Crystal Pite: ‘There’s a profound optimism in gathering together and creating something’

The refugee crisis of 2015 inspired Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite to create her groundbreaking, award-winning short ballet ‘Flight Pattern’. She talks to Kat Lister about turning it into a full-length show, and how art can respond to difficult world events

Crystal Pite (right) with dancers Matthew Ball and Isabel Lubach (Andrej Uspenski/ROH)

It was 2015 and Crystal Pite was supposed to be working on a ballet. But every time the Canadian choreographer sat down to think about it, she ended up watching the news, consumed by its daily horrors. In December of that year, the UN Refugee Agency estimated that more than 911,000 refugees and migrants had arrived in Europe over the previous 12 months. They also tallied that approximately 3,550 lives had been lost on the journey from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq via land and sea. Fences were constructed, borders reinstated. Meanwhile, the headlines roared and our television screens flickered.

“I just couldn’t stop thinking about it,” the Canadian choreographer says softly on a Zoom call from her home in Vancouver. Pite’s gaze is momentarily distracted by a possible commotion happening just outside her office window. “Our cat is sometimes bullied and I just heard a little scream,” she explains, before exclaiming, louder this time, “Oh look, there he is!” She jumps to her feet and briefly disappears from view. It’s an interruption that seems to encapsulate the essence not only of Pite as a cat owner, but as a choreographer, too. Porous to the world around her, it is this kind of attentiveness that drives her work and specifically drew her towards her career-defining composition – a one-act contemporary ballet that premiered at the Royal Opera House in 2017.

Sitting down to make a piece of art separate from what was happening outside her office window seemed to be an inadequate response – and an impossible task. What resulted from this creative conflict was a short ballet that she called Flight Pattern, set to the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No 3, and directly engaging with a humanitarian crisis few of us watching could comprehend. Hopes were high – and the choreography delivered. Not many theatre-goers, myself included, could deny its raw emotionality, the deeply affecting sight of a diverse group of rippling dancers moving as one.