Inwonderland. James Batchelor

6 April 2013, Courtyard Studio, Canberra Theatre Centre

James Batchelor’s dance and multimedia installation has already been seen in various manifestations, often as a work in progress, in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. This particular Canberra showing was, however, my first taste of the work and in fact my first taste of Batchelor’s approach to making art. It is an impressive production showing Batchelor’s strong film making skills—he has been mentored by Sue Healey—and some beautifully detailed costumes and settings. Overall it is a remarkably cohesive show.

Amber McCartney in James Batchelor’s *Inwonderland*. Courtesy James Batchelor

The title, Inwonderland, evokes of course Lewis Carroll’s Alice in wonderland and there are many clear allusions to that story. At the beginning of the work we enter a darkened space with our camp stools (shades of an art gallery installation) and notice that there are several separate areas where the work will unfold. At first we encounter a circle of toy rabbits with a dancer dressed in a long Victorian-style dress moving in the middle of this ring. The rabbit-hole of course! She engages in conversation with one rabbit, she twitches and twists—in fact circles seem to be a choreographer signature here. And as the work continues and we move on with it to other parts of the performing space there are other allusions to Alice in wonderland. The most obvious comes when the work takes place around a long table set up for a grand tea party.

But we can spend a lot of time searching for connections with Alice in wonderland when in fact the work goes beyond that. It’s an expressionistic work where ideas are subjectively presented, where experiences are exaggerated, removed from reality and often distorted. A scene where Amber McCartney, the ‘Alice’ of the piece, sits reading in the glow of a Tiffany-style lamp is a case in point. As she does so film footage of the Inwonderland characters moving through a hedge maze and a tangle of branches appears on a screen that looks as if it is made from unspun wool (in fact it’s wadding). This screen distorts what is in fact beautifully crisp footage (see the excerpt at the link below). The dream-like quality that emerges as the footage is screened in this way is mirrored by McCartney who moves in slow motion, sometimes almost imperceptibly.

The tea party is a great example of Batchelor’s approach as well. It becomes almost a slapstick adventure for the three characters: a schoolmarm, ‘Alice’, and a brightly dressed, crazy character, all of whom wreak havoc at the beautifully set up table. Stretched above the table is another screen on which footage is again distorted, both as a result of the screen’s location high above the table and because the screen is not stretched taut.

Inwonderland falls down slightly in terms of choreography, which I thought needed some pruning particularly in the opening rabbit-hole sequence. And a stronger movement vocabulary is needed I think. I’m not sure if Batchelor works in a particular manner in creating his vocabulary but it looks like he needs a firmer foundation from which to build and develop his movement ideas. I would have liked to know more too about the sound track and the scenic and costume design. The hand-out missed giving these credits.

Inwonderland is, however, a wonderful example of how dance, film, and scenic and costume design can work together, and its presentation as an installation is beautifully thought through and thoroughly refreshing. It is a dreamscape of the mind. I look forward eagerly to seeing more of Batchelor’s work and hope that he doesn’t move entirely into the area of dance film, although he is clearly talented in that area, but keeps a live component in his works as well.

Michelle Potter, 7 April 2013

Here is a link to the footage filmed at Berrima, New South Wales.

(UPDATE August 2020. Link no longer available.)

Dance diary. March 2013

Luke Ingham

In mid-March I had the pleasure of meeting up in San Francisco with Luke Ingham, former soloist with the Australian Ballet. Ingham and his wife, Danielle Rowe, left Houston Ballet in 2012 to take up other offers. Rowe went to join Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague and Ingham scored a soloist’s contract with San Francisco Ballet. Ingham has already had some great opportunities in San Francisco and my story on his activities is scheduled to appear in the June issue of Dance Australia in the magazine’s series Dancers without borders. Watch out for it.

Walter Gore’s The Crucifix

I have always been fascinated by a photograph taken by Walter Stringer of the final scene from Walter Gore’s ballet The Crucifix. Alan Brissenden, in his and Keith Glennon’s book Australia Dances, reproduces the photograph on page 53, and a print is part of the National Library’s Walter Stringer Collection. Brissenden gives a brief account of the storyline and the reception the ballet received when it was staged in Australia by the National Theatre Ballet in 1952.

Paula Hinton in Walter Gore's 'The Crucifix', 1952 — Paul Hinton in the final scene of Walter Gore’s ballet *The Crucifix*, National Theatre Ballet, Melbourne 1952. Photo: Walter Stringer, National Library of Australia

I have just recently been making a summary of an oral history interview I recorded with Athol Willoughby in February and his recollections of performing in The Crucifix tell us a little more, especially about the final scene, and provide, furthermore, a wonderful example of the value of oral history. Willoughby played the role of one of the soldiers who accompanies the executioner, played by Walter Gore, to the scaffold. He says of the opening performance:

‘The scene changed to a huge [stake] with a lot of fake wood around it … Wally came in carrying Paula … Her hands were tied … and he lifted her onto the [stake]. Just as the symphony ended he picked up a torch—none of us had seen the end of the ballet, even at the dress rehearsal the end of the ballet hadn’t been choreographed and we didn’t know what was going to happen—he picked up a flaming torch and threw it at the pyre of wood. The minute he threw the torch at her the wood lit up, the symphony finished and Paula screamed … It was so powerful.’

