NAC dance series combines the salty and the sweet

The NAC kicked off its new all-Canadian dance series Thursday night with a sweet/salty double bill by Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie. Married dancer-choreographers Laurence Lemieux and Bill Coleman have earned their place in the Canadian dance pantheon, with an international reputation for their stunning productions of works by James Kudelka. Successfully based in Montreal for years, Coleman-Lemieux recently opened a new studio and performance space in a former Salvation Army soup kitchen in Toronto, where their two children are enrolled in the National Ballet School. Their newest work, Interiors, is a family affair, with prominent roles for Jimmy Coleman, 12, and his nine-year-old sister Juliette. Set to Schubert's melancholic B flat Major and A minor Piano Sonatas, Interiors is crafted as a triptych showcasing the intimate, delicately shifting dynamics of a loving family. The work opens with the four family members arranged within a large square made up of stacks and piles of letters, papers and books. Each individual character has her or his distinct language of movement: the nervous, watchful mother; the father, who is distracted yet in search of a deeper connection with his wife and children; the boy, poised at that awkward juncture between childish games and teenage disdain; and the girl, blissfully confident as only girls that age can be. The middle section is a strange, powerful duet for Lemieux and Coleman in which they almost never touch. Her children flown, the mother seems lost, manic, punch-drunk. Her partner is in his own world, until he finally notices her anguish and takes her, still fighting and twitching, in his arms. It's a beautiful moment. Unfortunately, the final section is the work's weakest. The two kids monkey about while their parents sleep, and the choreography deteriorates into the shallow and cutesy. From family-friendly to R-rated: the second work on the program is In Camera, an early Kudelka piece from his Toronto Dancemakers days. Although the movement isn't overtly sexual, In Camera is nonetheless about sex, and all the dark, flirty, twisted games people play to have it. The seven dancers slink and sniff around each other; there's a saucy little pas de trois that ends in a sweaty tangle of she, he and she. But Kudelka offers some caution to go along with the lust: in their forlorn, horizontal duet, Lemieux and the formidable Dan Wild convey all the bitter emptiness of the post one-night-stand blues.