2017 – Crystal Pite creates Flight Pattern for The Royal Ballet

Flight Pattern, a piece made for 36 members of The Royal Ballet, and set to the first section of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, marked an end to an 18 year hiatus of women choreographers creating pieces for the stage of the Royal Opera House. The work’s departure point was the response to Europe’s refugee crisis, which saw the forced migration of predominantly Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi people across the Mediterranean Sea to escape long and ongoing conflict.

Flight Pattern would be the first time The Royal Ballet would dance a work by the internationally acclaimed Crystal Pite. Pite’s contemporary style has made her one of the world’s most sought-after choreographers. The ballet was designed by Jay Gower Taylor and Nancy Bryant, lighting by Tom Visser, and the original cast included Kristen McNally and Marcelino Sambé.

In October 2022, Pite extended Flight Pattern into a longer work. Now titled Light of Passage, and danced to Górecki’s complete Symphony No. 3, Flight Pattern became the first section of a full-length ballet charting the path through life to death. Pite chose the remaining two sections of Górecki’s symphony as an aural backdrop to her trademark deployment of dancers to create roiling, wave-like formations across the stage, duets and solos appearing and then receding into Visser’s atmospheric lighting. Covenant, the work’s middle section, focused on children, and Passage, the work’s concluding movement, used a couple from Sadler’s Wells’ non-professional Company of Elders to illustrate life’s transit to death.