The Night has a Thousand Eyes is an hour-long work described as a ‘nocturnal dreamscape of movement and mystery’. The first image is of a vast suspended square tent of white muslin, evoking the cloth draped over a baby’s cradle, lit from within, but empty yet. Piano music is gentle, lullaby-like. Soon the dancer moves in amniotic shadow inside the tent, we glimpse a limb, the edge of her torso, her arm gesturing up, then around, and down, the palms of her hands coming forward into focus. There’s a quiet mood of questioning and waiting as the work awakens to this exploration of space and place, and the piano carries us through.
This is Lucy Marinkovich in the first in a series of vignettes shared with Michael Parmenter, mostly solos, occasionally duets, that play with shadows and silhouettes from the dark and into the light that is sourced from side or back or front, with the two dancers’ bodies, especially arms and hands, striking 1, 000 shapes that hint, suggest, tease, whisper and play in the night.
Impressions are suggested—to wonder at the beauty of an arm outstretched then curved then dissolved—to hold and embrace an infant, perhaps—keeping silent reverie alone beneath a dark sky that shimmers with 1,000 stars, in no specific place but here. Nights are long but the piano, in Lucien Johnson’s driving score, carries us through.
Parmenter dances alternate sections, he too is a silhouette, then moving and flowing, then held in chiselled positions. He will later be the insomniac out in the night streets of Paris, marking out fragments of old tap dance routines, or flashing a thousand tiny lights onto a dark wall, imagining he’s alone but we are watching. These are film-like dream-like sequences, and still the piano carries us through.
The performers are not connected as characters, nor is any specific thematic narrative developed. They move in alternate sequences that build a sympathy and empathy between them as they share the thoughts and things that arrive in the nights—both theirs and ours. A scene comes to seem like a poem, each separate yet belonging together in a selected collection.
The hub of the work is the mesmerising Serpentine Dance reconstructed by Marinkovich after Loie Fuller moving in the earliest stagings of electric light on stage over 100 years ago. Vast swathes of white silk are held aloft with poles to extend the wings into a celestial realm. The carefully chosen moves and curves and swoops bring the silk into its own life, making invisible air now visible, eventually enveloping the dancer, and still the piano carries us through.
So the two dancers, but also the lighting design that in turn brings textiles to life, effectively make a cast of four performers. We cannot take our eyes off any of them.
My wish, although maybe not practical, would have been to see the pianist in low light side-stage, visually holding these vignettes together as indeed the music did throughout.
It’s always a pleasure to mark the end of the year with a rear vision reminder of the dance highlights we saw. 2024 had the best of the old and the new, with RNZB delivering a triumphant trio of seasons. After some important readjustments into new directions in management, the Company’s year opened with Tutus on Tour’s national itinerary of small venues that Poul Gnatt established back in 1950s. In May, Russell Kerr’s pedigree production of Swan Lake was memorably staged with respect and sensitivity by Turid Revfeim.
Their mid-year triple bill included Wayne MacGregor’s Infra, which I found deeply humane and appreciated very much. Sarah Sproull’s spirited To Hold, and Alice Topp’s High Tide had striking choreography and design, and each proved very popular with audiences.
The Company’s end-of-year season—a return of Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—showed yet again what a brilliant concept the 29-year-old choreographer brought to this company back in 2015. His loss will reverberate for years, but this production, shared with Queensland Ballet, and Tracy Grant Lord’s stunning design, ensures that we hold him tight.
New Zealand School of Dance continued to display high performance standards in both Liminal, mid-year, and end of year seasons, when students from both classical and contemporary streams gave committed programs. The highlight for me remains NZSD alumnus Taane Mete’s All Eyes Open.
In Homemade Jam the ever enterprising Turid Revfeim combinedher Ballet Collective Aotearoa with the local Tawa College dance group to energised effect.
Visiting companies to Wellington for the International Arts Festival included a dramatically different Hatupatu, a fusion of Maori legend into a contemporary love story from Tānemahuta Gray. Malia Johnston’s Belle offered striking airborne beauty combining aerialists and dancers. From afar Akram Khan’s company gave a sophisticated The Jungle Book which astonished many first-time dance-goers.
Later in March, Neil Ieremia of Black Grace staged a production of striking dramatic effect and design, under the title Paradise Rumour. It referenced missionary presence in the early settlement of the Pacific.
