Performance

The Dreamers Ever Leave You

The Dreamers Ever Leave You

Left: Lawren Harris, Lake and Mountains, 1928. Oil on canvas, 130.8 x 160.7 cm, Art Gallery of Ontario, Gift from the Fund of the T. Eaton Co. Ltd. for Canadian Works of Art, 1948 © 2016 Estate of Lawren S. Harris

Right: Robert Binet's Lake Maligne by Tony Nandi

Performance

The Dreamers Ever Leave You

August 31 – September 10, 2016
Signy Eaton Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario

An immersive ballet inspired by the work of Lawren Harris

Presented by The National Ballet of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario

Created and Choreographed by: Robert Binet
Music: Lubomyr Melnyk
Lighting Design: Simon Rossiter
Costume Design: Robyn Clarke
Video Elements by: Dylan Tedaldi and Ryan Enn Hughes
Performed by the Artists of The National Ballet of Canada

AGO Members and National Ballet Members tickets include admission to the exhibition, The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris on your selected performance date. Public ticketholders may purchase an upgrade ticket to view the exhibition on your selected performance date for $10.

Due to popular demand, a limited number of tickets have become available for The Dreamers Ever Leave You, an immersive ballet at the AGO presented in partnership with The National Ballet of Canada and inspired by the work of Lawren Harris.


This fall, the Art Gallery of Ontario and The National Ballet of Canada come together to co-present The Dreamers Ever Leave You, an innovative new ballet created and choreographed by rising star Robert Binet and inspired by the work of iconic Canadian painter Lawren Harris. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren HarrisThe Dreamers Ever Leave You is an immersive ballet created for a gallery setting.

Featuring music by composer Lubomyr Melnyk and performed by the artists of The National Ballet, The Dreamers Ever Leave You invites visitors to move through the gallery as the performance happens around them. Melnyk will perform his score live in the space alongside the dancers, who will move freely under shifting light and colour, evoking Harris’ majestic visions of land, light and sky.

Says Binet of the work: “Rather than choreograph something that would try to recreate or fix the beautiful, transient moments in Harris’s work, I decided to create a work in which all elements are constantly shifting in response to one another, as they do in nature. The dancers will also be making decisions reactively as the situation evolves. As a result, the performance will always be creating itself, often in unexpected ways.”

The Dreamers Ever Leave You is a celebration of Harris’ extraordinary vision and a testament to his ongoing influence over new generations of artists across artistic disciplines.

“This project represents a wonderful opportunity to strengthen bonds between Toronto’s great art organizations, expand our audiences and nurture a recognized and growing Canadian talent. Importantly, this collaboration is both confirmation that ballet is a vital part of a broader world of art and culture and a fascinating means of deepening our ideas about art and how we engage with it.” — Karen Kain
Artistic Director, The National Ballet of Canada

“Audiences in Toronto have expressed a strong appetite for cultural collaborations between the city’s institutions. They crave to see traditional works of art find fresh life in unconventional spaces, and experimental creativity invigorate familiar places and conventions. Through this imaginative partnership and new work by Robert Binet, the AGO and the National Ballet will bring audiences an experience that blurs the boundaries of the brush and ballet, canvas and stage.” — Stephanie Smith
Chief Curator, Art Gallery of Ontario


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Robert Binet was born in Toronto and trained at Canada’s National Ballet School, where he created a large body of work and received the prestigious Peter Dwyer Award, given annually to promising students. He was appointed Choreographic Associate of The National Ballet of Canada in June 2013 following eighteen months as the Royal Ballet Choreographic Apprentice, a position created expressly for him. Binet has created works for The National Ballet of Canada’s Choreographic Labs, YOU dance apprentice programme, and 60th anniversary Gala in June 2012. As Choreographic Associate, he created Unearth to an original score by Owen Pallett and These Worlds In Us for the 2013/14 season. In 2015, he created The Wild Space Between Two Hearts for the Eleventh International Competition for the Erik Bruhn Prize and Orpheus Becomes Eurydice, a co-production between The National Ballet of Canada and the Banff Centre. Binet has also worked with and created works for The New York City Ballet, The New York Choreographic Institute, Wayne McGregor|Random Dance, the Hamburg Ballet, the German National Youth Ballet, the Dutch National Ballet’s junior company and the Estonian National Ballet, among others.

