Whether you're looking for another voyage down the rabbit hole or a whole new way to experience the White Stripes, the National Ballet of Canada has you covered next season.
In its first ever co-production with London's Royal Ballet, the National Ballet will host the North American premiere of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Christopher Wheeldon.
A hot commodity in the world of choreography, Wheeldon returns to his roots in story ballet with Alice, a full-length piece in two acts which premieres in London next February before coming to Toronto in June, 2011, hoping perhaps to ride the lingering buzz of the Tim Burton film Alice in Wonderland opening next month.
But Wheeldon is only one of a new generation of choreographers featured in the Toronto-based National Ballet's 2010-11 season, announced yesterday.
Making his company debut will be Royal Ballet resident choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose award-winning Chroma will make its first trip away from Covent Garden for the National Ballet's fall mixed program.
Created in 2006, McGregor's piece features music from rock band the White Stripes. It will be presented along with Crystal Pite's mysterious Emergence, which successfully made its debut in Toronto last spring, and George Balanchine's Serenade.
The winter mixed program features a third company premiere with Russian Seasons by Alexei Ratmansky, now of American Ballet Theatre and formerly of the Bolshoi, in March of 2011. A challenge to its dancers, it will appear with a pair of Balanchine works, Theme and Variations and Apollo, as part of a distinctly Eastern European month that also includes Nicolas Beriozoff's Don Quixote.
"You ask anybody who are the top choreographers in the world right now, and those [Wheeldon, McGregor and Ratmansky]are the three names," National Ballet artistic director Karen Kain said at yesterday's announcement. "I like the idea of internationalizing this company."
The National Ballet was forced to reschedule the Ratmansky-led mixed program at the last minute to avoid a collision with a recently scheduled visit from the Kirov Ballet to the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in the first week of March.
Kicking off the fall season, meanwhile, is James Kudelka's broadly popular Cinderella, and his beloved The Nutcracker will return for its annual December run after strong sales this season.
Joining Alice next summer will be a mixed program featuring Balanchine's classic Mozartiana, Maurice Béjart's two-man duet Songs of a Wayfarer and Twyla Tharp's challenging In the Upper Room, composed by Philip Glass.
And for the first time in two decades, the National will tour to Quebec City in October as part of an expanded Danse Danse series, and then to Montreal, pairing Emergence with Quebec native Marie Chouinard's 24 Preludes by Chopin.
Kain said she hopes to make the tour a biennial fixture, alternating with its western tour. The same program, with Balanchine's Serenade added, will appear at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa the following week.
James Bradshaw