At the 17th Gala des Étoiles in Montreal last September, Canadians for the first time saw the new face of 21st century ballet, Americans Rasta Thomas, 19, and Adrienne Canterna, 18. Don't dare typecast this high-energy duo. They've won Varna and Jackson, toured Asia, done galas, danced principal roles. But along with jetes and pirouettes, they can as easily perform synchronized gymnastic flips, as they did in their Gala pas de deux, Unfolding, a tribute to youthful romance by Vladimir Anguelov. "Eventually in the course of my career I'll do all the classical ballets," said Thomas during an interview backstage at Place des Arts a few hours before the Gala curtain. Music from Le Corsaire swept from the stage where Canterna was rehearsing the show's finale with the Royal Ballet's Carlos Acosta. "But right now I want to find the new Jirí Kiliáns to work

Whereas some classical dancers much older than Thomas are ill at ease talking about themselves and their careers, Thomas is as effervescent as a newly opened bottle of champagne. He is the portrait of a life devoted to movement, and not just dance, for he is a 4th Dan in Tae Kwon Do, a former Maryland State Boys' Gymnastics Champion, and the holder of a Junior Olympic swimming record. If his father had not "punished" him by sending him to dance classes for acting up in martial arts class, Thomas says that he probably would not have taken up dance but become an athlete or made martial arts films. Classical ballet seems but a stopover on the road to another destination.

He performed at the 1999 Academy Awards, guested with American regional ballet companies, danced Basilio in Don Quixote with the Ochi Ballet in Asia ("My most memorable experience so far. At my premiere, I came on with a guitar and the strap broke.") He performed last year at the Gala des Étoiles held in Greece. "I do get tired living out of a suitcase and my constant, constant questioning - am I dancing well enough? It's one thing when you're young and your mother and father are telling you what you're doing is great. But when you're on your own, have to pay a mortgage, take care of responsibilities, there's no one to tell you if you're on the right path."

A 19-year-old dancer worried about his mortgage? Thomas grew up in a fast lane. "I don't know any other childhood. I doubt it was the same as other people's, but I can't compare. For me, it's normal. A lot of my peers are 18 and they're millionaires and this is the lifestyle we live." The classical vocabulary is too limiting for him, he says.

So is the ballet world. "I want to do commercials, films - I want to dance for the people, not the ballet world. That's why I'm doing things with Barbra Streisand, Debbie Allen - more mass media. People who are educated will go to Swan Lake, but my peers? They don't. They're on the Internet having a good time trading stocks." He obviously enjoys the spotlight - dancing is cool. As poised and confident as he is, he does not give the impression of being above it all. "There's always someone better - there's no need to be cocky.

Ballet is a perfect art, and my body's not perfect. So already there's no way I can say that I've 'conquered' ballet. What to improve? My turnout, flexibility, charisma, control. Once a week maybe I'll find a new muscle in my inner thigh and I'll say, oh my gosh, that's what my teachers have been yelling about." He studies at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C., with five ballet teachers, most of whom were Russian trained, and takes additional classes in jazz. For specific roles, he'll take classes with whichever teacher is best to help.

He once feared burnout, but no longer. Now, he says, he is in control. Controlling his life is clearly on his mind, and not only the big detailsof his career. At rehearsal, dissatisfied with the lighting of Credo, his martial-arts-inspired Gala solo, he descended from the stage and politely yet pointedly went over the lighting sequence with the technicians in their booth. Although he still won't turn down a performance, he is gaining more freedom to choose what he wants to do. Nonetheless, if he wants to perform a role with a specific company, he must send in an audition tape "like everyone else."

Soaring so high so young - how does he come down? The martial arts discipline of respect for one's opponent has remained a part of his outlook since childhood. A more recent interest is Zen, because, he says, "it's non-conformist. It's a philosophy of treating people as you'd like to be treated. It's a politeness - the gentle warrior." He and Canterna have teamed many times over the last few years, the result of a friendship that was struck almost 10 years ago when, Canterna recalls, Thomas happened to wander into the ballet school in Maryland where she was studying. At Jackson in 1998, where he won the men's senior gold and she won the junior women's, they performed Shogun, a pas de deux choreographed, like Unfolding, to set off their eclectic training. "I've done galas before, in Japan, but never one this big, where everyone is a star," confessed Canterna during an interview just before the Montreal show. "And then to dance the closing piece with Carlos Acosta - it's something else that I can't believe. You know, I was just thrown into it, but I would never take it back - ever. Yesterday I met Carlos and danced with him for the first time. He's a nice guy. It would have been different if he'd been someone who said, 'Oh, I don't want to dance with an 18-year-old.' But, no, he's very sweet."