Jan Bolwell’s impresssive season of Crow’s Feet, Woman, Life, Freedom, to Gorecki, was a moving witness to the struggles of women in Iranian and migrant communities.
2024 was a special year for Vivek Kinra’s Indian dance company Mudra, beginning with an arangetram (astonishingly, by a mature age Pākeha woman of Irish descent. The world can live as one if we want it enough).
In a later season Vivek choreographed a poetic and colourful Vismaya, the seven emotions of nanikas, with a quartet of stunning visiting musicians, in a national tour under the auspices of Chamber Music New Zealand. We could hope for more seasons of music and dance from these adventurous entrepreneurs.
My subscription to Sky Arts channel is always good value—and this year’s film of Dona Nobis Pacem, Neuemeier’s farewell to Hamburg Ballet, was an exquisitely poignant piece in a combination of J S Bach and John Lennon that I will never forget. It was a masterstroke to also screen the documentary of Neumeier’s dancing life in the same week.
Another very striking film was the Royal Ballet production of Christopher Wheeldon’s Like Water for Chocolate. I have family connection to Mexico and it is always welcome to encounter art from that extraordinary country.
This year’s Russell Kerr Lecture in Ballet & Related Arts was a tribute to the late and much lamented Sir Jon Trimmer, following an earlier memorial for him staged by Turid Revfeim in the Opera House. Rowena Jackson’s death was another sad event, but an opportunity to recognise her outstanding personal qualities alongside her celebrated performance and teaching career. I join Michelle Potter in lamenting the passing of Joan Acocella, dance writer of highest calibre, and my valued mentor. Edith Campbell, a stalwart arts and community leader, will be much missed in Wellington, and it was an honour to perform French and English baroque dances at her Memorial Service. Edith would have appreciated the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France that these referenced, as she had an admirable knack of contextualising all art events. She taught Scottish Country Dance for 75 years, up until the fortnight before her passing. Requiescant in pace.
I found myself involved in another performance (who says you’re too old to dance? certainly not Eileen Kramer…) in a piece composed by Alison Isadora for The First Smile Indonesian gamelan, and included on the album we have just recorded to mark 50 years of gamelan in Aotearoa New Zealand. (See Rattle Records website). Keep up the good dancing everyone—and you’ll certainly have a Happy New Year.
This end-of-year performance season is dedicated to the memory of New Zealand’s celebrated ballet dancer Rowena Jackson, who died earlier this year aged 99. Rowena was Director of New Zealand School of Dance (then National School of Ballet) in the 1970s when her husband Philip Chatfield was artistic director of (later the Royal) New Zealand Ballet. That partnership ensured a close rapport between School and Company, echoed later in 1980s when Anne Rowse and Harry Haythorne were respective directors. After some years it is heartening that Garry Trinder, director of the School, is again renewing that rapport with the Company’s artistic director, Ty King-Wall. Artists, teachers, students and audiences are all going to benefit from that mutual trust as it develops even closer.
This season includes three premieres, and alternates classical and contemporary works, which gives a welcome opportunity to see the strengths of the School’s two parallel programs. It opens with a piece to the Waltz from The Sleeping Beauty. The cast of 15 dancers, drawn from all three years’ classes, dance with enthusiasm and commitment.
Showpony! by Matte Roffe, an alumnus of NZSD, begins with a fancy-dress comic line-up of characters with voice-over, that then segues into energised abstract dance. “Using the ‘show pony’ metaphor, the work questions if the cost of constantly chasing approval is worth it, urging the audience to reflect on the toll this pursuit takes on authenticity and wellbeing.”
(S)even, by the late Jenna Lavin, to a piano sonata by Franz Schubert, was staged by Tara Mora—and brings a fresh clean style of classical alignment especially in port de bras. [The School employs three of the best dance accompanists in town, so how wonderful it would be to have at least one work danced to live accompaniment?]
Taane Mete, a graduate from NZSD in 1980s, choreographed All Eyes Open, to commissioned music by Eden Mulholland, a highly experienced composer for dance. It proved the masterpiece of the evening in its maturity of concept, contemporary relevance, construction, staging, style, dedication and performance. I’d have thought the work could go straight into RNZB repertoire, as in every way it evokes the works from José Limon and Doris Humphrey company legacy (which used to be an intrinsic part of NZSD curriculum and repertoire.) Clearly in Taane’s case that early inspiration, since his days at the School in 1980s, has proved lifelong.
