As Canberra gets ready to host the 2013 Australian Dance Awards as part of the city’s centenary celebrations, it is inevitable and absolutely appropriate that thoughts are turning to those dancers, teachers, directors and others who have made a major contribution to dance in the city in some way. Canberra-born Ross Stretton comes instantly to mind.
When Stretton died in 2005, following a career as a dancer in Australia and the United States, as the sixth artistic director of the Australian Ballet, and briefly as director of London’s Royal Ballet, I gathered together a list of the repertoire Stretton chose for his four and a half years at the helm of the Australian Ballet. It was published in Brolga, No. 23 in December 2005. As this article is not available via the online issues of Brolga, I am posting it here ahead of the ADAs.
Stretton marked his directorship with a catch phrase, a slogan of sorts: ‘Creativity, Energy, Passion’. It was often thrown back at him, sometimes with a touch of sarcasm, and it became known as the ‘CEP factor’. But behind it was Stretton’s passionate belief that dance was not superficial; it was an art form that in its greatest moments engaged mind, body and soul. Looking back at the repertoire list, which includes an astonishing twelve new commissions in the space of just over four years, as well as new acquisitions for the company from the existing international repertoire, it is clear that the CEP factor was hard at work.
Looking again there are a few works that haven’t been seen since Stretton’s directorship that I would love to see back: 1914 (despite the fact that it was not in general well-reviewed), Dark Lullaby, In the Upper Room, Theme and Variations and The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude are among them.
Below is a Jeff Busby shot of Elisha Willis in 2000 in William Forsythe’s The VertiginousThrill of Exactitude, and below that is a link to the original Brolga article (with one or two corrections to the original). Other corrections if needed or comments are welcome.
22 June 2013 (matinee), State Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne
The first thing to say about this performance of Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake is that Leanne Stojmenov as Odette was absolutely stunning. It all began with that Act I wedding waltz. Partnered by Andrew Killian as Siegfried, Stojmenov not only danced with delicious fluidity in the upper body, she was also so attuned to the music and was so much the happy young bride. And how often does that beautiful white gown with its long, long train impede parts of the movement? Not this time. The gown was manipulated pretty much perfectly so that, as intended, it was an intrinsic part of the choreography. It was a beautiful and absolutely captivating moment so early into the show and it was followed by some charming encounters between Stojmenov and the guests, especially with the children.
From there Stojmenov delivered some technically sumptuous dancing and swept us through a whole range of emotions until her final disappearance into the depths of the dark waters of the lake. As Odette at the lakeside in Act II her solo, with its remarkable ending—a backwards slide along the floor, was magnificent, as was the pas de deux with Killian, again with its breathtaking ending that moves from Siegfried holding Odette as a limp, bent-over body, which is then stretched out fully but is held parallel to the floor, to a fish dive, and finally to another slide to the floor. And perhaps nothing was more moving in a dramatic sense than Stojmenov’s encounters with Killian in the final moments of Act III. They were danced with all the abandon of a woman in the full knowledge that these moments were to be her last with the man she loves. A series of very fast, perfectly executed turns down the diagonal towards Siegfried, arms flailing up and down, summed it all up.
The second thing to say is that Murphy’s choreography in this work is nothing short of remarkable. Perhaps it is seeing this Swan Lake so soon after Stephen Baynes’ more traditional version that highlights what an expressive choreographer Murphy is. Not many choreographers are able to use the classical medium as an expressive, narrative tool, to move the story along through movement. Murphy does. Take, for example, Siegfried’s solo in Act I as he is torn between his new bride and his old love. He bends into himself, opens his palms wide and places them on his face, and at times moves with little jerky or contorted steps. It all speaks of indecision, inner turmoil, unspoken guilt even. Or take Odette’s meeting with Siegfried in the asylum. Here Murphy gives us all the twitching movements we might associate with Odette’s state of mind and yet there is something about her arm movements that recall those of a more traditional Odette, which not only links us with other stagings of Swan Lake, but also presages Odette’s lakeside dream, which is soon to come.
There are some magnificent images that surface throughout the work. In Act III, as the guests leave the party following the little tantrum by the Baroness, unevenly played on this occasion by Amy Harris, we see Siegfried and his friends against a backcloth that is a representation of M. C. Escher’s linocut, Rippled Surface. They are frantically looking for Odette who has left the party and a very new vision of Siegfried, Benno and friends on their swan hunt (seen in very old productions!) comes straight to mind. And shortly afterwards, when Siegfried arrives suddenly at the lakeside, alone this time, the beautiful choreographic patterns being made by those black swans are just as suddenly scattered into a flurry of different poses and different arm movements. We are left with a fleeting image of a flight of birds disturbed from their ordered existence as if a shot had been fired into their formation.
