Crystal Pite’s latest work Polaris is by far the largest of her career, created on a scale she’s only ever been able to fantasise about. It’s set to Thomas Adès’s cataclysmic 2011 score of the same name, and its 60 dancers will be accompanied by an orchestral force that’s rarely heard – or seen – in contemporary dance: 75 musicians who’ll be spilling out of the pit at Sadler’s Wells, up into the balconies and even on to the back corners of the stage.
“The music is so epic, so phenomenal, it’s preposterous to even imagine meeting it with human bodies,” Pite enthuses. “In the last few minutes it goes through profound changes, so intense it’s like poles shifting or planets colliding. In my head I saw it with a cast of thousands, although 60 on the Wells stage does look like a lot of people.”
Pite has worked with Adès’s music before, when she choreographed a production of his opera The Tempest at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. But she would not have considered creating one of her own dances to Adès’s concert music, had it not been for the invitation that came from Sadler’s Wells. Polaris is part of a full evening of Adès-inspired choreography, the second programme in what’s planned to be a regular series of composer-focused events.
Director Alistair Spalding wants See the Music, Hear the Dance to open up perspectives on both art forms, but he says that the theatre “wants to put music first for a change, working with the same quality of composers that we normally do with choreographers. Usually it’s the choreographer who chooses the composer, but this time we’re turning the tables, and seeing how that affects the creative process. Contemporary music has such an important relationship with dance – when it was on the level of Stravinsky and Balanchine it was outstanding. With this series we’re trying to encourage choreographers to be bold with their music – to look more widely in their choice of composers.”
There will be four dances in the Adès programme, two of them new (Pite’s Polaris and Alexander Whitley’s setting of the 2001 Piano Quintet) and two revivals (Wayne McGregor’s Outlier and Karole Armitage’s Life Story). None of the music has been specially composed for dance, but the combination of these four very different scores in one evening is for their composer an exceptional event. “It’s a feast,” he grins joyfully. “The four pieces of music are all so different from each other, written in different voices and at different times. The choreographers are all so different too. And I love to be surprised.” Adès is interestingly non-proprietorial about his music, once he’s given permission for choreographers to use it.
“I’m fascinated by the way they read it and the way they see it in the air. It’s so often not what you’d expect. They notice things and feel things that are new. Music and dance are so closely related, right hand and left hand, and yet they are such very different disciplines.”
For choreographers themselves, much of Adès’s music is, as Spalding says, “very sympathetic to dance”. Sometimes it can spin into passages of extraordinary challenging newness – Adès describes them as ‘moments inside the music when it explodes into the here and now when it’s 2014 and people are walking in space’ – but it can have a relationship with more traditional classical structures, such as the sonata form in the Piano quintet, and it will reference musical dance forms from a passacaglia to a tango or waltz. All these can be useful signposts for choreographers in mapping out his scores, but more importantly the music has a rare theatrical immediacy, constructing sound worlds of colour, emotion and imagery. This may connect to the fact that Adès tends to think about music in quasi-narrative terms.
“I have a sense of the setting, the place and time of a piece – the hidden little theatre in a Beethoven sonata and the characters in it. Maybe that helps choreographers.”
Certainly for Pite, the storyline that she hears so strongly in Adès’s Polaris has been a powerful influence. During her 20 years as a choreographer she’s tended to avoid using pre-existent orchestral scores, in fact she’s worked principally with one composer whose music is written to her requirement. “I’ve always been very hands on with the way my music is structured but now with Polaris it’s completely different. It’s like working to a script – the arc, the pace and the narrative have all been predetermined. It’s an inspiring challenge.”
For Alexander Whitley, the powerful emotional character of Adès’s Piano Quintet is very attractive, but its something that he’s also wary of. “When you work with a score this rich the music and the dance are basically vying for the audience’s attention. Adès’s music is so complex, continually changing in its ideas and continually jumping between moods. I hear a story in it but I want to make a dance that’s one layer away from the music, that doesn’t just replicate what’s in there.”
Whitley is focusing principally on the structure of Adès’s quintet. The title of his work The Grit in the Oyster is a response to the profusion of musical ideas that are generated in the score from its opening themes, and in particular to the dominance of one single note, F (the “fetish note”, as Adès refers to it) as the grit at music’s centre.
Watching the choreographer in rehearsal, its clear how deeply he’s delved into the intricacies of the score. In one section, the three dancers are linked together in a complex section that gathers speed in response to the surging dynamic in Adès’s music. Whitley spends a good five minutes fiddling with the timing, the spacing, the mechanics of a lift, before he’s satisfied that the dance measures up to the music’s weight and momentum. Adès finds the dance-making process fascinating to observe.
“I don’t understand how choreographers can hold the entire structure of the work in their head. The way they work is so precise, for them moving a dancer one inch to the left matters as much to me as writing a B or a B flat.
It’s nice having people at this level choreographing to my music. I do hope Alex has fun with the quintet. It’s quite volatile, quite precarious. I’d like nothing better than to see everyone fall over.”
Adès immediately looks contrite: “perhaps you’d better not write that.” One of the other elements Whitley has to accommodate is the fact that the musicians will be playing on stage alongside the dancers, and that his own choreography will be in some kind of visual competition with them. “When the music is louder and busier then the musicians themselves are likely to be moving more forcefully, so I’m having to think carefully about that. The choreography can’t necessarily be loud and busy at the same time, or we’ll be competing for space and attention.”
Whitley’s choreography will also be competing with the fact that Adès himself will be playing the piano for the Wells premiere. In fact he’s going to be in action throughout, conducting those pieces in which he’s not playing.
Spalding is delighted. “It’s going to be a real event, the cream on the cake”. However Adès says he wouldn’t be able to cope with the evening any other way.
“It’s by far the most comfortable place for me to be either on the podium or sitting on the piano stool. If I was sitting in the stalls I’d be a mass of nerves.”
Adès believes that dance is a wonderful platform for contemporary music: not only bringing it to a wider public, but making it more accessible: “the audience can read the music by watching the dance.” He wishes more composers would write specifically for dance, and in that he includes himself.
“I would love to write an evening-length dance score, and I’m talking to one opera house, so something might happen.”
The problem for him is accommodating his own writing pace to the pressured schedules of the theatre. Recently the American choreographer Mark Morris asked permission to use Adès’s three short piano mazurkas for a new piece, and Adès was delighted by the request. But Morris needed more than three mazurkas to make a complete dance. And Adès hoots with laughter as he does the maths. “Mark said he wanted 50 but I told him those three took me six months. I said, you’re looking at 35 years of work.”
• 30 October to 1 November. Box office: 0844 412 4300. Venue: Sadler’s Wells, London
