Cikilax™m: Controlled Burn - Holding the Heat

Jessie Rivest reviews Ballet Kelowna's world premiere of Cikilax™m: Controlled Burn choreographed by Cameron sinkʷa Fraser-Monroe.

Fire is one of humanity's oldest archetypes. It is creation and destruction, ceremony and catastrophe, the thing that gathers us and the thing that can drive us apart. When a production takes on that much symbolic weight, the stakes are high. Ballet Kelowna's world premiere of Cikilax™m: Controlled Burn is a work that carries real ambition and next-level creative teamwork.

Twists and Turns

The production opens inside a dystopian fire-season future, following Nathan (MacKye White), a rookie firefighter navigating a world where suppression has become both policy and pathology. He is surrounded by the institutional force of the Fire Chief (Donaldo Nava), the wild knowing of Mothkʷ (McKeely Borger), and the grounded presence of Mae (Shae Jones). 

The sets, images, projections, music, and choreography worked together cohesively. However, in Act 1, the many quick moving scenes in succession asked a lot from the audience. The program tells us this is a non-linear, circular work, rooted in Indigenous dramaturgies and Syilx ways of knowing, asking us to move through time differently, to remember and become. That framing is poetic and the intention is clear. But structurally, the scenes operate with a tight linearity, and details pushed forward in a way left us feeling out of the loop.

Cris Derksen’s score was filled with movement, intensity, and fiery rhythmic assertion. The sound of a flip-top lighter used as a percussive beat being one of our favourite moments, texturally and symbolically colliding in a single click. Some transitions would have benefited from either a definitive ending, or a smoother shift into the next motif. The circular fragments of the story were mirrored in the music, and so was the emotional register— dark, urgent, weighted. After a while the peaks and valleys of the palette flattened, all sharing a similar tone with repeating builds that seem to have nowhere else to go. 

A Place to Land

Act 2 breathes differently. The scenes and all corresponding elements allow what a dancer friend of mine called “a place to land”, a moment of genuine stillness inside all that motion. The partner lifts and variation were beyond impressive. The four main characters fighting for the lighter was immersive and exciting. The music showed more of Derken’’s experimental flavour. The sequence where the Firefighters and the Firestarters danced together with a completely open stage was mesmerizing. And the closing smudge ceremony was the most honest moment of the night. Learning. A pause. A different kind of fire altogether.

The Fire Worth Tending

Donaldo Nava was exceptional as the villainous Fire Chief, representing not just a character, but a  whole bureaucratic worldview. The history of aggressive wildfire suppression has resulted in forests that are denser and more uniform, which has both increased the risk of devastating wildfires and negatively impacted biodiversity and forest health (prescribedfire.ca).

Cikilax™m: Controlled Burn is asking real questions about land, memory, suppression, and what it means to tend to fire rather than fear it.

Jessie Rivest is a vocalist, leadership coach, and local arts supporter living in Kelowna.