And I can’t forget Harry Haythorne in Act I as the Marquis (the photographer). While he commands centre stage at times, he also spends a lot of time up in the back OP corner with his camera and his little hanky, a wave of which indicates that a shot has been completed. Taking my eye off the central action for a moment I noticed him arranging a group of children in a special pose, and also photographing a kite that one child was flying. Never one to stand still and just watch the action!
And the third thing to say is that all the drama that was missing from the recent Baynes production was there for all to see in this Murphy production. Murphy’s knack of moving seamlessly from one situation to another and back was evident in Act II as we saw the lakeside dream begin with Siegfried and the Baroness meet outside the asylum window, and saw the dream end with a return to that same meeting. But more than anything the drama was gripping as Odette teetered from one emotion to another.
I do have a couple of gripes. It is annoying that so few of the cast were mentioned by name on the cast sheet. I didn’t have the best seat in the house. It was a way back and a little too much on the side so it was quite hard to identify who was dancing in smaller roles. Who danced the two leading Hungarians in Act I, for example? I thought they did a splendid job, especially the female dancer. [It was Dana Stephensen—see comment from Anna below]. And who danced the little swans and the two leading swans? It is extremely frustrating to have some of the minor characters in Act I named, characters who really have very little to do and certainly no dancing to speak of, when dancers who have relatively substantial dancing roles are not named. And I will never understand why the magic of those last moments has to be spoilt as the black cloth disappears from that circular piece of wood that is the lake leaving us to see a bit of cut chipboard. Come on!
Gripes aside, I was immensely moved by this performance. It was one of those rare performances, I think, where so much pours out, so much underlying logic becomes apparent, so much of the detail of the choreography is made clear, and so much is impossible to record! A huge bouquet to Stojmenov for carrying the dramatic line so well and dancing so sublimely. Performances like this are why I keep going back for more.
Michelle Potter, 23 June 2013
Featured image: Artists of the Australian Ballet in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, ca. 2003
IMAGES: I have no images of this current production as yet and in any case, with Stojmenov giving the performance she did I really am not inclined to post an image of another Odette. The featured image is one supplied by the Australian Ballet some years ago, probably around 2002 or 2003. No photographer’s name is mentioned but I would be more than happy to correct that if someone can supply the name. Looking closely you might notice some dancers who are now principals!
UPDATE (later, 23 June 2013): The second image on this post is indeed of Stojmenov in Murphy’s Swan Lake kindly supplied by the Australian Ballet and by one of my favourite and most generous photographers, Jeff Busby.
Garry Stewart’s G had a short run in Canberra last week. Although it first had a showing in 2008, this was my first opportunity to see it and once again I was impressed by Stewart’s exceptional approach, which combines his unique intellect with his emphasis on the physical. My review was published in The Canberra Times on 15 June 2013 and is reproduced below.
‘G is Garry Stewart’s deconstruction of Giselle made for the company Stewart directs, the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre. But although G refers back to a ballet made in the 19th century, there are no happy, smiling peasants in pretty matching outfits celebrating harvest time, and no lines of ghostly Wilis dancing in the moonlight. Instead Stewart gives us a no-holds-barred examination of states of being that the traditional Giselle hints at but never blatantly puts before our eyes.
Stewart condenses the narrative and the story unfolds before us in words on an LED screen. Each of the main characters is known by the initial of his or her name. We read of the betrayal of G (Giselle) by A (Albrecht), a prince disguised as L (Loys) but who is really betrothed to a princess B (Bathilde, and the subsequent death of G and her entry into a spirit world of Wilis headed by M (Myrtha).
Props play a part in making the narrative clear. A sword, the weapon by which G dies, is used at various points, B and her party arrive wearing crowns to signify their royal status, and some dancers are carried, stiff and lifeless, across the stage wearing shrouds to represent the Wilis who have risen from their graves. Elements of the traditional Giselle are there.
