When Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite created Flight Pattern for the Royal Ballet in 2017, she proved you could use ballet to illuminate pressing real-world issues – in this case the plight of refugees – in a way that wasn’t trite or melodramatic but teeming with authentic emotion. Flight Pattern was set to the first movement of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and now Pite has expanded the piece into a full-length work using the whole symphony.
Rather than an extension of the original, it adds two companion pieces, all on the theme of passage – through places, time and life. In keeping with the sense in Pite’s work that these are real people on stage, the cast is multigenerational. The second short section, Covenant, is inspired by the UN convention on the rights of the child, with six children being supported, guided, lifted, by a mass of adults moving in concert. The final act opens with an older couple (Isidora Barbara Joseph and Christopher Havell, members of the Company of Elders) grappling with loss, the idea of passage from life to death.
One of Pite’s signatures is the use of massed bodies in morphing shapes, like vertebrae curling and flexing, or a whole universe expanding and contracting. It’s a simple idea but it resonates, and has a gravitational pull that draws you in to mesmerising effect. In Flight Pattern she pricks that fabric with individual details, zooming in on a fragment of personal story. In the final act, called Passage, couples come forward in duets of legato movement, bodies full of yearning, striving and reaching; fulsome life force and embedded sorrows.
The design and lighting for the second half, by Jay Gower Taylor and Tom Visser, is glorious: streaks and shafts and delicate veins of light in what looks like the heavens actually opening. With soprano Francesca Chiejina’s celestial voice suspended above the orchestra’s shimmering, mournful music, you might feel as if you’re transcending yourself, especially when Joseph Sissens and Ashley Dean leap on to the stage, suddenly soaring after so much movement rooted to the Earth. Pite is very clever about the effect of movement and the whole vision. She brings wisdom, craft and class, deep thinking and a desire to connect.
• At the Royal Opera House, London, until 3 November.