His program note, a model of clarity, reads: This work is a humanitarian response to the occupation in Gaza. The all-female cast morph and oscillate in solidarity in a confined area. The work explores each individual pathway in relation to the ensemble group moving en masse like a hypnotic force. I couldn’t have reviewed it better myself. If ever the NZSD Board can see ahead to forming a touring company, giving graduates a year of performance experience, they would have in All Eyes Open a timeless work, and a premiere ready to go.
It’s Not Me, It’s Me, by Zoë Dunwoodie to music by David Jones, is a lively work suiting the young dancers searching their identity. It is inspired by a painting by Dutch artist Jan Toorop who is known for Javanese themes throughout his works, though this dance takes a different path. It extends the dancers’ movement range in many new directions.
The final work Forte, by Tim Podesta, premiered earlier this year in Wellington. It is a sophisticated classical work, albeit in flat shoes, and the cast of five dancers deliver performances of electric quality throughout. Three students are from the First Year class so it is clear they have reached the school already highly trained and skilled performers. There are four separate pieces of music, with applause from audience following each section. If it were possible perhaps to connect each section with a minimal choreographic thread, that would allow the work to build the full momentum and denoument it certainly deserves.
6 July 2024. Te Auaha Theatre, Wellington reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
This attractive program takes the unpretentious title Homemade Jam, as if to say, ‘We can’t afford to import posh marmalade from Harrods so we’ve made our own jam from the fruit in the orchard here.’ With a full house at both performances, and sold-out printed programs, BalletCollective Aotearoa (BCA) must be pleased to know there are clearly audiences keen to follow their work.
Earlier this year Turid Revfeim staged the triumphant production of the late Russell Kerr’s Swan Lake for RNZBallet, and 2024 will be long remembered for that tribute to the father of ballet in New Zealand. Without delay Turid turned her attentions to a BCA season at the Taranaki Arts Festival where it was very well received (involving NZTrio, a leading chamber music group, and a dance cast headed by Abigail Boyle, how could it not be?)
And now, with a different cast, to this Wellington season as part of the Pōneke Festival of Contemporary Dance. The energy all this takes cannot be underestimated, and it’s the combined resilience of BCA, with the participants’ independence of thought (something not always possible for those in a company structure) that is noticeable. It’s impressive when any dancers’ careers flourish, though how this troupe does it, with high performance standards on a zero budget, is anyone’s guess.
The opening work, Last Time We Spoke, is by Sarah Knox, graduate of NZSchool of Dance and now a faculty member of University of Auckland Dance program. It echoes back to Covid-era experiences, and is a study of the sense of community that can prove so vulnerable to such circumstances. Set to music by Rhian Sheehan, it has a poignant atmosphere and is beautifully danced, opening with Callum Phipps who moves as liquid amber.
preference for reason is an impressive large group work by students from the Dance program at Tawa College, whose creative director isBrigitte Knight. The work takes a theme of isolation and connection in an era of digital communication, and is staged with clarity and focus by the group of 24 youngsters giving their all. One of the dancers knows how to let his face become absorbed as part of the overall dancing body, so ‘the whole body does the talking’. This is an innate ability, can barely be taught, is rare, and should therefore be recognised when it happens. He will go far, but all the students will have been thrilled to share the program with BCA.
The third and final work, Subtle Dances, by Loughlan Prior, is a smooth smart, sassy work inspired from tango but carrying further the emotions that that stylised dance form usually keeps internalised. Prior is a choreographer who has made a major contribution to dance in New Zealand (including BCA’s premiere work, Transfigured Night, to Schoenberg, under Chamber Music New Zealand’s auspices). He is a past master at setting groups that capture and build atmosphere, and this stylish piece is no exception.
Well done to BCA and to all involved for a heartening demonstration of the joy that dance can offer if we let it. The name of the venue, Te Auaha, means to leap, throb, thrill with passion…so go for it, I say.
choreography Vivek Kinra auspices of Chamber Music New Zealand 29 June 2024. Q Theatre, Auckland 30 June 2024. Meteor Theatre, Hamilton 2 July 2024. Little Theatre, Lower Hutt reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
Vismaya is Sanskrit for Amazement and proved the perfect title for this highly enterprising project of Bharata Natyam, South Indian classical dance, in performances and workshops on a national tour to five centres—Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch.
