A surreal multimedia dance premiere leads off the National Ballet of Canada's fall mixed program

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By News Room 14 Min Read


The National Ballet of Canada has scored a coup. As it opens its fall mixed program this weekend, it becomes the first North American company to perform the work of two of Europe’s most prolific and inventive dancemakers, Sol León and Paul Lightfoot. The National Ballet will dance “Silent Screen” — its Canadian premiere — a 2005 work often hailed as among León and Lightfoot’s finest.

After almost 20 years, the originality of “Silent Screen” remains startling. Its brilliant illusory use of video projection and the emotive blending of movement and music — Philip Glass’s “Glassworks” and “The Hours” — make for a work that circles through past and present, the real and surreal, with an emotional starkness that can be as spellbinding as it is unsettling and mysterious.

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