Here is the rewritten content: Eemma Portner wishes I didn't need to ask her about being hired to choreograph a West End musical aged 20, or going on
Here is the rewritten content:
Eemma Portner wishes I didn’t need to ask her about being hired to choreograph a West End musical aged 20, or going on tour with Justin Bieber, or being married to a film star. “I think I’m one of the only choreographers that has to deal with, in almost every review, going through that list of things first, and then it’ll talk about the work. It’s almost humiliating, and I wish that we could just look at the work sometimes.” OK, so let’s talk about the work. The reason we’re chatting (over video call, she’s in Oslo) is because a duet Portner made called Islands is being performed in London for the first time, by the National Ballet of Canada.
When the call originally came through to her agent, she turned it down. She had pulled out of making a piece for New York City Ballet not long before. But once persuaded, Portner brought her own singular sensibility to the piece, away from classical conventions, not least because it’s a duet for two women – something surprisingly rare in ballet.
She didn’t set out to make a feminist work, she insists, and her interest in choreography isn’t political. “It’s much more about the actual inventiveness of the physical form itself.”
Portner’s Islands is not necessarily a romantic coupling, although it could be. “It’s an inherently queer duet because I’m queer and it’s two women,” says Portner, “But at the same time I liked the idea of leaving it open. You could find a mother-daughter relationship in it, or a sibling relationship in it, or is it the same person, dancing with the self?”
Disliking the distance that traditional tutus put between dancers, Portner went to the other extreme and starts out with both dancers sharing the same pair of trousers. “It sounds goofy when you say it,” she laughs. “Maybe it is goofy,” she muses. “I’d say it’s a pretty serious duet. Or is it so serious that it’s comical? I enjoy that tension.” From the snatch I’ve seen, it’s a very contemporary piece (no pointe shoes) that has some of the jagged attack of commercial dance and the yearning grace of ballet.
Portner’s Islands was an unlikely chance to pivot Portner back into the dance world after years working with Justin Bieber and West End musicals. A Ailey school graduate turned Justin Bieber’s tour choreographer turned YouTube sensation with video duets, the Los Angeles transplant had put ballerina ambitions behind and never found her stride under the microscope of competitive, high-fashion dance company commissions. No more; or so, at the minimum, seems the prognosis once this Canadian choreographer brought Islands before the UK – in no small measure bolstered, as in by way of a welcome rebalancing of ballet-centric forces afoot around Los Angeles by the late April debut’s reception within Stockholm, after the February exhibition debut from the February New York event.
But without Islands there would never had been other ballets done since her first premiered.
Whatever it is, it worked, and after Islands, things snowballed. In four years, Portner has made four more ballets. In fact, starting any new dance job “is like getting back in the bath of drama”. Her new experience became tabloid fodder after the marriage she held to Ellen Page went very badly indeed. Also due to becoming tabloid fodder after suffering from chronic disease called Trigeminal Neuralgia, as painful condition related to pain related to some nerve or sensation related with electric shocks along the area of cheek
It is still, single-minded passion for Portner to share her unique blend of strength and light which Portner’s got over dance industry. A way she talks about dancing at that 20 was at least with the right approach in every dance
““The reason I got into performing is because it is this fleeting thing that disappears”… dancers of the National Ballet of Canada rehearse Islands.”
After her “Dancing In The Dark” debut 10 years ago at The Dance Place, when Justin Bieber started to promote choreography her work turned dance sensation among the likes from “YouTuber”s in all over North-America – it can, by reason of so all those all the attention over this last decade now changed my overall career as long as what I needed of me after all time before – we can then at once call it one after a work that went really all.
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