Canberra will be the venue for a bold new dance festival, which will take place over five days in March. Its scope is broad, its speakers and performers have wide-ranging experience across the art form, and it is supported by the nation’s major collecting agencies. Check the BOLD website for daily program and details of how to register.
Australian Dance Awards 2017
Nominations for the 2017 Australian Dance Awards close on 28 February. Despite huge funding difficulties, the 2017 Awards will go ahead and be held in Melbourne in November (exact date to be confirmed). For details on how to nominate in all categories go to the Australian Dance Awards website, in particular to this link. These awards are given for outstanding achievement in Australian professional dance. Nominate now!
Press for January 2017
‘The transformative power of dance.’ Feature on a new venture by Padma Menon. The Canberra Times, 18 January 2017, p. 18. Online version
‘Dancer’s journey a rainbow of colours.’ Feature on Philip Piggin, creative program officer at Belconnen Arts Centre. The Canberra Times, 25 January 2017, p. 20. Online version
22 January 2017 (matinee), Carriageworks, Eveleigh (Sydney). Sydney Festival 2017
The walk down the corridor to enter Bay 17 of Carriageworks for Champions was accompanied by the recorded sound of crowds cheering and referees’ whistles blowing. We entered the space through an arch of balloons and before us, on a green grass-like floorcloth, was a dancing mascot. The scene was set for Martin del Amo’s Champions, a dance work commissioned by FORM Dance Projects and presented as a sporting event, a football match to be more precise. Del Amo’s program notes stated, ‘It is a commonly held belief that sport and the arts do not go together.’ Champions was del Amo’s comment on that pervasive attitude. It also had political overtones about women in sport, especially in those sports that are more often than not regarded as ‘men’s work’.
The first thing to say is that the mascot—a swan dressed in a tutu—was an entrancing part of the show. Inside the costume, Julie-Anne Long kept us entertained before the show proper began and then mid-piece in the half-time section. She crossed her wrists demurely in front of her à la Swan Lake, executed little piqué style steps, and waved her arms up and down like a dying swan. Smart choreography from del Amo and amusing execution by Long, despite the difficulties her orange webbed feet must have caused her.
The rest of the dancers/football players, all women, included some of the best contemporary dancers working around Sydney today. One by one, as they warmed up for the dance/match, they were introduced by a commentator (real-life sporting commentator Mel McLaughlin), who appeared on video on a series of upstage screens. Then the main section of the work began with a series of group exercises and, a little later, with comments, again via the video screens, about salaries for men and women in sport, in particular salaries received by the Australian men’s soccer team in comparison with the women’s.
In preparation for Champions, the dancers had worked with the Sydney-based soccer team, the Western Sydney Wanderers, so there was a certain authenticity to their sporting moves. But from a dance perspective, the most interesting section came when the dancers lined up downstage and began to wave gold pom-poms, as we are used to seeing from cheer squads. Throwing away the pom-poms (thankfully) they began to take a series of poses that seemed to teeter between football moves and contemporary dance poses. At first the moves seemed unconnected but slowly it became clear that in fact there was a set number of moves and the dancers had an individual sequence they were required to follow. At the end of this section the entire row began working as one with every dancer taking on the same pose. I enjoyed the choreographic surprises that characterised this section.
Again interesting from a dance perspective were those moments towards the end of the piece, when individual dancers were lifted high above the heads of the group. Celebratory moments perhaps?
Champions was a clever work. It was fun to laugh at the swan mascot and the references being made to certain works from the ballet repertoire. It was interesting, too, to reflect on the sporting commentary and interviews recorded with the dancers and screened for viewing by the audience. Those comments and replies often reflected common thoughts about contemporary dance. A question from the commentator, for example, about what was happening onstage had the reply, ‘A lot of people are baffled by contemporary dance.’
My regret is that the work really didn’t give us much of a chance to see the exceptional abilities of people like Kristina Chan, Miranda Wheen, the Pomare sisters, in fact all eleven women. Champions was enjoyable but, despite its apparent intentions to make a social and political comment, to me it was a slight work.