But what really drives G is Stewart’s research into illness, hysteria, suicide and the inter-connectedness that was believed to exist between madness and sex at the time Giselle was created in 1841. It is largely a look at the state of mind of Giselle, the woman, rather than a story of love and betrayal. The dancers’ movements are often flagrantly sexual or irrationally repetitive. The work moves from left to right across the stage, unchanging and inexorable in direction but constantly changing in rhythm and intensity. Sometimes the dancers walk slowly and purposefully, sometimes they cross the stage with fast moving feet. Sometimes the movement looks quite classical but is soon followed by sequences where the dancers hurl themselves through the air in displays of extreme dancing.
There are, nevertheless, a number of references to traditional productions of Giselle, enough for audiences to make the link if they wish. Some such references are choreographic. Two dancers often partner each other with arms linked, imitating the steps Giselle and Albrecht perform in Act I of traditional versions, and dancers often walk across the stage with arms crossed over their chests, palms facing upwards in the pose that is characteristic of the Wilis in Act II. In addition, the electronic score by Luke Smiles includes a brief section taken from the 1841 score for Giselle by Adolphe Adam. And some more props remind us of the traditional Giselle, including a daisy held by one dancer as she crosses the stage towards the end of the work. It harks back to the ’he loves me, he loves me not’ game played by Albrecht and Giselle in Act I of traditional productions.
The physicality of the dancers of Australian Dance Theatre has become legendary and they certainly show their thrilling athleticism in G. But what is also admirable is the way in which they show the madness, the hysteria and the unstable, manic qualities that Stewart is seeking. Shaking hands, nodding heads, wildly flailing limbs, crazed eyes, they are all there and all electrifying to watch.
At its best, the traditional Giselle is a moving work leaving us to ponder, perhaps a little loftily, on many aspects of love, loss, betrayal and grief. Most of those who stage it look to the notions of Romanticism in the arts for their inspiration. Stewart’s G is clearly of today: there is nothing of the 19th-century Romanticism about it. But what makes it such a compelling work is that it makes new art from an old work without destroying the old and without compromising Stewart’s constant push towards the new.’
Michelle Potter, 17 June 2013
I had previously spoken briefly to Stewart about his interest in an article entitled ‘Giselle, madness and death’ published in the journal Medical Humanities in 2004, which has some bearing on the approach Stewart took. For anyone interested in this background here is a link to the article.
7 June 2013, Lyric Theatre, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane
The back story to The Bright Stream has been told and retold. Originally created in 1935 with choreography by Fyodor Lopukhov and with a score by Dmitri Shostakovich, the ballet lasted just months. Set on a Soviet-style farm at harvest time, but with some eccentric touches to the story of collective agriculture, the ballet was banned by Joseph Stalin.
As the overture begins in Alexei Ratmansky’s restaging of The Bright Stream for the Bolshoi Ballet, which dates to 2003, we understand something of this back story. We are faced with a front cloth covered with various Soviet slogans and some headlines from Russian newspapers, said to be those of Pravda in its review of The Bright Stream, and in its review of another of Shostakovich’s scores, that for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Stalin also hated. Amongst the extracts and slogans are ‘Ballet falsehood’, ‘Muddle instead of music’, ‘Tractors and kindergartens are the gearbox of the new village’, and others of a similar nature.
Working from the original libretto, but without any choreographic notation from the 1930s, Ratmansky has built his version of The Bright Stream, the title being the name of the collective farm, using his classical heritage mixed with his unique choreographic sensibilities and a clear talent for humour and characterisation. What emerges over two hours is a comic ballet based on the lives of a group of peasants living in the steppes of the northern part of the Causcasus region. They become entangled with a visiting group of entertainers from the city and what ensues is a world of flirtatious encounters and mistaken identities, the latter largely as a result of moments of cross dressing.
What a joy it was to see the beautifully accomplished Bolshoi dancers performing Ratmansky’s choreography. Whether whipping off a few fouettés (with never a hint of moving across the stage), performing a series of jetés, or tossing off a manège of jumps, they danced with such attack, made everything look so easy, and always looked as though performing was pure pleasure for them. The two leading ladies, Maria Aleksandrova as the ballerina from the city and Nina Kapstova as Zina the local entertainment organiser, both gave finely sculpted performances, but the entire cast deserves bouquets.
Ratmansky’s choreography for groups of women was especially captivating. He often arranged steps in canon and the overall image that emerged as arabesque followed arabesque, for example, was a little like the movement of plaiting and unplaiting. I loved too the characters that populated The Bright Stream—the elderly folk in particular—and I especially liked that, while they were all drawn with broad, comic brush strokes, there seemed to be no desire by the dancers to overplay their characterisations. As a result these folk were funny and eccentric but believably so.
