Review: Ballet BC – Frontier and Passing Light Up Edinburgh

Ballet BC’s much anticipated stop at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre was worth the wait. It’s a stage that hosts plenty of world-class dance every year, but the double-bill of Crystal Pite’s Frontier and Johan Inger’s Passing as performed by the twenty-strong Ballet BC company may prove the highest light of 2025.

Crystal Pite’s Frontier: A Choreographic Vision of Shadow and Form

Starting then with Frontier, Pite’s updated and reimagined take on a show she first created for Nederlands Dans Theater back in 2008. Having not seen the original, I cannot speak to the changes, but the results are sensational. Dark matter, the shadowy and hypothetical counterpart to the visible matter that makes up you and me, and everything around us, may not be an obvious prompt to dance excellence, but that’s one reason why Crystal Pite holds an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance – and I don’t.

From the opening moments when amoebic-like shadows roll onto stage, the attention to shape and form is utterly exquisite. Not only do the black-clad dancers achieve some truly pseudopod-esque extensions (the ‘feet’ extended by single-cell animals when moving), they do so lit in Tom Visser’s enormously atmospheric weaving of light and shadow.

What follows is an evolving duet between visible matter – dancers clad in white – and their entirely black-shrouded counterparts. Sometimes in-step, sometimes in opposition, they circle about each other like so many atoms under the influence of unseen, primal forces. Whether solo, in duets, groups or the full ensemble, the twenty-strong Ballet BC company and four Rambert students deliver masterful performances. Pite’s emphatic, emotive choreography demands attention to every movement and the chain linking each.

From the opening moments when amoebic-like shadows roll onto stage, the attention to shape and form is utterly exquisite.

Indeed, as with her own company’s Kidd Pivot’s Assembly Hall – seen at the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival – the sheer quality of movement and attention to every detail is razor sharp and exquisitely realised. There’s also a clear and distinct narrative thread, however abstract, driving matters towards a darkness-fuelled finale. Is it an allegory for the end of the universe, however many millennia from now, or the inevitable triumph of the unconscious mind each night?

However you interpret it, this is a singular and arresting journey.

The show’s expansive yet minimalist feel is only enhanced further by the majestic, if bittersweet choral bookends from composer Eric Whitacre, surrounding Owen Belton’s ‘meditation on human breath’. Plus, even in this shadow-ruled staging, scenic designer Jay Gower Taylor’s at first invisible and only gradually revealed architecture adds lashings of mystery.

Frontier is, quite literally, a sensational show. Ballet BC’s artistic director, Medhi Walerski chose exceedingly well when he oversaw the selection of this show as the company’s opening gambit on this side of the Atlantic.

**Ballet BC Artist Vivian Ruiz in Frontier by Crystal Pite.photo©Michael Slobodian**

Johan Inger’s Passing: A Playful, Profound Tale of Humanity

Onwards then to Ballet BC’s second offering on this tour, facilitated by Dance Consortium, Johan Inger’s Passing. Tonally, the two couldn’t be more different, though they resemble each other in their audacious scale. Instead of a landscape of light/dark/conscious/unconscious, Inger opts to tell a potted history of…everyone.

It’s a mostly joyous journey, with lashings of humour and pathos for the Ballet BC ensemble to get their talented teeth into. It begins, and ends with ash (an allegory needing no explanation), at first poured from jars by two figures emerging from opposite sides of the stage. In their wake, and following the path, two more, male and female, almost zombie-like in gait and aspect, until they meet. Courtship, mating, and fecundity follow, portrayed through a blend of contemporary, folk, tap, and something very close to either mazurka or line-dance.

The predominant sense is one of playfulness, whether it’s a uniquely heavy-stepped take on sexual intercourse, a memorably daft birthing scene, or even when tragedy meets comedy as groups of dancers enter and exit the stage wailing with grief or buckled with guffaws. This is life, with all it’s ups and downs, cycles and repetitions, seen as a dance – literally.

**Ballet BC Artist Sidney Chuckas. Photo by Michael Slobodian**

Amos Ben-Tal’s score is every bit as varied as the above requires, encompassing elements of Copland, Bernstein, folk, jazz, and more, before sliding into emotive textures akin to Hanz Zimmer’s organ-laced score for Interstellar.

A Celebration of Human Folly and Fragility

There’s a sense of society evolving in virtuous and more toxic directions as the show progresses, moments of beauty extinguished by the loud and excessively proud. Love is found, broken, embraced, and lost; friends are recognised, enemies scorned. Movements come, movements go, the only consistent truth humanity itself. It’s a challenge to embrace the full complexity of humanity’s progress, but clad in the Linda Chow’s many-coloured, but homely costumes, and destined for a rather apocalyptic finale complete with a never-ending ash rainfall, the momentum of existence is everything.

It’s a challenge to embrace the full complexity of humanity’s progress, but clad in the Linda Chow’s many-coloured, but homely costumes, and destined for a rather apocalyptic finale complete with a never-ending ash rainfall, the momentum of existence is everything.

However epic a visual spectacle the ash-drenched finale may be, it is over-indulged, and suffers from losing any semblance of the wry humour accompanying proceedings previously. In comparison with Pite’s assured and clinically measured final triumph in the shadows, Inger’s repetitious cycle of running, rolling and exiting towards oblivion is lacking.

Final Verdict: A Must-See Double Bill from Ballet BC

However, this one imperfection isn’t enough to compromise the experience offered by this exceptional double-bill of world-class dance, or to qualify my recommendation to see Ballet BC whilst they are still in the country.