15 January 2017 (matinee), Carriageworks, Eveleigh (Sydney). Sydney Festival 2017
What a delight it was to see Dancenorth, whose home is in Townsville, North Queensland, and who are not all that often seen in southern parts. It was even more of a delight to see them (joined by some artists from the Japanese company, Batik) in a very theatrical production, Spectra. Choreographed by the Dancenorth team of Amber Haines and Kyle Page, the show featured just seven dancers. But they held the audience’s attention from beginning to end with their fluid movement, their astonishing moments of stillness and their absolute immersion in the inherent nature of the choreography.
Program notes indicated that the idea behind the work was an exploration of ‘the Buddhist philosophy of “dependent origination” which states that the secret of the universe lies in the nature of causality—the way one thing leads to another.’ But even without this note, it was very clear that the dancers were working with the idea of causation, whether in a group when a touch would cause the one touched to move in a particular way, or whether in the movement of an individual whose sense of lyricism and fluidity had a similar effect.
But while the dancers were outstanding, the lighting, by Niklas Pajanti, was absolutely brilliant and was what made the performance so theatrical. The work was lit with downlights, sidelights, tiny star-like lights hanging from the flies, rows of lights, flashes of lights, lines of light. It twinkled, shone, glowed, and enveloped the space. Just spectacular. Music was by Jairo Matsumoto and played live onstage by the composer. It added to the sense that this was an act of collaboration of the best kind.
In February 2000 I wrote an article for National Library of Australia News on the dance photography of Walter Stringer, who before he died donated his very extensive collection of images to the National Library of Australia in Canberra. In the light of the recent discussion about the dancer portrayed in photos of Swan Lake in my recent post about the 1958 Royal Ballet tour to Australia and New Zealand, I thought it might be worth making the Stringer article more readily available, and adding a little about some of the Royal Ballet images included in the Stringer collection.
Follow this link to the National Library of Australia News article. Please note there is an error in the caption for the Swan Lake image used in the article. It is not, of course, Anne Woolliams and corps de ballet in the image but corps de ballet in the Anne Woolliams production! This was an editorial mishap.
Unfortunately the Royal Ballet material is not fully digitised so most of it can only be viewed on site at the National Library. This non-digitised component includes an album of 43 photos relating to the 1958 tour. The album came with a list created by the photographer. What follows is a slightly expanded version of the list, although no changes have been made to Stringer’s identification of dancers or ballets.
Accession No.
Captions
994/1
Les Patineurs, 1958, Susan Alexander and unidentified
994/2
Swan Lake, Act I, 1958, Elizabeth ?, Michael Boulton, Audrey Farris
994/3
Swan Lake, Act II, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odette)
994/4
Swan Lake, Act II, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odette)
994/5
Swan Lake, Act II, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odette), David Blair (Siegfried)
994/6
Swan Lake, Act II, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odette), David Blair (Siegfried)
994/7
Swan Lake, Act II, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odette), David Blair (Siegfried)
994/8
Swan Lake, Act III, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odile)
994/9
Swan Lake, Act III, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odile), David Blair (Siegfried)
994/10
Swan Lake, Act III, 1958, Lynn Seymour (Odile), David Blair (Siegfried)
994/11
Les Sylphides, 1958, Valerie Taylor
994/12
Les Sylphides, 1958, Anne Heaton
994/13
Les Sylphides, 1958, Valerie Taylor
994/14
Les Sylphides, 1958, Anne Heaton
994/15
Les Sylphides, 1958, Anne Heaton
994/16
Coppélia, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Dr Coppélius), Rowena Jackson (Swanilda)
994/17
Coppélia, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Dr Coppélius), Rowena Jackson (Swanilda)
994/18
Coppélia, 1958, Valerie Taylor (Prayer)
994/19
Coppélia, 1958, Rowena Jackson (Swanilda), Philip Chatfield (?) (Franz)
994/20
Coppélia, 1958, Dance of the Hours
994/21
Coppélia, 1958 Rowena Jackson (Swanilda)
994/22
Coppélia, 1958 Rowena Jackson (Swanilda)
994/23
Hamlet, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Hamlet)
