Ballet B.C. makes a Euro connection with UN/A

Spanish choreographer Cayetano Soto headed to Munich to hone his craft; now he travels the world, and has a new work for Ballet B.C.

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      Cayetano Soto’s parents might not have taken him seriously when the young dancer, who grew up in the sun-soaked, colourfully tiled Mediterranean city of Barcelona, said he wanted to relocate to Germany.

      “It was always clear: I would say to my parents, ‘I will move to Germany,’ and my father was always joking, ‘You think you’re going to live better there?’ And I said, ‘Yes!’ ” the affable artist tells the Straight with a laugh over the phone from Munich, where he now lives.

      It turned out the younger Soto was right. Germany has opened up the world to the in-demand choreographer and offered him chances to develop his craft that he probably never would have had if he’d stayed in Catalonia. There were few opportunities for contemporary dance in his home country.

      After studying dance in Barcelona and the Netherlands, he landed a contract to perform with Ballet Theater Munich, where he also started choreographing. “I have to say I am happy to live in Germany and I can really connect with the mentality, in a way,” he says, and then, when pressed, he admits: “I miss the sun and maybe the warmth of the people. But there is a saying: you will be a prophet but not in your own country. And in my own country so few people know me.”

      Happily, that is no longer the case in much of the rest of the world. Having moved to Munich, Soto now creates work from São Paulo to Santa Fe—and is making his debut at Ballet B.C. in its season-closing program, UN/A. This will be exciting news for anyone who caught Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal’s anniversary program last year: his restless, hard-edged Fuel, with its maniacal, driving duets, was a piece artistic director Louis Robitaille said was a nod to “the future of dance”.

      Soto is making a name for fierce, virtuosic yet unusual partnering and a cinematic style.

      Ballet B.C. artistic director Emily Molnar, who also found success in Germany (with William Forsythe at Ballett Frankfurt), has tapped Soto for a mixed program made up entirely of premieres, with work by Gustavo Ramirez Sansano and Montreal’s Gioconda Barbuto. In fact, Molnar has had her eye on him for a long time, and had to wait two or three years before he had room in his schedule to come here. “Aside from Ballets Jazz, he has never created for another Canadian company,” Molnar says over the phone from her downtown office. “I think he has a very unique, individual style that’s very distinct to him. It’s not movement for movement’s sake; he’s a real sculptor of ideas in the body.…He’s pulled out a lot from the dancers.”

      Michael Slobodian dances in Twenty Eight Thousand Waves by Cayetano Soto
      Michael Slobodian

      Soto, who took the job partly because of the strong reputation Ballet B.C. has in Europe, found Molnar’s young, daring dancers a perfect match for his edgy work and demanding process. “Now the level of dancers in the world is going very high—and here, I have to say the company has been amazing to work with,” he says, commending their commitment. “Although they are very young, they are very mature.”

      You can expect Soto’s piece, called Twenty Eight Thousand Waves, to be moody and intense, set to haunting music by Bryce Dessner and David Lang.

      “I think one piece leads me to the next one, always,” he says. “My inspiration at the moment is what is going on with me, so it’s very subjective, but it can be universal as well.”

      Waves follows a piece he just finished at Nederlands Dans Theater 2 that he says closed a chapter on the demons he was dealing with. So the new work, he tells the Straight, is about opening doors. “And of course if you want to open new doors you have to be very strong as a person,” he says. Not surprisingly, this has also led him to themes of death and rebirth here.

      But Soto always brings strong imagery into the studio as well, with ideas for sets, lighting, and costumes already circulating in his head when he begins. This show’s title refers to a 2005 film, The Secret Life of Words, by fellow Catalonian Isabel Coixet, about the victim of an oil-rig fire and the woman who comes to care for him: in it, a little girl refers to the 28,000 different waves that rock the rig daily.

      Cayetano Soto who’s known for his unusual partnering and cinematic style.

      Not surprisingly for an artist so adept at conjuring entire environments of light, costume, and movement on-stage, Soto is a film fan. “I always think, ‘If I wasn’t a choreographer, I would be a director,’ ” he says. “I admire very good directors, like Godard or Almodóvar.”

      Expect to see movement and imagery that play with the ideas of water and the pounding of waves, and, as usual for Soto, intricate, tsunami-force duets. “Where I feel more powerful is doing partnering work,” he explains. “Although there are solos and a lot of group sections at the end of the piece, the combination of two bodies is what I love the most. I love the movement and shape of two bodies together.”

      Whether it’s in those pairings, or in gorgeously patterned group numbers, expect unexpected moments from Soto’s work: it’s something he strives for. “If I surprise the dancers or I surprise myself in the process, then I have it. We have it,” he says.

      Soto’s innovations have put him more and more in demand. That means he’s spending less time in his adopted home in Germany, of course. In fact, home is becoming a fluid term these days, as Soto travels the world.“I have to say I feel very privileged that I am doing what I really wanted to do, and I am really enjoying the energy and drive of this moment,” he says. “I do take care I don’t burn out. But as much as I work, I get more ideas. It’s when I’m at home resting that the ideas kind of stop.”

      Ballet B.C.’s UN/A is at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre next Thursday to Saturday (April 24 to 26).

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