In an inspired move, Chamber Music New Zealand (CMNZ) invited four highly skilled Indian musicians to visit and team up with six dancers from the Wellington-based Mudra Dance Company. Vivek Kinra has directed his Bharata Natyam academy and company here since 1990, but the calibre of his work has always been international rather than merely local, so we expect to be thrilled, and we are, by this performance of enriched chamber music.
Vocalist and director of music, Ranjani Ganesan Ramesh, sings with full expressive effect, reining in the ensemble with layers of melody and arcs of harmony. Sri Adyar Gopinath is a consummate player of mridangam/drum, his hands declaiming authority then fluttering and diving like hummingbirds, in mesmerising rhythmic embellishments on the steady beat within the music. Both these artists have had long association with the renowned Kalakshetra school in Chennai where Vivek had trained for many years, so they each know the other’s art as their own, and the dancers are galvanised into brilliance as a result.
Tiruchy L. Saravanan plays flute with great skill, evoking songbirds on the wing, and his solo piece, Nagumomu, is a particular delight of flight. The deeper string tones of the veena, beautifully played by Jaishri Suresh, offer a balm and solace that seems to embrace the listener. This ensemble could have played until dawn and no-one from the audience would have left early.
As for the dancers, we saw something quite sublime. I have attended Mudra performances since 1990, including a number of arangetram, (the two-hour solo graduation recital of a pupil who has attained the required standard). Each of those seasons has carried its own high quality but never before have we witnessed such an explosion of joy and total commitment from the six dancers in this production.
All the choreography by Kinra is new, in a wonderful blend that honours tradition but weaves in many contemporary references. He stands on stage before each work to perform the gestures and motifs of the work we are about to see. These are luminous miniatures and reveal the exquisite qualities he has always brought to his stage presence. The opening Pushpanjali, offering of flowers, is followed by Shyamala Dandakam in which a mysterious Tantric goddess is portrayed, and complete rapport is established between musicians and dancers.
The major work, a varnam—Navarasa: Nine Emotions—is a tour-de-force. Each dancer has an assured technique with stunning geometric precision in arm and leg movements, intricately detailed mudra (hand gestures), beguiling facial expressions, powerful dramatic timing in sustained narratives, and the range of emotions from love and ecstasy, hope and curiosity, pride and envy, fear and loathing, to peace and serenity. Comedy is also there—for example when Siva disguises himself as an old man and makes approaches to the young devotee to test her love and loyalty. Her disgust is palpable and she passes the test.
There are solo passages, and other times where two dancers move at great speed but in perfect unison (harder to do than it sounds, but no effort is shown). Shrinidhi Bharadwaj, Banu Siva and Varshini Suresh are hugely effective in portraying the emotions of the drama.
There is a distinctive quality to the dancers’ elevation as they anticipate on the upbeat, a leap that flies them free of gravity, to then land, of course, precisely on the beat. The effect on us is kinaesthetic—we feel we have been flying too.
In the final Thillana there is much to celebrate—glorious arcs of dancers curving and intersecting in lines across the stage, in a particularly joyous denouement of a performance that nobody wanted to end. The dancers—Varshini Suresh, Banu Siva, Shrinidhi Bharadwaj, Esther McCreadie, Deepika Sundar and Rhea Homroy—will be long remembered.
Each of the performances I attended, in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington, had appreciative audiences, but the Lower Hutt’s Little Theatre experience was a particular triumph with the audience on their feet acknowledging the performance of a lifetime.
There were workshops, open to all, offered the day before a performance, and these too were memorable and informative—for example: ‘What skin is the mridangam drumhead made of?’—’Oh, I had to replace the leather with a quality plastic for this tour because New Zealand biosecurity measures are very strict and we could not afford to have this drum impounded for a three-week fumigation. We’d have been back in India by the time it was released.’ Each musician spoke to their instrument but had to be paused after 15 minutes by Kinra, who knows that the sacred and Sanskrit history of this art has to be contained somehow, or we would all have missed the following night’s performance. It’s a considerable art in itself to compress so much into the time available, but we catch all of it. We go home through a wild Wellington storm that had hours earlier almost prevented our planes from the north from landing, but the elements, let’s call them the gods, were with us all the way.
