“Islands,” a ballet for two women, knits and knots its dancers together. They start out sharing a single pair of pants. Two of their arms meet to form a circle; a head snakes through, then an elbow, a wrist. Legs — how many? whose? — twine and untwine, a meticulous confusion of limbs.
Emma Portner, the work’s choreographer, has spent her career interweaving genres and disciplines. She has made dances for Justin Bieber, collaborated with the tap dancer Michelle Dorrance and worked on the West End musical “Bat Out of Hell.” She sings in the indie music duo Bunk Buddy and acted in the A24 film “I Saw the TV Glow,” set to be released in May.
“I think I go a little insane if I stay in any one place or in any one medium for too long,” Portner, 29, said. “I love to be a beginner.”
“Islands,” made for the Norwegian National Ballet in 2020, was her debut as a ballet choreographer, and the first in what became a string of works in the form. This week it will be at the National Ballet of Canada — a kind of homecoming for Portner, who grew up in Ottawa.
“Islands” is a milestone work in other ways, too. During its creation, Portner was contending with a series of personal crises. She had begun, slowly, to grapple with her childhood experience of sexual abuse. She was battling the chronic pain disorder trigeminal neuralgia. (In 2019, she had to withdraw from a New York City Ballet commission because of illness.) And she was navigating the dissolution of her very public marriage to the actor Elliot Page.
“I was sort of running away to Oslo, to work in a place where people didn’t know me and no one was watching,” Portner said. “It was a moment where I felt utterly wrecked by things.” The perpetually entangled, ambiguously connected dancers in “Islands” — they could be a couple, a mother and daughter, or halves of the same person — reflected her complicated feelings.
“I didn’t want to make a piece about trauma,” she said. “But I did want to make something that moved through it.”
“Islands” also reflects Portner’s complicated feelings about ballet, which she studied growing up but left behind as an adult. The idea of two women sharing a pair of pants came, she said, from an interest in subverting the form’s gendered traditions. Rather than create a pas de deux for a man and a woman, she would have women partner each other. Rather than separate their bodies with wide, stiff tutus, she would bind their hips together.
The ballet became a hit, and in the commissions that followed she has continued to challenge the form’s conventions. (She is on track to create five ballets by her 30th birthday in November.) Last year’s “Some Girls Don’t Turn,” for Norwegian National Ballet, also pulled and prodded at ballet’s gender roles. In “Bathtub Ballet,” which had its premiere at Royal Swedish Ballet last month, she eschewed balletic formality, filling the stage with 25 sloshing bathtubs.
Portner said she doesn’t see herself as a ballet revolutionary. But questioning norms about gender and identity has been a through line in her diverse career. As a relative outsider to ballet, with a humane approach to the creative process and an unusually wide-lens view on art, she seems particularly well positioned to identify and soften the form’s calcified patches. And many in ballet are becoming more open to that kind of softening.
“I think she has always wanted to investigate bodies and form and gender, these different sides of what’s possible,” said the choreographer and director Jordan Johnson, who has known Portner for more than a decade. “I think her entry into ballet coincides with certain ballet directors getting more interested in that, too.”
One of those artistic directors, Hope Muir, brought Portner to Canada at the recommendation of another, Ingrid Lorentzen, of the Norwegian troupe. Muir said she appreciated Portner’s distinctive perspective — and was also excited about her connection to the National Ballet of Canada: Portner grew up doing school reports on Karen Kain, a former ballerina and director of the company, and hanging posters of its star dancer Heather Ogden on her bedroom wall.
“I didn’t have the feet, I didn’t have the flexibility for ballet,” Portner said, “so for me the National Ballet of Canada was this unattainable ideal of perfection. Being back here as a choreographer is not something I ever thought I’d accomplish.”
That feeling of awe, it turns out, is mutual. Something about Portner’s calm self-assuredness seems to intimidate even experienced artists. “Emma is just so smart and so quick,” said Ogden, 43, who is dancing in “Islands.” “At first I was like, ‘Am I cool enough to do this piece?’”
Portner quickly put Ogden at ease. Her first goal as a choreographer, she said, is to create a welcoming environment in the studio, “which hasn’t always been a ballet thing.” Her rehearsal process involves a lot of talking — also not typically a ballet thing — to hash out the dance’s mechanics and motivations.
“Her process is very intimate, emotionally as much as physically, which creates a sense of trust,” Muir said. “The work becomes a conversation rather than just a teaching of steps.” As part of that conversation, Muir suggested including a non-female-identifying dancer (Portner ended up choosing a cisgender man) in one of the casts of “Islands” — but in the stereotypically “feminine” part of the partnership, in front rather than supporting from behind.
Portner has built notably strong relationships with Muir and Lorentzen, who have helped her feel more at home in the sometimes-unfriendly world of ballet. “With female directors, there’s more face-to-face, there’s more understanding, there’s more seeing each other,” Portner said.
At the National Ballet of Canada, in particular, she’s found a sense of security that’s often missing from a freelance artist’s life: “It’s the only company I could imagine doing some kind of resident choreographer position with.” (“That makes me so happy,” Muir said, though no such position has been formally discussed.)
Portner has two more premieres on the horizon. “Forever, Maybe,” debuting next month at Gothenburg Opera Dance Company in Sweden, features dancers singing and incorporates text they wrote themselves. In August, the Kammerballetten in Copenhagen will premiere a pas de deux starring Maria Kochetkova, an adventurous and preternaturally cool ballerina who seems especially well-suited to Portner’s choreography.
After a year spent on planes and in hotel rooms, hopping from company to company, Portner is looking forward to recharging her artistic batteries this summer. She’ll retreat to her cabin in the Canadian woods and work on a nearby farm. “That’s when new ideas tend to fall into my head,” she said, “when I’m weeding the tomatoes.”
But if no new ballet ideas come, she’s OK with that.
“Sometimes I think my nervous system is incompatible with the machine of ballet,” she said. “The scheduling, the politics — you feel like you’re running a small country.” She’s also wary of the commissioning snowball effect, in which a small number of hot-this-moment choreographers end up dominating ballet company seasons. She might be ready to be a beginner again, somewhere else.
“I know I’m a good check box, but I want to make space for other voices, too,” she said. “I think ballet needs more guests in its culture if it wants to progress.”
