Robert Binet: Lake Maligne

Lake Maligne is a seven-minute dance performance inspired by works on view in the exhibition "The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris." Choreographed by Robert Binet, choreographic associate, The National Ballet of Canada, and performed amongst the paintings by the company’s corps de ballet member, Spencer Hack, Lake Maligne responds to the light, composition and spirit of Harris’s mid-career landscapes. For Binet, through the dance “the contrasting qualities of fearsome magnitude and quiet isolation present in Harris’s work manifest in the body…all elements are constantly shifting to respond to one another, as they do in nature.” Motivated both by figuration and abstraction present particularly in the painting Lake Superior (about 1923, The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario), the dance brings a human element to these spare, powerful works, paying homage to the environments they conjure while activating them in the present tense.

Lake Maligne was presented from April 6 to 10, 2016. 

Photo by Liza Voll Photography.