The idea for this project was initially proposed by Rose Campbell, a former trustee of CMNZ, and has proved an exceptional achievement for everyone concerned. There have been some voices raised in complaint that CMNZ is departing from its original charter in including dance and ethnic arts in its programming. I’d have thought everything is ethnic therefore nothing is ethnic … that dance is not the opposite of music but that each art can mutually enhance and inspire the other, so entwined as to be one and the same art. Vismaya was chamber music of the highest calibre, expressed through dancing of mesmerising yet accessible quality.
Heartfelt thanks are due to those whose vision brought us this truly amazing production, to all the performers, and to Vivek Kinra who at the end of the performance thanks us all for coming. That’s the only thing he got wrong all evening. It’s we who are to thank him.
Production by Russell Kerr, staged by Turid Revfeim—alternate casts in continuing Wellington season reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
I have been privileged to see the three casts of the Wellington season of Swan Lake, in Russell Kerr’s pedigree production (and note there is also a fourth cast, though not performing in the capital). It’s impressive that a relatively small ballet company can field that number of Principals since ours is half or a quarter the size of major world companies who would stage a Swan Lake.
We might also score as the world’s most widely nationally touring company. That dates back to 1950s when Poul Gnatt took ballet to 156 towns throughout the country each year. In part the geography of Aotearoa New Zealand allowed that, provided you could find the stamina, but it was also Gnatt’s intent to take ballet to the people, to the farming community, to schools, to local towns where billets were forthcoming and the provision of suppers became a thing of some local competition—in contrast with his own homeland where people had to travel to Copenhagen to see their national company. Gnatt’s vision seems to have worked since sell-out shows of Swan Lake around the country are still happening, and the zeitgeist of the Company today is causally connected to those beginnings.
I said in my review of this production’s opening night that the corps de ballet of swans are making a particularly beautiful line-up, and that is impressive since most of them would not have danced Swan Lake before. Also noteworthy is that none of the Odette/Odile-Siegfried casts has ever danced these full-length roles before either. And what’s more you can spy last night’s Swan Queen in the line-up of Princesses dancing at court tonight, and here amongst the corps de ballet tonight, as a fragile and beautiful but anonymous swan, is tomorrow’s Odette/Odile. Perhaps it is the freshness of so many premiere performances that is contributing to the rich and committed quality of this production. That, and the staging by Turid Revfeim.
Kate Kadow as the Swan Queen uses her statuesque physique to real effect and gives a striking performance particularly as Odile. Her Siegfried, Branden Rainers, is a strong and secure partner.
Ana Gallardo Lobaina and Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson make another fine pairing in the title roles, again spectacular in the Odile-Siegfried liaison. The solo of the melancholy prince alone on stage between acts is a poignant and beautiful performance I will long remember.
It is quite a moment when after the matinee performance Ty King-Wall, the Company’s artistic director, takes the stage to announce that both Ana Gallardo Lobaina and Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson are being promoted to the rank of Principal.
A ballet stage is usually full of beautiful things many, many times rehearsed and then impeccably delivered. Improvisation and spontaneity are not normally on offer, so it is quite wonderful to watch Gallardo Lobaina overwhelmed at the surprise announcement. ‘Is she laughing or crying’ is the 4 year old’s urgent whisper beside me in the dark. The answer is ‘yes’ since she is a quivering, laughing, crying dancer who hasn’t rehearsed this bit, but eventually, after several minutes, finds a fist punch to say ‘OK. Yes. I accept.’
The Jester in that cast, Dane Head, is a truly mischievous character with impeccable timing throughout (echoes of a Mercutio or a Harlequin in some other ballet). Von Rothbart, here played by Zacharie Dun, also has the week’s edge of that role in his scheming duplicity and evil intent (reminding me of the Devil in Denis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, that tour de force of the theatre). Paul Mathews, returning from retirement to play the somewhat bumbling old Tutor Wolfgang, of course wears the same costume by Kristian Fredrikson as did the late Jon Trimmer who created the role, and we welcome the reminder of that.
