Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern

Canada’s Crystal Pite is among the world’s leading dancemakers, renowned for exploring resonant, often existential questions about humanity through emotionally charged movement. Flight Pattern is a striking expression of this gift – a searching response to the refugee crisis that touches the individual and the collective at once, giving form to a profound experience of displacement, loss and community.

Created in 2017, Flight Pattern was Pite’s first commission for The Royal Ballet, marking their first mainstage creation by a woman in 18 years. That trajectory began in Canada in 2009 when then Artistic Director Karen Kain invited Pite to create Emergence for The National Ballet of Canada. Until then, Pite had worked exclusively with smaller contemporary companies; Emergence demonstrated how readily her choreographic language translated to a large classical one. The success of Emergence led to major international commissions, including a second award-winning creation for the National Ballet with Angels’ Atlas in 2020.

Artistic Director Hope Muir is deepening the company’s connection to Pite’s choreography through Flight Pattern and has plans to present additional work from her in upcoming seasons. The association is longstanding: Muir assisted with the initial creation of Emergence and has staged it numerous times internationally. With Flight Pattern, she introduces a landmark work from Pite’s canon to North America.

Featuring an ensemble of 36 dancers, Flight Pattern resists specificity in its portrayal of refugees, whose uniform dress and simple surroundings could place them anywhere. Their lack of belonging reflects their fundamental alienation from a stable concept of home; they travel instead on its periphery, waiting and grieving at its door. Theirs is a community based on the ephemeral, on an experience of flight Pite defines as “to flee, to escape, to leave an impossible situation and that sense of hope and possibility, a kind of freedom that is yearned for.” Such dualities – outsider and insider, fear and hope – allow Flight Pattern to hold tragedy and solace in balance. Pite’s ballet has had a significant impact internationally, garnering critical acclaim and winning the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production in 2018. The Royal Ballet subsequently invited her to expand the work into a full-length production, Light of Passage, which debuted in 2022.

The National Ballet is presenting Flight Pattern in its original one-act form, set to the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and featuring the celebrated Canadian Soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee in her National Ballet and Four Seasons Centre debut. It promises to be an unforgettable moment; in Muir’s words, one that is “certain to encourage powerful and important experiences for our Canadian audiences.”

Flight Pattern is onstage with Suite en Blanc February 27 – March 6.

About Flight Pattern

Top Photo: Artists of the Ballet in rehearsal for Flight Pattern. Photo by Ted Belton.