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A new ballet by famous Chinese-trained dancer and choreographer Wen Wei Wang ends the 2021 season for Ballet Edmonton . Like many other art projects born last year, the work – presented by the Brian Webb Dance Company – exposes the guts of the pandemic experience.

Called Persistence of Memory, the 35-minute ballet can be seen online May 3-8 as a digital world premiere . Visit balletedmonton.ca for details and tickets, which cost $ 15.

“It’s about 2020, the memory (of it) and how we are going through the pandemic, isolated and unable to do normal routines, and unable to see our friends,” says Wang, artistic director of the Ballet. Edmonton since 2018. “It’s been difficult to be alone, not to be free, to be afraid… we’ve been through a lot emotionally.

An emotional calculation

The new ballet isn’t just an emotional calculation, it’s also a triumph of timing and detail, as the rehearsals and filming of the performance took place amid a confusing array of ever-changing pandemic restrictions. When rehearsals started in January, Wang said, only one dancer could be in the studio at a time.

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“That’s not how you dance,” Wang said. “It’s body language, and without dancing together you’re just a soloist.”

But Wang and the nine-person dance troupe, yes, persisted. Over time, wearing masks throughout the process, the group was able to bring more dancers into the studio. They completed registration just before the latest set of restrictions were enacted in April. While the team had planned to record the final performance in the Westbury Theater with proper lighting, they ended up having to stay at the Ruth Carse Center for Dance, the home of the Edmonton Ballet, with simple production elements.

The result, Wang says, sees Persistence of Memory presented as a hybrid of documentary and performance.

“The dance sequences are beautiful to watch,” he says. “I just want the audience to watch – don’t think about it – we bring you to our house to show how we rehearse and how we create works. You feel like you are in the studio and you can see how the dancers breathe and how they work. I think it’s quite different, quite interesting.

While the docu-ballet style is an unusual approach, Wang is used to a challenge. As a boy growing up in China in the 1970s, he aspired to dance. Even though his parents, who were teachers, had other career plans for him, one day Wang heard about auditions for a Chinese state ballet – the Lanzhou Song and Dance Theater – being held at his school. At 13, he tried and was accepted.

Officially, Wang entered the military and put on a uniform to be part of the dance company. But in reality, he had landed in an arts school, where he flourished, eventually becoming Lanzhou’s first dancer.

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“So I was quite happy that I was able to become the dancer I wanted to be, and my parents were happy that I was a soldier,” he recalls.

In 1991, Wang received a scholarship from Simon Fraser University to participate in an intensive summer dance course in British Columbia, before enrolling with the Judith Marcuse Dance Company, followed by seven years of dancing with Ballet. BC. Since 2003, he has been running his own company, Wen Wei dance .

It was Brian Webb who suggested that Wang would be perfect as artistic director of Ballet Edmonton when the job was created almost three years ago. Wang said yes before finding out that Ballet Edmonton, which was rebranding at the time, had no funding from the Canada Council for the Arts. With Wang’s backing, the company now has operating funds from the federal government until at least 2024, an important stabilizer for any professional business.

Brian Webb Dance Company

“Under his leadership, they’ve grown into a very good ensemble of dancers,” says Webb, who has run his own company for 42 years in Edmonton. “He’s also a great teacher and inspires them. They have taken a big step forward in recent years and it has been recognized. It is a company on the verge of doing very big things. “

Wang has created six original works for the Edmonton Ballet since taking over as artistic director. It focuses on Canadian artists performing contemporary Canadian choreography. As his contract expires in 2022, Wang has no plans to leave.

“I want the business to be stable and to have good plans for the future,” he says. “For me, it’s not about working for power or money. It’s to be able to bring the company to the level it wants, a beautiful contemporary ballet company in Edmonton. The world changes. We have to see good work, good art. “

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