\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIslands,\u201d a ballet for two women, knits and knots its dancers together. They start out sharing a single pair of pants. Two of their arms meet to form a circle; a head snakes through, then an elbow, a wrist. Legs \u2014 how many? whose? \u2014 twine and untwine, a meticulous confusion of limbs.<\/p>\n
Emma Portner, the work\u2019s choreographer, has spent her career interweaving genres and disciplines. She has made dances for Justin Bieber<\/a>, collaborated with the tap dancer Michelle Dorrance<\/a> and worked on the West End musical \u201cBat Out of Hell.\u201d<\/a> She sings in the indie music duo Bunk Buddy<\/a> and acted in the A24 film \u201cI Saw the TV Glow,\u201d<\/a> set to be released in May.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I go a little insane if I stay in any one place or in any one medium for too long,\u201d Portner, 29, said. \u201cI love to be a beginner.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIslands,\u201d made for the Norwegian National Ballet in 2020, was her debut as a ballet choreographer, and the first in what became a string of works in the form. This week it will be at the National Ballet of Canada \u2014 <\/strong>a kind of homecoming for Portner, who grew up in Ottawa.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIslands\u201d is a milestone work in other ways, too. During its creation, Portner was contending with a series of personal crises. She had begun, slowly, to grapple with her childhood experience of sexual abuse. She was battling the chronic pain disorder trigeminal neuralgia. (In 2019, she had to withdraw from a New York City Ballet commission<\/a> because of illness.) And she was navigating the dissolution of her very public marriage to the actor Elliot Page<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI was sort of running away to Oslo, to work in a place where people didn\u2019t know me and no one was watching,\u201d Portner said. \u201cIt was a moment where I felt utterly wrecked by things.\u201d The perpetually entangled, ambiguously connected dancers in \u201cIslands\u201d \u2014 they could be a couple, a mother and daughter, or halves of the same person \u2014 reflected her complicated feelings.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want to make a piece about trauma,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I did want to make something that moved through it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIslands\u201d also reflects Portner\u2019s complicated feelings about ballet, which she studied growing up but left behind as an adult. The idea of two women sharing a pair of pants came, she said, from an interest in subverting the form\u2019s gendered traditions. Rather than create a pas de deux for a man and a woman, she would have women partner each other. Rather than separate their bodies with wide, stiff tutus, she would bind their hips together.<\/p>\n The ballet became a hit, and in the commissions that followed she has continued to challenge the form\u2019s conventions. (She is on track to create five ballets by her 30th birthday in November.) Last year\u2019s \u201cSome Girls Don\u2019t Turn,\u201d for Norwegian National Ballet, also pulled and prodded at ballet\u2019s gender roles. In \u201cBathtub Ballet,\u201d which had its premiere at Royal Swedish Ballet last month, she eschewed balletic formality, filling the stage with 25 sloshing bathtubs.<\/p>\n Portner said she doesn\u2019t see herself as a ballet revolutionary. But questioning norms about gender and identity has been a through line in her diverse career. As a relative outsider to ballet, with a humane approach to the creative process and an unusually wide-lens view on art, she seems particularly well positioned to identify and soften the form\u2019s calcified patches. And many in ballet are becoming more open to that kind of softening.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI think she has always wanted to investigate bodies and form and gender, these different sides of what\u2019s possible,\u201d said the choreographer and director Jordan Johnson, who has known Portner for more than a decade. \u201cI think her entry into ballet coincides with certain ballet directors getting more interested in that, too.\u201d<\/p>\n One of those artistic directors, Hope Muir, brought Portner to Canada at the recommendation of another, Ingrid Lorentzen, of the Norwegian troupe. Muir said she appreciated Portner\u2019s distinctive perspective \u2014 and was also excited about her connection to the National Ballet of Canada: Portner grew up doing school reports on Karen Kain, a former ballerina and director of the company, and hanging posters of its star dancer Heather Ogden on her bedroom wall.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t have the feet, I didn\u2019t have the flexibility for ballet,\u201d Portner said, \u201cso for me the National Ballet of Canada was this unattainable ideal of perfection. Being back here as a choreographer is not something I ever thought I\u2019d accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n That feeling of awe, it turns out, is mutual. Something about Portner\u2019s calm self-assuredness seems to intimidate even experienced artists. \u201cEmma is just so smart and so quick,\u201d said Ogden, 43, who is dancing in \u201cIslands.\u201d \u201cAt first I was like, \u2018Am I cool enough to do this piece?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Portner quickly put Ogden at ease. Her first goal as a choreographer, she said, is to create a welcoming environment in the studio, \u201cwhich hasn\u2019t always been a ballet thing.\u201d Her rehearsal process involves a lot of talking \u2014 also not typically a ballet thing \u2014 to hash out the dance\u2019s mechanics and motivations.<\/p>\n \u201cHer process is very intimate, emotionally as much as physically, which creates a sense of trust,\u201d Muir said. \u201cThe work becomes a conversation rather than just a teaching of steps.\u201d As part of that conversation, Muir suggested including a non-female-identifying dancer (Portner ended up choosing a cisgender man) in one of the casts of \u201cIslands\u201d \u2014 but in the stereotypically \u201cfeminine\u201d part of the partnership, in front rather than supporting from behind.<\/p>\n Portner has built notably strong relationships with Muir and Lorentzen, who have helped her feel more at home in the sometimes-unfriendly world of ballet. \u201cWith female directors, there\u2019s more face-to-face, there\u2019s more understanding, there\u2019s more seeing<\/em> each other,\u201d Portner said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At the National Ballet of Canada, in particular, she\u2019s found a sense of security that\u2019s often missing from a freelance artist\u2019s life: \u201cIt\u2019s the only company I could imagine doing some kind of resident choreographer position with.\u201d (\u201cThat makes me so happy,\u201d Muir said, though no such position has been formally discussed.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Portner has two more premieres on the horizon. \u201cForever, Maybe,\u201d debuting next month at Gothenburg Opera Dance Company in Sweden, features dancers singing and incorporates text they wrote themselves. In August, the Kammerballetten in Copenhagen will premiere a pas de deux starring Maria Kochetkova<\/a>, an adventurous and preternaturally cool ballerina who seems especially well-suited to Portner\u2019s choreography.<\/p>\n After a year spent on planes and in hotel rooms, hopping from company to company, Portner is looking forward to recharging her artistic batteries this summer. She\u2019ll retreat to her cabin in the Canadian woods and work on a nearby farm. \u201cThat\u2019s when new ideas tend to fall into my head,\u201d she said, \u201cwhen I\u2019m weeding the tomatoes.\u201d<\/p>\n But if no new ballet ideas come, she\u2019s OK with that.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes I think my nervous system is incompatible with the machine of ballet,\u201d she said. \u201cThe scheduling, the politics \u2014 you feel like you\u2019re running a small country.\u201d She\u2019s also wary of the commissioning snowball effect, in which a small number of hot-this-moment choreographers end up dominating ballet company seasons. She might be ready to be a beginner again, somewhere else.<\/p>\n \u201cI know I\u2019m a good check box, but I want to make space for other voices, too,\u201d she said. \u201cI think ballet needs more guests in its culture if it wants to progress.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n