But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of The Bright Stream was Ratmansky’s development of those scenes in which, as a joke, two of the main characters, the Ballerina from the city and her partner, dress in each other’s costumes and set up a romantic tryst with two elderly dacha dwellers who have joined the harvest festivities. Ruslan Skvortsov, dressed in a long white Romantic tutu, gave a wonderful performance as the (cross-dressed) Ballerina. Ratmanksy’s choreography for him was an absolute delight. It had moments that recalled Giselle, Pas de Quatre, Les Sylphides and La Sylphide, all arranged in a topsy-turvy mix. The image of Skvortsov with his index finger under his chin à la Pas de Quatre will remain in my mind for some time.
So was there any hint of politics in this work? After all, collective farms did not always operate as happy and productive initiatives in Soviet Russia. Well, the Grim Reaper appears during the final scenes as the harvest festival begins. He joins in the dancing with his scythe swinging wildly round and round. But the people largely ignore him and he disappears as unexpectedly as he appeared. We can make what we like of this appearance but it adds a touch of politics to a fascinating ballet that shows Ratmansky as a choreographer of unusual and diverse strengths and abilities.
31 May 2013, National Library of Australia Theatre, Canberra
The National Library’s theatre is quite unsuited to dance. It is a lecture theatre really, although capable also of acting as a cinema. It has a small, oddly-shaped area at the front of an auditorium that holds about 300 people. The auditorium is raked but anything that is ‘grounded’ movement is difficult to see unless one is sitting in the first few rows. Liz Lea did her best to accommodate the space and its severe limitations. From a practical point of view, for example, a small dais allowed some movement to be seen to better advantage, and she had some lovely black and white screens at each side of the performing space that allowed the performers to change costumes at various points. But I think she did herself a disservice by performing InFlight in the National Library Theatre.
InFlight is in two parts. Part I, ‘Aviatrix’, is inspired by the exploits of Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and female aviation pioneers, the British woman Amy Johnson and the American Amelia Earhart. In this section, four dancers play out a fantasy of becoming aviatrixes themselves.
The choreography was severely limited by the space available. I enjoyed the dance that opened the show, a 1920s–1930s style number with fabulous black and silver costumes and gorgeous red and black feather fans. But so often the dancers, Melanie and Marnie Polamares, seemed to be just moving on the spot. It did however serve its purpose well by setting the scene in the era of pioneer aviation activities.
The audio-visual material screened throughout Part I included the voices of Ulm and Kingsford Smith, footage of Johnson and others, still photographs of them all (interspersed with photos of the dancers dressed in aviation gear), and contemporary newspaper headlines. There was so much audio-visual material that the choreography became a side issue. This section seems to me to be more suited to being shown as something other than a dance performance. A history lesson about pioneering moments in aviation?
Part II, ‘Aviary’, leaves aviation history behind and the four dancers are transformed into birds, staking out a territory and building nests. Miranda Wheen’s solo was a highlight as she, wearing an elegant long white dress and manipulating two large white feather fans, sought a place to build her nest. Alison Plevey, dressed in red, also made a mark in another solo as a more aggressive bird. But again there was just no room for the dancers to move and no way for the audience to enjoy Lea’s usually expansive choreography. Naomi Ota’s feathery, trailing installation also got a little lost. It needed space to be seen at its best (some of it had to be hung along a side wall), and space for the dancers to manipulate it effectively. The ending was a bit of a mystery to me. Something was carried onstage in what seemed to be a piece of bark. This moment in the story was performed with great solemnity.
Lea has a great eye for the theatrical and a wonderful capacity to use all kinds of unexpected additions to her shows. But basically she is an artist working in the medium of dance. Dance doesn’t really exist without choreography and if the choreography is compromised in the way it was in InFlight, both by lack of space and by being overshadowed by audio-visual material, the show becomes something else. Perhaps it doesn’t matter? However, I think it does in this case because Lea’s choreography deserves to be seen in a situation that allows it proper range. Whatever were the political needs of performing it at the National Library, it is impossible for me to ignore the fact that Lea did herself, and her four very accomplished dancers, a disservice.
Postscript: The photocopied handout/program did little to make me feel better about the show. It contained many of the errors that creep in when one does a cut and paste to a document and then doesn’t check and recheck for extraneous words. It was an unprofessional publication.