Russell Kerr’s catch-cry was always ‘There’s no such thing as a small part’ and that would explain why every performer in his productions makes the stage their own. The Spanish, Hungarian and Italian entertainers at court, in von Rothbart’s thrall, are delivered with exceptional panache. Catarina Estevez-Collins has a stand-out quality, but it’s always Kirby Selchow who steals my eye. She is the character who acts before she dances, whereas in ballet is mostly the other way round. Calum Gray continues to impress, and he will likely be a Siegfried in years to come.
Katherine Minor, the ‘fourth’ Odette/Odile (with Kihiro Kusukami as Siegfried) is the cast I didn’t see. Minor is in the corps of swans each night in Wellington, they are all immaculate and identical but there’s an aura of Olga Spessivtseva about Minor that uncannily marks her out from the rest (and what’s more she is a dead ringer lookalike of former Royal New Zealand Ballet dancer, Fiona Tonkin— now there’s New Zealand ballet history for you).
We have already seen Minor as Odile in a recent Tutus on Tour program so we know she can do it, but it’s always the matter of how evenly and convincingly Odette and Odile will play off the double sides of that single role that takes us back to the next performance. In this season and by my reading, it is Mayu Tanigaito who plays both aspects equally and deeply, right from the get-go—the subtle and anguished Odette, equally with the sparklingly duplicit Odile (possibly the somewhat ‘easier’ role to smash out? Who knows? Ask the dancers). Tanigaito appears as each of these persona before she even starts dancing. How that mystery, that alchemy works is another reason we go back to the ballet. So sadly, I’ll just have to imagine how Minor is playing out her double character in the role of a lifetime.
Of course, what Swan Lake is ‘really about’ is the emotional stamina required to continue living when your beloved partner has had to leave—in other words, it’s an essay on grief, how to live with the memory of someone after von Rothbart has stolen her away. That’s ‘really’ why we go to back to see Swan Lake, and why Russell Kerr’s quiet mastering of the layered and ambiguous ending is so very consoling, so very finely wrought.
3rd Year Contemporary Dance students choreographic season 10 May 2024. Te Whaea Theatre, Wellington reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
We are seated in the round which proves the right choice for this attractive program, and effective use is made of the four aisles that serve as overflow performance space, or entrances and exits to and from the central area. There is stylish costuming in shades of white, designed in an impressive collaboration with student colleagues in the Design course at Te Whaea.
Liminal comprises eight works individually choreographed but linked into a continuous sequence that moves forward but also allows echoes back to images in earlier sections. This pleasing continuity is partly due to the same costumes being worn throughout—smart upstanding collars, a layer added here or removed there, masks worn (though a pity perhaps that the golden rule never to actually touch a mask while it’s being worn onstage, since that immediately destroys illusion, is not followed).
In the dances there are themes of friendship and camaraderie, with a good opener, In The Making, by Anna Hosking, followed by Please Let Me Remain with thoughts on sisterhood by Aylin Atalay (with music by Sibel Atalay, presumably a sibling?).
Natural? by Lila Brackley takes on themes of unease and uncertainty, with masks involved. Primo by Sophie Sheaf-Morrison invokes the atmosphere of an airport with people coming and going in chaotic haste.
Anya Down continues with an urgency of atmosphere in Hardly Working. A/Effect by Audrey Stuck leads into Accidental Renaissance by Aleeya McFadyen-Rew, with stronger bouts of competition growing out of play.
In the closing piece by Trinity Maydon, Worn Shoe, determined strides are taken by all the dancers in all directions, wave after wave of walking patterns that build to a committed cadence of the program.
These dancers are clean and clear movers, with open and varied facial expressions so we feel we meet them all in turn as they move through the light. Although there are no specific references to the time and places of life in Aotearoa New Zealand, the performance is impeccably prepared and each piece segues easily into the next. Overall the effect is gained of a group of friends, enjoying each others’ company, playing then competing, aware of possible danger but in the end uniting as a single supportive group. Holly Newsome as choreographic mentor has made a flowing and attractive sequence of the students’ work, with welcome collaboration with Design department.
One wonders if there could be further collaboration with the Classical Dance stream at the same school, since Ballet too needs to encourage new choreography. These emerging dance -makers are earning their school’s motto—Kia kōrero te katoa o te tinana. Make the whole body do the talking.
