Portrait of an Artist – The Many Roles of Medhi Walerski

Soft-spoken but emphatic, Medhi Walerski, at 45, is a ballet prince with piercing eyes, a crown of clipped curls, and a calm that borders on a Buddha. Four years at the helm of Ballet BC, Walerski runs between rehearsals and myriad other Artistic Directorial duties at the company’s 18,000 square-foot facility on Vancouver’s upscale Granville Island. He agrees to pause and speak about the company’s upcoming performance at The Soraya on Saturday, November 23, 2024, Ballet BC’s fourth showcase as the performing arts center’s resident dance company. Walerski grows animated in describing the planned mixed-repertory program.

Walerski cherry-picked the evening’s three works in close consultation with Thor Steingraber, The Soraya’s Executive and Artistic Director. Known for his acute dance instincts, Steingraber, according to Walerski, is not only “an inspiration and a leader,” but one of the “rare people nowadays to follow the journey of a company.”

A dance program of this nature typically juxtaposes three discrete and often unrelated ballets. But Steingraber advocated for something different. He envisioned a tour through Walerski’s three roles—as a dancer, choreographer, and now as the company’s director/producer.

The Soraya’s dance audience will undertake a nearly biographical journey through important touchstones of Walerski’s career as it unfurled: first as a fifteen-year veteran of Netherlands Dance Theater (NDT); then as a choreographer creating works influenced by NDT’s legendary director, Jiří Kylián; and now in the catbird seat of Ballet BC, where he curates a distinctive repertory culled from his network of Canadian, American, and European choreographers.

Offering his reasoning for putting Walerski under a spotlight, Steingraber said, “Medhi Walerski is known worldwide for his outsized contribution to contemporary ballet, in a professional life that is still in the early stages of unfolding.”

The Soraya evening opens with “Chamber,” a work Walerski choreographed in 2013 for NDT at the centennial of Vaslav Nijinsky’s groundbreaking “The Rite of Spring” (1913), for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Motoring Walerski’s homage is not Stravinsky’s blistering score, but original music by contemporary British composer Joby Talbott.

“It’s primal, it’s ritualistic.” Walerski says of his work. “It’s intense in its relationship to the music.” Choreographer and composer put their heads together: “Joby and I listened to ‘The Rite of Spring’ a lot. We felt its bold, complex, irregular rhythms. And that’s what we wanted to extract.”

In the middle of the program, Walerski has placed a more recent work. Walerski’s arrival in Vancouver in 2020 coincided with the outbreak of a global pandemic. His “Silent Tides,” for two dancers, bears the timestamp of its creation. The duet, he says, was “greatly influenced by the issues of human closeness that the pandemic more or less forced upon us all.”

“Silent Tides,” which spools to the musical pairing of a Bach violin concerto with modern music by Belgian composer Adrien Cronet, should provide “a space where the audience can breathe,” says Walerski. “It’s an intimate duet for the audience to go through, a nice musical and visual landscape, with silences and pauses. (“Silent Tides’” unisex costumes are designed with partial nudity.)

For the final chapter of The Soraya performance, Walerski commissioned a revisiting of “Frontier,” a work by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, dating to 2008. This ballet, says Walerski, is “very dear to my heart.” Nearly as an afterthought he adds, “Funnily enough, I was part of the original cast.” He’s being modest. In fact, Pite forged much of her choreography while Walerski was still a dancer at NDT.

A work by Crystal Pite is a special event. She is one of concert dance’s top in-demand choreographers. Burned in our memories is Pite’s prior outing for Ballet BC at The Soraya, her droll “The Statement” in 2022, featuring corporate zombies around a large boardroom table.

Walerski shares that the “large-scale ensemble work” will use 24 dancers, and yet, “it’s an intricate piece [that] really reflects Crystal’s signature—an exploration of physicality and narrative through movement. It’s very imaginative and emotional, exploring human themes, via light and shadow,” explains Walerski, a dance exploration between the “invisible and the visible.”

Running Ballet BC suits the strikingly handsome former dancer. Among his many accomplishments in his brief tenure, he importantly has implemented, through a sizeable donation, a 52-week salary for the dancers. And to connect the company’s Canadian past with its future, efforts are underway to enter “a new spectrum in regard to Canadian artists, with a strong focus on emerging artists. Two of our artists-in-residence are indigenous choreographers, something new for me.”

Tethered as Walerski is to his roots, there’s no escaping that Vancouver is “far from Europe” and “quite isolated.” That is a fact that “has its challenges but also its opportunities. It feels like a laboratory where we can explore and experiment.”

Soraya audiences have been in stride with Medhi Walerski’s journey since Ballet BC’s first appearance here in 2020. His memorable “Romeo + Juliet” performed just weeks before the pandemic closures. Now, four years hence, it’s time for a deeper appreciation of the full range of one of contemporary dance’s leading artists—at The Soraya.