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GLACIER: A Climate Change Ballet (review)

Accessible and timely are not necessarily the first words that come to mind when someone mentions the word “ballet,” but GLACIER: A Climate Change Ballet is both these things. Glacier is the perfect introduction to modern ballet for the uninitiated and even the disinterested. With a running time of 45 minutes, a tightly scored soundtrack and live video projections, this briskly paced series of vignettes is a crowd-pleaser for all types of theatergoers.

GLACIER is a meditation on the world’s rapidly changing Arctic ecosystem. Wearing pointe shoes and simple white costumes, dancers emulate the rippling, dripping and cracking of polar ice. The ballet is broken up into 10 distinct parts, each inspired by a different type of Arctic ice or climate change phenomenon. The dancers expertly execute Diana Movius’s choreography and each vignette flows smoothly from one part to the next. The pacing of each part is well-timed and seems to end at just the right moment before it flows into the next. (snip)

The penultimate scene features the dancers handling giant bowls of water, the only props to enter the performance. This part verges on being heavy handed, but puts the onus back on the audience. The dancers gesture to us from their thawing habitat, startling us from our place of removed observation: we are responsible for this melting world.

Say, I wonder what the carbon footprint is for this production, which is rather short for a ballet (so we’re told in the review). All the electricity used. The amount of energy and fossil fuels needed for people to get to this short ballet. On the bright side, it most likely will not last long, because most people, even liberals, don’t particularly care to pay money to be told they suck and are Bad People. In this case, because they’re killing Gaia and stuff.