Presented by the University Musical Society (UMS), The Body Undone brought Vancouver’s premiere contemporary dance company, Ballet BC, to the Power Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 17. The evening featured two works — “Pieces of Tomorrow” and “Passing” — that explored transformation, community and the fragile choreography of being human.
The stage opened in shades of gray. A solo began the evening, more dancers quickly joining the stage in near-silence, their movements soft and deliberate, bodies unfolding like smoke. Gradually, others joined — duets and trios folding into one another like a shared breath, creating a single rhythm. It felt less like a performance and more like a pulse beginning to steady, something human slowly waking up.
The first piece of the evening was “Pieces of Tomorrow,” choreographed by Medhi Walerski. Midway through, the air shifted. From the soft chaos, a gold sculpture emerged — a figure built from recycled fragments, gleaming against the muted backdrop. It appeared wordlessly, as if summoned by the motion around it. For a long moment, the dancers moved in silence, orbiting the figure as if it were the heart of their creation. The stillness was startling, frightening even.
Walerski’s collaboration with visual artist Lyle XOX turned waste into worship. The sculpture, made from found objects, didn’t just decorate the stage; it reshaped it. “Pieces of Tomorrow” became the act of transformation itself, art reborn from what’s been thrown away. The reimagined score, Johan Ullén’s Infinite Bach, stretched and fractured familiar melodies until they sounded like memories of themselves. It was all about reconstruction: sound, motion, matter, self.
The evening’s second work, “Passing,” choreographed by Johan Inger, shifted the tone entirely — a meditation on time, emotion and the fragile choreography of being alive. It began with a scattering, a thin trail of ashes tracing across the stage like the outline of a path. The dust hung in the air, catching the light, a soft reminder of what is left behind. From that quiet act, life unfolded.
The first gestures were small, ordinary — a dancer’s hand brushing another’s arm, a shared glance, a walk across the space. Then, the duets emerged, delicate but grounded. Each moment felt unhurried, as though the dancers were remembering rather than performing. At one moment, the dancers began to weave what felt like fragments of everyday stories — playful exchanges told entirely through movement. Their gestures hinted at shared jokes and familiar routines, moments that felt almost humorous in their honesty, a sense of play that connected the performers with the audience. This spontaneity drew the audience closer, reminding us that beneath technique and form, we are all simply human — imperfect, emotional and longing to be understood.
From this sense of play, a new duet took shape — a couple at the dawn of their story. Two bodies folded into one another, moving with unspoken agreement. Each breath seemed to travel through both dancers, each muscle mirrored in its twin. Every contraction rippled through them at once, as though they shared a single spine. There was no leader or follower, only a constant exchange, weight passing between them like wind. No effort, only surrender. The effect was astonishing in its simplicity. They weren’t partners; instead, they were two people discovering the rhythm of early love, one continuous body rediscovering itself through touch. It wasn’t about love or romance or even balance. It was about existing together and feeling the human instinct to reach out and be matched.
Without warning the dancers began to sob. The sound was sharp, unguarded, real. It cracked the air open. Then, the sobbing slowly gave way to laughter, emerging from the same raw place. The laughter spread through the company, uncontained and contagious. Soon, the audience was laughing, too. The divide between the stage and seats dissolved until the entire room became one body, one breath. During a post-show Q&A, Balerski reflected on the meaning behind the work, tracing its emotional and creative roots.
“It’s a different expression of energy,” Balerski said. “You use your whole body differently when sound becomes part of it.”
It was a transformative cycle of emotions — sound becoming movement, movement becoming breath, and then silence once more.
And then, ash began to fall.
It looked like confetti at first, fluttering down in slow motion. But its color betrayed it — gray, heavy, final. Inspired by volcanic eruptions in Mallorca, the ash symbolized death and renewal. The dancers stood beneath it, stripping away layers of costume until nothing was left between their skin and the world. Nakedness arrived not as shock or exposure, but as truth.
What remained on stage was not vulnerability, but wholeness. The individual forms blurred into a collective portrait of humanity in all its differences: lovers, strangers, men, women and everything in between. Themes of community, sexuality and identity intertwined quietly in their movement, implying that being human is not about sameness but about connection. Beneath the falling ash, they became one organism, breathing as a single entity. It wasn’t the perfection that captivated, but the fragility of being seen by one another.
As the final flake fell, the dancers stood still, the stage covered in gray. It felt like the aftermath of something sacred: not an ending, but a return. “Passing” was not a performance about precision or perfection. It was about what happens after — after motion, after loss, after everything falls away. The performance asked what it means to remain human when there is nothing left to hold onto but each other.
“It’s an arch of what life is in a little village — birth, young love and the things you see every day: the small gestures, the humor, the sadness, the way people connect and grow apart,” said Walerski at the post-show Q&A.
The mundanity was its genius. It didn’t dramatize life; it revealed it as raw, rhythmic and fleeting, the accumulation of the small moments that build and break us.
When the lights dimmed, silence lingered. No applause at first — just the shared breathing of the audience. Ballet BC left something behind in that quiet: a trace of dust, a pulse, a reminder.
Perhaps that’s the point of it all — to keep shedding, to keep rebuilding, to keep becoming, again and again. To scatter, to merge, to become dust and still keep moving.
Daily Arts Contributor Ashanti Mirelez can be reached at amirelez@umich.edu.