1 May 2024 (and following national tour). St James Theatre, Wellington reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
This pedigree production of Swan Lake by Russell Kerr, the beloved father figure of ballet in New Zealand, was first staged on the company in 1996 and again in 2002, 2007 and 2013. Russell Kerr died in 2022 so this re-staging is the first not under his direction.
It proves a triumph on several levels, and is giving many a balletomane a sense of coming home. To some degree that involves the sumptuous sets and distinctive costumes by designer Kristian Fredrikson, which still carry as well as they did nigh on three decades ago. The cut and the cloth, the colours, weight and scale of all of Fredrikson’s work come from a singular vision.
Mayu Tanigaito as Odette/Odile can trust her formidable technique to release an exquisite interpretation of the dual role. She conveys Odette’s yearning through superb control of port de bras, unfolding arabesques and in the beautifully held balances, which could have lasted even longer, holding her breath and ours. But after a hint of rubato with the masterful conductor Hamish McKeich holding the baton, you have to go where the stunningly beautiful violin solo, played by Donald Armstrong, is leading you. The pathos of doomed love and Odette’s courage to protect both the Prince, and her fellow victims, is rendered with a tenderness that was in splendid contrast with her sparkling duplicity as Odile. Pearl then diamond.
Laurynas Vejalis is a pensive Prince Siegfried, and I appreciate enormously the aesthetic restraint that he brings to his phenomenal technique. As a dancer he can do anything, as Siegfried he holds back, until he sights Odile that is. As the four-act ballet progresses this couple perform some of the finest pas de deux we have seen here in recent years.
The ensemble of swans is impressive, many of them younger dancers who will be performing in their first Swan Lake. They may have missed Russell Kerr but they could not have a better introduction than this beautifully realised production. Character dances in the ballroom scene are very stylishly delivered and help build a rich and royal courtly atmosphere, all the more devastating when it falls out of the vertical and collapses into chaos. Von Rothbart wears the most magnificent cloak in history but I felt the mysterious and evil intent of his complex role could have been more convincingly conveyed.
Kerr’s production lifts Tchaikovsky’s sublime composition off the page and onto the stage, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra play superbly, with a number of fine players evident in the solos. The different sections of the orchestra are alive to the drama of lyrical and haunting or tempestuous and extrovert passages. Hamish McKeich holds it all together and the triumph belongs equally to him.
Much credit is due to the Company’s new artistic directorate for appointing Turid Revfeim as regisseur of Russell Kerr’s production. Revfeim is another of the country’s ballet legends—an accomplished dancer, teacher and artistic director of an independent ballet collective, a long-standing professional of great stamina and skilled diplomacy. Having worked with Kerr for years she is the perfect person for the job. The modesty apparent in her curtain-call speaks volumes, but as Edmund Hilary would say she ‘has an awful lot to be modest about’. Her program essay reminisces about Kerr’s inimitable way of working, and the high expectations he had of each dancer.
It is good too to be reminded of Shannon Dawson’s words about Kerr … ‘He is a parent of sorts, a father of dance, teaching the young, guiding the teenager and letting the adult go free, and the only thing expected in return is that you do your best.’
Kerr’s own insightful essay in the printed program proclaims ‘There are no swans in the ballet Swan Lake…’ explaining they are all women…’victims of an evil genius’. His reading offers an ambiguous ending to the ballet, suggesting that von Rothbart as the power of evil has been overcome, but perhaps only temporarily? Swan and Prince are together, but the misogynist magician will be back. He was conquered once, for now, but there may come a need to conquer him again. The resourceful lighting design by Jon Buswell contributes much here.
John Neumeier choreographer. Hamburg Ballet reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
John Neumeier has been the artistic director and choreographer of Hamburg Ballet since 1973. His prolific output of numerous full-length ballets over those decades is legendary, and what’s more, all the works have stayed current in the company’s repertoire and are given regular return seasons. That is a phenomenal achievement in world ballet terms.
I was more than fortunate, when on a Goethe Institut study tour to Germany in 2005, to see many of Neumeier’s full-length ballets staged in a breathtaking single week in Hamburg—Romeo & Juliet, Lady of the Camelias, Death in Venice, Midsummer Nights Dream, Odysseus, Mahler Third Symphony. I have simply never recovered from that week and indeed have no intention of ever recovering.
