Edouard Lock

Choreographer Edouard Lock melds the classical and the contemporary for New Work (with Talia Evtushenko and William Lee Smith).

La La La Human Steps’ Edouard Lock may be calling his latest creation New Work, but its inspiration is more than three centuries old.

The choreographer—who made his name in the ’80s for boldly urban, body-crashing movement and working with rock musicians like David Bowie and Skinny Puppy—now shifts his interest to two iconic operas: Henry Purcell’s 17th-century Dido and Aeneas and Cristoph Gluck’s 18th-century Orfeo ed Euridice. Like most of the company’s pieces since the late 1990s, New Work will be performed en pointe.

Both of the operas are tragic love stories. Purcell’s work is about Dido, the queen of Carthage, devastated over her abandonment by Troy’s Aeneas; Orfeo is based on the myth of Orpheus, who is allowed to return to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Euridice, if he promises not to look at her on the way back to the land of the living. Lock says he’s interested in the audience members’ memories of the operas and what they might bring into the theatre.

“If they already have an association to the themes, the experience becomes more personal but also more chaotic. It’s an uneasy path toward the audience; they will resist, or they will reinforce,” Lock says from his Montreal studio, still a bit short of breath after fitting in his own workout following a rehearsal with La La La. “Also, both had a love story that’s rarely dealt with—the end stage and the memory stage.”

Although he may refer to the themes, Lock, as ever, resists following a literal story line in his work. Too much narrative, he says, “is probably more toward mime”.

Similarly, composers Gavin Bryars and Blake Hargreaves have deconstructed the operas and rescored them for piano, violin, and cello, with sax in place of the singing—all played live by four musicians. But Lock is careful to point out they couldn’t upend the music too much.

“It was important to address them with respect because they’re masterworks,” he emphasizes. “We wanted it so that people who knew the score would still be able to follow it.”

In the creation of the piece, Lock worked with one of the top classical ballerinas in the world, Diana Vishneva—a principal dancer with the Kirov Ballet and American Ballet Theater—and you can tell her art form influenced the piece. (Sadly, she’ll be busy with other projects when the production comes here.)

“She’s the archetypal ballet dancer,” Lock says. “You don’t want to create a situation where things don’t work for her, and it was a listening process for both of us. You can’t underplay the power of traditional ballet.”

Lock draws on that classical language, but he kicks it into hyperspeed: the choreography is complex and razor-sharp, with the pirouettes and partnering executed in a dazzling blur of movement.

“The idea of the body shape being a known factor is naive,” says the choreographer, who’s as in touch with the intellectual as he is with the visceral. “When we move, we no longer can be measured by what society uses to measure—not by aesthetics, not by age.

“I don’t know why this attracts me. I guess it says I don’t understand and I really, really want to think that I don’t understand because it makes people more complex. It gives us back some grandeur. The dance is almost like a piece of white light, and the music and things around it shape it.”

The response to New Work, which premiered at Amsterdam’s Het Muziektheater in January 2011, has been positive. The Montreal Gazette suggested that it “could be his finest creation”, while London’s Guardian said, “Lock has created an extraordinary language out of classic ballet, a language of jabbing, kniving, pouncing pointework.”

Lock was one of the first to use pointe shoes as a contemporary-dance tool—an approach now embraced by everyone from Paris Opera to our own Ballet B.C.

“When I began way back when, the two art forms didn’t speak to each other,” Lock recalls of the contemporary and classical-ballet worlds. “Neither was there very much respect in the contemporary ballet world.…Now that’s changed. A lot of classical dancers are going into contemporary companies, and vice versa.”

After teaming up with some ballet companies, in the 1990s, Lock started creating pointe work for La La La, and by the early 2000s his entire company was stocked with classically trained dancers.

Initially, the transition startled La La La’s fans, but innovating with pointe is just one of the ways the company has stirred things up over the years. Lock created New Work to mark the troupe’s 30th anniversary, and looking back over the decades, he sees several big influences La La La has had here and worldwide.

Of the height of La La La’s rock stardom of the 1980s, when platinum-tressed, athletic Louise Lecavalier embodied the entire aesthetic of the company, he says: “I think people were whispering in those days and we probably raised the volume. We also stripped the differences between genders and brought the idea that dance could be an extreme art form.”

Reflecting on the past 30 years, Lock, who originally studied film at Concordia University, admits he couldn’t have imagined his adventures with La La La or where he’d come artistically. He jokes that it’s his “Tom Hanks moment”: he never knows what life is going to give him.

But he also admits that he feels, in many ways, more confident in the studio than he ever has.

“It feels that I have a history to draw from when I step into the studio, and I don’t have a lot of questions,” he says, before adding with typical thoughtfulness and introspection: “But you can’t know too much; when you do, you start duplicating yourself. It’s just that some things I understand now.”

DanceHouse presents La La La Human Steps’ New Work at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Saturday and Sunday (January 21 and 22).