Like Thomas, Canterna has come up very fast, very young, and does not seem to rest. The day after the Gala, she was flying off to South Korea to dance in Don Quixote with a local ballet company about to undertake a major European tour. Just five years earlier, she recalled, she had waited backstage at American Ballet Theatre to get José Carreño's autograph. It was "totally surreal" for her to think that she and Carreño would be performing in Montreal on the same stage. She admitted asking Gala organizer Victor Melnikoff whether she really belonged in the show. Melnikoff, the keenest eye for ballet talent since Sol Hurok, told her "you wouldn't be here unless you belonged." Following Jackson, she received many offers to enter companies, but she could not "because I was 15. I didn't want to join a company until I'd finished school. My parents are very big on education, which is good, because if anything ever happened and I couldn't dance, I'd need that."

In compensation, Jackson gave her a good deal of stage experience, which, added to the numerous other dance competitions she had entered, served as a solid training ground for overcoming stage nerves. She joined the Kirov Academy after Jackson, grateful for her two years there because, she says, "it cleaned up my ballet act a lot." Her earlier training had included tap, gymnastics, contemporary, jazz. Now graduated, she is looking forward to going on a European tour, which will mean new exposure for her. Afterwards she will start looking to join a classical company, probably in North America, that has some Balanchine and contemporary repertory. "I'd like to join a company as a soloist. I don't think I deserve to be a principal yet, though I'm dancing principal roles. As a soloist, I'd get more experience in the company."

At 18, she is already aware of the dancer's ticking clock. Like Thomas, Canterna wants to pack as much dance into her career as she can - then move on to something else. "I don't eat, sleep and breathe dance, which I think is good. There's so many things that are important to me outside ballet. I hope to do something else after I finish my dance career. I change my mind all the time between medicine or being a lawyer or a sports therapist. Having a family. There are so many things to do. To limit yourself to one thing is ridiculous." Expect to see them again at next year's Montreal Gala. <end>

View From Vancouver
By Kaija Pepper

Peter Bingham, Canada's master of improvisation, celebrated the 25th anniversary of his life in dance this fall. Back in September of 1975, Bingham took his first dance class with Linda Rubin at the Western Front Lodge, the same place where he can be found today with his own company, EDAM (Experimental Dance and Music). He fell in love with the radical, caring aesthetic Rubin introduced to the Vancouver dance scene, combining elements of improvisation with a Graham-based modern dance technique and body work. The following year, two Americans, Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, brought the new and athletic ideas of contact improvisation to town and Bingham never looked back. The basic elements of his dance practice were in place and he's spent more than two decades perfecting and developing his art.

In 1977, Bingham, Andrew Harwood and Helen Clarke co-founded the contact improvisation-based company, Fulcrum. The trio toured Canada, introducing contact improv in workshops which followed their performances. Contact improvisation has infiltrated the dance world significantly since those pioneering days, and it's easy to forget how avant garde the barefoot, equal opportunity dance form was, with men and women using their body mass to roll over and under each other, to lift and to be lifted, all without pretense or narrative. Even the world of ballet has become intrigued by the possibilities: for instance, in 1996 Ballet British Columbia's artistic director, John Alleyne, tackled a co-production with Bingham, Remember Me From Then, an exciting West Coast blend of ballet and contact improvisation.

Bingham's present company, EDAM, was founded in 1982 by six independent dancer/choreographers and one musician, who collectively gave the city a good, strong dose of wildly creative, experimental dance, combining their disparate backgrounds in ballet, modern dance and contact improvisation. Alone at the helm since 1989, Bingham has found running a company a complex and sometimes painful process. Over coffee at the end of August, he talked about how part of the art of dancing is being able to get along with other people. "When you're their boss the relationship shifts ... You have to fire people - it never dawned on me that that was part of the art world."