Ukrainian Composer and Pianist Lubomyr Melnyk is best known for his “continuous music,” a piano technique based on rapid notes and complex note-series, usually with the sustain pedal held down to generate overtones and sympathetic resonances. In 1985, he set two world records at the Sigtuna Stiftelsen in Sweden for sustaining speeds of over 19.5 notes per second. Melnyk has composed over 120 works, mostly for piano solo and double piano, and some for piano with ensemble. To explain the proper physical and mental techniques for his music, Melnyk wrote a treatise, OPEN TIME: The Art of Continuous Music (1981), and 22 Etudes to teach the fundamental levels of his continuous technique.

Dylan Tedaldi, a Boston native, is a dancer, filmmaker, and photographer currently living in Toronto. He trained in dance at the Boston Ballet School and the School of the Hamburg Ballet in Germany before joining the National Ballet of Canada where he is currently a first soloist. He has worked with and danced in ballets by Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, and Guillaume Côté among others. In 2014, his film ‘White Rush’ featuring the choreography of Robert Binet and commissioned by the Royal Ballet of London was live-streamed worldwide as part of the Deloitte Ignite Festival. Dylan’s film ‘Kathryn’ premiered at the 40NORTH Dance Film Festival in 2015. Working closely with dancers of the National Ballet of Canada, Dylan has directed and choreographed a number of short films that aim to make ballet more accessible to a younger audience.

Ryan Enn Hughes is a Director and Photographer from Toronto, Canada. He began his professional career working for The Globe and Mail and The New York Times. In 2009, Ryan was selected as an official filmmaker of The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, creating the film RGB Move as part of the Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition exhibition. Shortly after, Ryan was awarded a Chalmers Arts Fellowship and collaborated with Canada’s National Ballet School to create The 360 Project, a film that captured peak dance movements in 360° using 48 synchronized cameras. Ryan’s work has been exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery of London, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Hammer Museum, The Getty Center, SXSW, and at Art Basel. His work has been profiled in The Atlantic, The British Journal of Photography, The Guardian, Wired, The Huffington Post, Applied Arts, Creative Review, NPR, and on the BBC. Today, Ryan’s commercial clients include Microsoft, AT&T, Facebook, Samsung, Bell, Uniqlo, TSN, TD Canada Trust, and Vice Media. He is a member of The Advisory Council for The School of Image Arts at Ryerson University, his alma mater.

Simon Rossiter is a Toronto-based lighting designer. He has had the pleasure of creating more than one hundred and fifty original lighting designs throughout Canada, including recent works for Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie (Les Paradis Perdus; #lovesexbrahms; Elvis & the Man in Black; From the House of Mirth), Soulpepper (Frankly, Sinatra; The Dead; Thirst of Hearts); Sudbury Theatre Centre (The Romeo Initiative; In Piazza San Domenico), théâtre français de Toronto (Les Précieuses Ridicules; Les Zinspirés; Le Fa Le Do), Theatre New Brunswick (Frankenstein), and Toronto Dance Theatre (New York/Toronto; Brussels/Toronto; Eleven Accords; Rivers), and is the lighting director of Fall for Dance North. Simon has received five Dora nominations for outstanding lighting design, winning the award twice, and is a member of the Associated Designers of Canada.

Robyn Clarke is a Toronto-based Costume Designer and tutu maker; Robyn studied at Ryerson University earning a BFA in Performance Production. Currently she is the Resident Costume Designer and Wardrobe Supervisor of Canada’s National Ballet School. Resent design credits include; Of the People, Choreographed by Demis Vopli and Shaun Amyot (Panamia), The Wild Space Between Two Hearts, by Rob Binet (The National Ballet of Canada), Wave Ring, Choreographed by Robert Binet (NBS) and Chalkboard Memories, Choreographed by Demis Vopli (NBS).


The Dreamers Ever Leave You is commissioned by The National Ballet of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, and presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, on view at the AGO from July 1 to September 18, 2016.

For requests for Verbal Description, American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and/or live captioning for online and onsite programming, please provide three weeks notice in advance of the event date. The AGO will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than three weeks notice. Please note that automated captioning is available for all online programs. For onsite visits, the AGO offers these supports for an accessible visit. Please contact us to make a request for these or other accessibility accommodations. Learn more about accessibility at the AGO.

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