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Tanya Howard of the National Ballet of Canada (SIAN RICHARDS)

The National Ballet of Canada proves a tough act to follow with its electrifying, one-night-only anniversary show

After an absence of well over a decade, The National Ballet of Canada received a hero’s welcome last week as it presented a boldly eclectic program of contemporary choreography well worth the wait.

The one-night-only show (held Oct. 4) wrapped up the venerable company’s Western Canadian 60th anniversary tour, aptly titled Celebrating 60 Glorious Years. Notably, the evening also marked exactly 14 years to the day the NBC’s revered, now-artistic director Karen Kain gave her final performance as a dancer right here in our city.

Vancouver-bred choreographer Crystal Pite’s Emergence (2009) was a tour de force that rightfully has earned its four Dora Mavor Moore awards. Evoking a surrealistic, subterranean world, the company’s members appeared like twitchy insects, with their angular movement stunningly lit by Alan Brodie. Many audible gasps were heard in the crowd as individual dancers burst through Jay Gower Taylor’s black hole tunnel set design, accompanied by Owen Belton’s electronic score. There was a sense of foreboding but also strange beauty as the 28-minute piece steadily grew in intensity and cumulative power.

NBC former artistic director James Kudelka’s The Man in Black (2010) was the gritty sleeper of the night. Three expressionless men and a single woman wearing cowboy boots shuffled and stepped their way through a stream of country western dance patterns, accompanied by six covers recorded by Johnny Cash near the end of his life. The haunting work lassoed your heart with more than a little poignancy; finale Further On Up the Road was particularly stirring.

The oldest — and most classically driven — work on the program was Other Dances (1976), originally choreographed by American Jerome Robbins for dance greats Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. The lyrical pas de deux — performed beautifully by Greta Hodgkinson and Brett van Sickle — was pure poetry in motion, including a live score of Chopin’s piano music performed by Andrei Streliaev.

The two-and-a-half hour show (including two intermissions) opened with master deconstructionist William Forysthe’s the second detail (1991) which features Thom Willems’ biting electronic score. The abstract work performed by 13 company members proved the most cryptic work — suggestive of a ballet studio, I think — as dancers gravitated to upstage chairs during others’ syncopated solos and ensembles.

It’s a mystery why it’s taken this long for the NBC to return to the ’Peg. While contemporary ballet is not everyone’s cup of tea, this cutting-edge program performed by a world-renowned company on the cusp of a new season has set the dance barre very high, indeed.