Kevin O’Day’s Unwinding
ProArteDanza/ Fall Season 2025, choreography by Kevin O’Day, Dominique Dumais and Roberto Campanella, Betty Oliphant Theatre, Oct. 30 to Nov. 1.
ProArteDanza reviews always provoke the same burning question. Why is this company not known across Canada and internationally?
Sensational dancers, sensational choreography.
ProArte is simply one of the best contemporary ballet companies anywhere whose dancers can match any in the world for technique, musicality, and expressive depth.
A Different Season
Campanella has contributed a new work himself, but he also invited two choreographers he admires—Kevin O’Day and Dominique Dumais—to create new pieces for the company. Both bring impeccable credentials.
O’Day danced with Twyla Tharp’s company in New York and later with Baryshnikov’s White Oak Project before moving to Germany, where he led a company of his own.
Dumais, once a cherished member of The National Ballet of Canada, also settled in Germany, where she is currently ballet director and chief choreographer at Mainfranken Theater Würzburg , where O’Day is also artist-in-residence.
Time-honoured choreographers, both, returning to set new work on a company they clearly respect.
Kevin O’Day and An Unwinding
Sometimes, I wish choreographers would just shut up. Take Kevin O’Day’s An Unwinding.
His program note reads: “An Unwinding explores the quiet strength that emerges from vulnerability without sentimentality, a space where fragility is not weakness, but resilience.” For God’s sake, what does that mean?
Shut up, Kevin, and just choreograph.
Let the audience decide what An Unwinding means, because, Kevin, your piece speaks volumes. Set to music by Neil Young—one short segment that repeats again and again—it is witty, intelligent, and charming.
A trio for a man and two women, it begins with the male dancer, Dimitri Apostolopoulos, prone on the floor in a spotlight, folded awkwardly. He struggles upright with gangly motion, slowly finding rhythm and shape before two women, Sarah Di Iorio and Sasha Ludavicius, enter with casual ease and join him.
At times they attach themselves to him, almost parasitically; he tries to escape and inevitably ends up back on the floor where he began. The cycle is hilarious, revealing: the baggage we place on ourselves, the baggage others place on us, our endless effort to unwind.
The choreography has bite and brains. I laughed aloud each time Apostolopoulos collapsed in his ungainly pose.
A piece that is witty, charming, and full of substance—yet, Kevin, you did yourself a disservice with that bafflegab of a description.
Sometimes the dance says it all.
Dominique Dumais and Memento Vitae
Dominique Dumais’s Memento Vitae (“Remember Life”) is the opposite of Memento Mori (“Remember death”).
She begins in the program with a beautifully poignant line by T. S. Eliot: “Where is the life we have lost in living?”
What a line, and what a premise for a dance work—exactly the kind of philosophical spark Dumais handles so exquisitely.
But, Dominique, you too can’t resist explaining.
She has created, all her career, pieces of utter beauty—exquisite, expansive, and, alas, novel-length. Memento Vitae follows suit: breathtaking imagery that at times feels like War and Peace in motion.
The six dancers—three women and three men (Griffen Grice, Connor Mitton, Willem Sadler, Petra Toop, Eleanor van Veen and Carleen Zouboules)—move through relationships, separations, and reunions, embodying the question Eliot posed, to a potpourri of evocative music from Bach to Max Richter and Laurie Anderson.
But layered atop these gorgeous images is an insufferable voiceover credited to excerpts from Jeanette Winterson’s 1997 novel Gut Symmetries—pretentious twaddle that drones on and on.
Why, Dominique? Why?
Why overlay such dreary verbiage when Eliot’s single line already contains everything you need? The spoken interruptions from the dancers themselves work far better: three times they shout at the audience ordinary phrases about time—“What time is it?” “Where did time go?”—and those jolts land with perfect impact.
Let the dance images and those bursts of speech speak for you, Dominique, not the pompous narration. You create such beauty; trust it.
Roberto Campanella and Un’Altra Vita: Inspired by True Events (in collaboration with the Ensemble),
And then we come to Roberto Campanella’s Another Life – Inspired by True Events and a program note that matters.
Campanella writes clearly and succinctly, describing his dance as “an almost autobiographical work, an exploration of self through four men who each carry fragments of my almost story, from birth through life.” That’s all we need to know—and that’s exactly what we see onstage.
It unfolds through nine dancers (all of the above mentioned with Aerin Cho replacing van Veen) in a collage of memory, emotion, and humour. Some passages are melancholy, others hilarious. The choreography is gutsy, full of risk and energy.
Campanella doesn’t care whether we follow a linear path; he drags us wherever his imagination leads. We glimpse bullying, outsiderdom, tenderness, and joy, all woven into the non-linear tapestry of a man’s life. Images flash—birth, childhood, learning to walk, love, loss—each fragment vivid and alive. It’s funny, touching, and at moments devastatingly honest.
The music collage comes from the classical repertoire and popular Italian song.
A Final Overview
Valerie Calam has designed the costumes for all three pieces giving each a different contemporary style. It’s a clever thread that joins the dances together and gives the evening a particularly attractive look. Noah Feaver has provided each work with its appropriate evocative lighting. Both Calam and Feaver have contributed to the class act concert that marks a ProArte performance.
Across all three dances, the evening is rich with imagery.
In O’Day’s, survival and release; in Dumais’s, the restless search for meaning; in Campanella’s, the scattered pieces of a man’s journey. Together they form a triptych of contemporary ballet at its finest—dense, witty, emotional, and performed by dancers whose technical and expressive power are second to none.
That’s what you get with ProArteDanza: an evening so rich, so fearless, and so beautifully danced that you leave wondering, yet again, why this company isn’t famous the world over.