994/24
Hamlet, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Hamlet)
994/25
Hamlet, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Hamlet)
994/26
Hamlet, 1958
994/27
Hamlet, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Hamlet)
994/28
Pineapple Poll, 1958, Patricia Cox (Poll)
994/29
Pineapple Poll, 1958
994/30
Pineapple Poll, 1958, Patricia Cox (Poll)
994/31
Coppélia, 1958, Alan Alder
994/32
Coppélia, 1958
994/33
Coppélia, 1958, Philip Chatfield (Franz)
994/34
Coppélia, 1958, Susan Alexander (Swanilda)
994/35
Coppélia, 1958, Susan Alexander (Swanilda)
994/36
Coppélia, 1958, Susan Alexander (Swanilda)
994/37
Coppélia, 1958, Rowena Jackson (Swanilda)
994/38
Coppélia, 1958, Rowena Jackson (Swanilda), Philip Chatfield (Franz)
994/39
Coppélia, 1958, Robert Helpmann (Dr Coppélius), Rowena Jackson (Swanilda)
994/40
Coppélia, 1958, Rowena Jackson (Swanilda), Philip Chatfield (Franz)
994/41
Coppélia, 1958, Rowena Jackson (Swanilda), Philip Chatfield (Franz)
994/42
Unknown, Rowena Jackson, 1958
994/43
The Rake’s Progress, 1958, Anne Heaton
Michelle Potter, 15 January 2017
Featured image: Margot Fonteyn with Kelvin Coe and John Meehan in The Merry Widow. The Australian Ballet, 1977. As featured in my article ‘Walter Stringer’s dance photography’. National Library of Australia
8 January 2017, Carriageworks, Eveleigh (Sydney). Sydney Festival 2017
Cry Jailolo and Balabala, both choreographed by Eko Supriyanto, were both danced by men and women from Jailolo, a remote town on the western side of the island of Halmahera in the Maluku Islands (formerly known as the Moluccas).
Cry Jailolo, made for seven men, was perhaps the more theatrical of the two works. Not being familiar with the traditional dances of this part of Indonesia I have no idea if the work reflects those traditions, although publicity material states that Cry Jailolo is based on a local dance called ‘Legu Salai’. But whatever its origins the work is a mesmerising 50 minutes or so of changing rhythms, patterns and spatial concerns. It begins with one dancer, barefooted as are all the men, stamping out a rhythm with the sole of one foot and the heel of another. It continues for what seems like a long time but it establishes the overall repetition that characterises the work.
This single dancer is then joined by the rest of the men, who move in a close-knit group around the performing space changing direction every so often when one of the group claps his hands and takes over the leadership. In this section the dancers resemble a school of fish travelling through the water—and indeed Jailolo is a coastal town well-known as a diving centre and for its spectacular sea life.
But soon the story seems to shift to the land and a cyclone appears to hit the town. The men dance individually and in a frenzied manner, twirling and twisting as they manage the conditions. One dancer in particular (the shortest of the dancers seen in the back row of the featured image) was so involved with the wild choreography that he seemed to be in a trance. It was absorbing dancing from an audience point of view too, and it was impossible not to admire the powerful focus the dancers had and the choreographer’s exceptional ability to create patterns and relationships between the dancers.
Cry Jailolo ended as it had begun with a single dancer left on the stage to dance until the lights had completely faded.
Balabala was made on five women, also from Jailolo. It too is said to be grounded in the performing traditions of the region—this time in two dances usually performed by men. But with the choreographer trained in both the Indonesian martial art of Pencak Silat and classical Javanese dance, references to both were clear. The dancers arm movements and powerful thrusts of the body referenced (for me anyway) Pencak Silat. On the other hand, one dancer in particular often stepped forward in Javanese/Balinese fashion with heel first and toes turned up, and yet another, with her arms moving as if holding a fan and body slightly bent to one side, reminded me of moments in the Balinese Legong.
But Balabala was about giving a voice to women and it was powerfully performed and, again, with a strong sense of focus.
Indonesia is an archipelago of great cultural and ethnic diversity. It is most common for Westerners to see dance from the western islands, especially Java and Bali and, to a lesser extent, Sumatra. It was an exceptional pleasure to see material, albeit created in a contemporary vocabulary, from an area further to the east, and also to be made aware of the different ethnicity of people from that region.
Michelle Potter, 12 January 2017
Featured image: Scene from Cry Jailolo, Ekos Dance Company Indonesia
