motivations. More than just beautiful to look at, this dance work is something rarer: a real novelty.
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