Les Grands Ballets Canadiens De Montréal

Comments (0) By Ann Haskins Wednesday, Oct 4 2006

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens offer the West Coast premiere of TooT. (Photo by Serguei Endinian)

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The fourth season of Dance at the Music Center opens with a bang — Canada’s audacious, reinvented Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Since Macedonian Gradimir Pankov assumed the artistic-director post in 2000, the company’s profile has morphed from a bastion of classical ballet into a serious outpost for Europe’s new generation of contemporary choreographers. Its Music Center debut reprises two ballets presented at the 2005 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival that elicited reviewer adjectives like “breathtaking” and “wild and witty.” Choreographer Didy Veldman’s? TooT utilizes Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No. 2 for action in a stylized circus that includes a water-pistol fight and a ballerina garbed in a cluster of red balloons. The iconic Stravinsky score for the equally iconic 1923 Bronislava Nijinska ballet Les Noces is employed as Belgian choreographer Stijn Celis’ Noces considers the institution of and mutual anxieties about marriage. Come early for the preperformance discussion one hour before each show. Music Center, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; Fri., Oct. 6, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 7, 2 & 7:30 p.m.; $25-$95. (213) 365-3500 or www.ticketmaster.com.

—Ann Haskins