Hamburg Ballet later performed in Brisbane where I saw Nijinsky Gala. Neumeier has long and often cited Vaslav Nijinsky as the formative inspiration for his own life in ballet. On a later visit to Copenhagen I was enormously impressed by the Royal Danish Ballet’s production of The Little Mermaid, which they had commissioned of Neumeier. I visited Hamburg again in 2015, to see his Bach St.Matthew Passion.
I’d have to say deep and lasting gratitude was the word for all these choreographic riches, but you can’t have too much of a good thing so when recently I noticed Dona Nobis Pacem, to JS Bach’s B Minor Mass, was to be Neumeier’s prayer for peace in the world and his swan song choreography as he prepares to retire from Hamburg Ballet, I was tempted to treat myself to a final trip to Europe. Would I, wouldn’t I get there?
Measure my delight then to notice that the local Arts TV channel was about to screen film of Dona Nobis Pacem right here in my front room! So I didn’t have to fly to Europe after all but just to cancel all commitments for a day and a night and sit glued to the screen for two airings of the work that proves among the of most poignant, exquisite, sad and uplifting of ballets ever made.
Do check Youtube for a 5 minute excerpt of the work. There you will see the superb ensemble dancing of the blessed spirits, as well as of the shell-shocked soldier-victims of war. The lead performer, Spanish born dancer Aleix Martinez, brilliantly portrays the central role of—shall we call him the Unknown Soldier, or Everyman. He would and should outdance warmongers everywhere—but that’s not the way the world works of course.
One of several excerpts from Dona Nobis Pacem available on YouTube
A few days later the same Arts Channel broadcast the documentary—The Life and Work of John Neumeier. All manner of insights are offered, as to how the boy from Milwaukee ended up as arguably Europe’s finest ballet choreographer who rates the music he selects as highly as the dances he sets to them. You don’t work with French pianist David Fray unless you mean business. Clearly these films exist somewhere in the world. Please hunt them down and watch them, then tell your grandchildren what you saw.
If we had to pick our three favourite choreographers in the whole world, and thank goodness we don’t, my votes would go to John Neumeier, and to New Zealand’s Gray Veredon (more on him later), and the remarkable Douglas Wright. Both Neumeier and Wright shared the magnetic inspiration of Nijinsky, of dancer and of choreographer in their own calling, and I was more than once made mindful of Wright by this choreography of Neumeier and by the performance of Martinez, which is about the finest compliment I can offer to them all.
24 March 2024. Hannah Playhouse, Wellington reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
This dance work is choreographed by Jan Bolwell and performed by 35 members of Crows Feet Dance Collective, an ensemble of mature dancers, marking 25 years since the formation of the group in 1999.
‘Anyone can join Crows Feet—you just have to be a woman over 35. There are no auditions’ reads the program note. It’s a courageous undertaking to put trained former dancers together with others who have never performed professionally—never mind mid-30s, some are in their 70s and 80s. In today’s dance culture, which typically favours technical virtuosity and the prowess of youth, it is refreshing to see this dignified and measured yet impassioned meditation on the roles and rights of women in several parts of the world, focussing principally on Iranian and Kurdish societies.
The hour-long dance work is a vigil, a witnessing, a lament, a letter to the world. It plays against Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and incorporates text from a number of sources, including the utterly wonderful poem by Maya Angelou—A Brave and Startling Truth. There’s not meant to be a star in a show of this nature but, since her words address all of humankind, Angelou (who was herself a dancer of some note) is that star—or do I mean that Annie Ruth delivers her text with an empathy and luminous vocal quality that binds the performance together. The poem Home, by Warsan Shire, is equally memorably spoken.
Gorecki had Poland’s tragedies in mind—Angelou knew too well the violent savagery meted out to Black Americans—Shire is British-Somali—so the show’s telling of Iranian women’s struggles and resilience finds echo in many other times and places in the world. Processions resemble mediaeval basses danses, tableaux and groupings use lengths of cloth to double as hijab or the shrouded bodies of dead babies, a serpentine farandole of grief acts as a poroporoaki to farewell family and friends.
It’s sad and sobering, but finds a way to end with resilience and hope—which are words you can equally apply to Jan Bolwell herself, both in her life and her work. It’s a yes from me.
