Court of Miracles a Joy For Christmas!

William Littler, Toronto Star, 14/12/1984

"..nothing less than a pageant of the Middle Ages come to life in all its sounds, colors and diverse activities."

Tired of the commercialism of Christmas? Nutcracked and Christmas Carolled out? Eager to return to the good old days, before neon-nosed reindeer descended upon the nation’s rooftops?

Then do I have the place for you! It’s Harborfront’s Premiere Dance Theatre between now and Dec 22, where the days are not only good and old, they are positively medieval.

For there, spread out across that elegant theatre’s accommodating stage, you will find nothing less than a pageant of the Middle Ages come to life in all its sounds, colors and diverse activities.

It’s called Court of Miracles, the name commemorating an area of medieval Paris in which the quick of wit plied their various trades, and it’s one of the finest spectacle pieces ever produced by Toronto Dance Theatre.

Premiered last Christmas and considerably revised for the current run, Court of Miracles is the brainchild of David Earle, Toronto Dance’s Theatre master of spectacles, a choreographer with a feeling for the Age of Faith in all its paradoxes.

He shows us the life of the streets during the Feast of St. Nicholas, teeming with beggars, acrobats, courtesans and religious, place where lepers stretch forth desperate limbs and elegantly gowned damsels deftly dodge their gnarled fingers.

And as we watch the passing parade, taking in the colors of the banners and the bustle of the crowds (not to mention the efforts of such celebrity guests as pianist Elyakim Taussig and CKFM Radio’s Jeremy Brown to distinguish their left feet from their right), he interrupts its flow with vignettes that invite a closer look at the fraudulently lame, the professionally pious, the irrevocably simple.

We’ve seen these people before, in paintings, tapestries, woodcuts. But always with a missing ingredient. Earle (together with his choreographic colleagues, Peter Randazzo, Christopher House, Kenny Pearl and Les Grands Ballets Canadian’s James Kudelka) restores that ingredient; movement.

To a recorded collage of period music, the characters scurry through the tableaus vivants of their lives as Ron Ward’s ingenious assemblage of movable ladders and platforms keeps re-defining their dancing space.

Yes, there is dancing. And if it isn’t what scholars would consider historically authentic, it’s at least historically evocative in its juxtaposition of peasant roughness and aristocratic grace.

But it’s the way the set pieces flow out of and disappear back into the action that makes the first act of Court Of Miracles in particular such a success.

The second act opens in a much more serious vein, as the inmates of a home for the socially discarded act out their fantasies to the theme of the seven deadly sins. With such potent cameo players as Earle, Randazzo, Kudelka, Donald Himes and the wonderful Celia Franca cast as the resident blackgowned loonies, the emotional power of this scene threatens for a time to throw the entire production off-balance.
But only for a time. As the loonies are finally integrated into Court Of Miracles, the aspect of spectacle returns. We are back again in the midst of the medieval pageant, watching a miracle play.