His connection to other dance artists has, however, never been stronger. Although Bingham performs and teaches nationally and in the United States, including Winnipeg, New York and Minneapolis, his dedication to the local scene is as thorough as ever. In addition to offering short-term company positions, a variety of daily classes and annual summer intensives, Bingham has given encouragement to scores of choreographers through informal performance series which have taken place in EDAM's small studio/theatre.

Kathleen McDonagh, whose name often appears on the roster of EDAM dancers, was introduced to the company through a summer intensive. McDonagh praises Bingham's expertise as a teacher, appreciating his ability to articulate in language as he's moving through something during a demonstration: "You get two clear messages, a kinetic and a verbal one." She adds: "Peter's body itself is a great teacher - he's a fantastic person to dance with." Ex-EDAMite Jaci Metivier, one of Bingham's most exciting contact improvisation partners, spoke from the B.C. Interior where she now lives about Bingham's ability "to give people what they need" to develop as dancers. Contact improvisation was "a revelation" to Metivier, who recalls one duet with Bingham that was "total exhilaration," and took her to a place like nowhere she'd been before. What McDonagh noticed about Bingham and Metivier was the great rhythm of their dancing together. "You could sense the communication between them and that's really the foundation of contact improvisation."

Communication, in terms of responsiveness to both space, time and other dancers, is in Bingham's very bones. He describes dance as "a relationship between yourself and other dancers, yourself and the space, yourself and the audience." That holds for his improvisations as well as for his substantial choreographic body of work. The physical form of a Bingham choreography is created from a quarter century's experience in improvisation, contact improvisation and dance techniques from Graham to ballet; the inspiration comes from the bodies he works with and the life around him. In addition to large multimedia pieces, such as Teller of Visions (1986) and Dreamtigers (1992), Bingham has made a number of popular miniatures, smaller masterworks where head and heart have been memorably combined.

Take The Intimates (2000), a contact improvisation-based choreography to Bach made for Delia Brett and Daelik. Bingham created this at the same time he was making the challenging group work, Red-Handed, in order to give himself a place he could retreat to. At the first rehearsal, he worked out some physical ideas about balance and noticed how the two dancers worked together. He told them he wanted the choreography to be "really comfortable" and for the boundaries to develop organically. The resulting duet is a relaxed display of virtuosic partnering that reveals the kinder, sensual aspects of human intimacy. Metivier called the work "vintage Bingham," with the richness and maturity of old wine. She felt it was full of all the things they'd worked on when she was with the company, "only smoother, better."

Or take Crossfade (1994), a duet Bingham made for himself and McDonagh. Bingham remembers playing with imagery during its creation; in one section he wanted to see if he could show McDonagh and only his face. "That's a game I played, it's not that I actually [expected to] achieve it." Crossfade "developed out of how Kathleen and I are together." They have a relaxed friendship, "and our hips are about the same height, so we have an easy counterbalancing contact style." The resulting choreography is, like all good art, about more than its parts. Max Wyman, writing here in spring 1994, called it "a hectic little poem of human intimacy."

This past June, The Echo Case gave us a chance to see Bingham with Andrew Harwood and Marc Boivin, along with musicians Coat Cooke and Ron Samworth, and lighting and set designer Robert Meister, all of whom are long-time collaborators and confident improvisers. Watching the three accomplished male dancers interacting was incredibly enjoyable. Bingham describes their improvisations as "very choreographic - it's like instant choreography." All three are able to work at a level of awareness that includes space, movement and energy, the same elements that go into a choreography. "We also have to be very time conscious because that's a big part of dancing." This includes timing in the sense of when to do something, as well as the length of time needed to fully develop, but not overwork, a movement idea.

Improvisation is about working in the moment from an internal place and it's this skill that both Metivier and McDonagh appreciate having learned from Bingham. "I discovered improvisation not only in contact," explains Bingham, "but as a truth of life." Naturally, then, it underlies all his creative processes. So does allowing the body its instinctual imperative, its own right to speak. "The art of investigating ... with the body" is how Bingham puts it. Being in the moment and the body's ability to know are not mere strategies through which to create, but are integral to Peter Bingham's philosophy of art and life. <end>

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