Dancers portray the horrors of violence in the home.
It took seven minutes for a short performance by the Atlantic Ballet Theatre to bring 500 guests, all dressed in gala attire, to tears.
That was nearly four years ago. Now, the company has created a full-length ballet, Ghosts of Violence, which will have its world-premiere at the National Arts Centre Feb. 15.
“It’s about love, it’s about hate, it’s about betrayal, it is what domestic violence is,” says NAC’s Rosemary Thompson,
“It’s all those human emotions and I think that they can really express that through dance.”
The ballet was initially conceived in 2007.
The company was approached by the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Foundation to create a short piece for its fundraising gala in support of the New Brunswick Silent Witness Project.
The project honours women who have been killed through acts of domestic violence.
It aims to preserve their legacies through creating life-sized, wooden silhouettes representing each victim of domestic homicide.
Two weeks later, one of the members of the project came to the company and asked them to create a full length ballet to help draw attention to the issue.
For the past two years, the company has been hard at work creating a realistic and touching story of four couples all affected by domestic violence.
“The piece is hard hitting at moments,” says Atlantic Ballet Theatre’s CEO, Susan Chalmers-Gauvin. "It’s not what you expect when you go to the ballet. It’s very real."
She says that Igor Dobrovolskiy, the company’s artistic director, and playwright Sharon Pollock, collaborated to make the plot line and choreography flow seamlessly.
Dobrovolskiy spent months choosing music.
Chalmers-Gauvin says Pollock had access to police records of abuse cases in the province.
This allowed for a truly authentic look at common themes in domestic abuse.
The company also received support from the federal government. Funding came from several federal agencies, including Status of Women Canada, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and The Canada Council of the Arts.
To show the range of this issue, the company cites alarming Canadian statistics, such as a finding that approximately half of all women over the age of 16 have experienced some form of physical or sexual abuse.
“One to two women are killed every week in Canada,” says Chalmers-Gauvin.
“We don’t have the answers of how to make it better, but we can spark a dialogue about the subject”
Dialogue is something Karen MacInnis, executive director of Interval House Ottawa on Eccles Street, says is extremely important.
“People don’t think it’s in their backyard. People don’t think about it being their neighbours, their friends or their family, but it is,” she says.
The ballet will help reveal how violence in partner relationships transcends all age, societal, and religious backgrounds, MacInnis says.
“People turn a blind eye and sometimes they don’t even know what abuse is,” she says.
“It’s such a great way to get the topic out.”
She says Interval House offers support to women in a variety of ways: from education about what abuse is, to help for women in the event that abuse is being experienced.
Thompson says the performance might be a way to help people reflect on their own relationships, or simply be more aware of the issue in general.
“It’s another way to drive home the message,” she says. “Art is very powerful.”
After the premiere at the NAC, Chalmers-Gauvin says the company will travel across the country to perform the ballet.
She says she has received an enormous amount of support and interest from women’s groups across the country and the play hasn’t even debuted.
“This is a topic that is always behind closed doors. It’s a taboo subject, it’s in the shadows,” Chalmers-Gauvin says.
“The idea was to give this a big presence in Ottawa and to launch with a lot of visibility.”