The Rite of Spring: an animated graphical score

I have just received the following note and link from composer Stephen Malinowski:
‘The last few months, I’ve been working on an animated graphical score of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This week I completed the first part. Enjoy!

Pacific Northwest Ballet

In my review of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s recent program I mentioned that the show I saw was only the second time I had seen the company in performance. Well that is not quite true. I had the good fortune to see the company in 2007 in Seattle when the program consisted of George Balanchine’s La Sonambula, Christopher Wheeldon’s Polyphonia and Nacho Duato’s Rassemblement. Certainly a very interesting program.

Michelle Potter, 31 March 2013

Featured image: Luke Ingham and Sarah van Patten in Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour. Photo: © Erik Tomasson, 2013. Courtesy San Francisco Ballet

Further details

Valerie Grieg (1922–2013)

‘Good dancers love dancing’ (Valerie Grieg, 2011)

Valerie Grieg, who has died in Melbourne on 27 March in her 91st year, was an inspired teacher of ballet whose deep understanding of the classical technique and how it can best be taught are contained in her publication Inside ballet technique: separating anatomical fact from fiction in the ballet class. Inside ballet technique was first published in 1994 by the Princeton Book Company and remains an essential guide to body mechanics and the anatomical laws behind classical ballet.

Valerie Grieg modelling Prestige Ltd fabric, taken during the filming of ‘Fabrics in Motion’, Melbourne, Victoria, 1951. Courtesy Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. Reproduced with permission

As a child in Melbourne Grieg studied ballet before going on to work with Elisabet Wiener, proponent of the Central European modern dance style. But ballet, with its strong technical underpinning, was where her interests and commitment lay and in the 1940s she joined Laurel Martyn’s Ballet Guild. It was an extraordinarily creative time at the newly-formed Guild and Grieg’s colleagues at the time represented a roll call of Melbourne-based artists of the day. They included Martin Rubinstein, Strelsa Heckelman, Corrie Lodders, Max Collis, Graham Smith and Eve King. With Ballet Guild, Grieg performed in many of Martyn’s original compositions, including Sigrid in which she danced the title role, as well as in classics of the repertoire such as Serge Bousloff’s staging of Le Carnaval in which she appeared as Chiarina.

Teaching soon became an important aspect of Grieg’s career. In 1950 the Guild established a branch in Hamilton, Victoria, and Grieg became its director. A newspaper report in 1952 claimed Grieg had flown over 40,000 miles to give classes since taking on this role. Later she taught for the Guild on the Mornington Peninsula.

Grieg left the Guild, and Australia, in the early 1950s to work and study in the United Kingdom. In London she came under the influence of esteemed teacher Audrey de Vos whose approach to a number of technical issues Grieg absorbed into her own developing career as an educator.

After returning to Australia briefly Grieg left in the early 1960s to pursue her dance interests in the United States. She studied in New York at the Juilliard School where she especially admired the warmth and strength of Martha Hill, and then moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she worked with Ohio Ballet. She was also the founding coordinator of the Dance Department at the University of Akron, Ohio. Eventually, Grieg returned to Manhattan where she coached, choreographed and taught master classes. She came back to Australia on frequent occasions to teach and coach. Later she returned permanently to her country of birth living first in Canberra and then in Melbourne.

Grieg’s students continue to teach and perform in the United States, Australia and elsewhere and many continue to develop and expand upon her influential approach to teaching. Her friend and colleague, Janet Karin, recalls Grieg’s influence:

In the 1950s, Valerie was a ballet teacher well ahead of her time. Her experience in modern dance, her anatomical knowledge and her enquiring, analytical mind enabled her to see the fundamental truths behind traditional teaching. As my mentor in my early teaching years, she was always generously encouraging. Her interest in discussing esoteric technical points inspired me then, and was still inspiring me as she reached the age of 90. Valerie helped lay the foundations of my teaching career.

Grieg’s legacy lives on. She is survived by her nephews, Christopher Zegelin in the United States and Peter Zegelin in Australia.

Valerie Grieg: born Melbourne, 4 September 1922; died Melbourne, 27 March 2013.

Michelle Potter, 28 March 2013

[Modern] Masterpieces. Pacific Northwest Ballet

21 March 2013, McCaw Hall, Seattle

This program was a particularly generous one from Peter Boal’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, consisting as it did of four works: George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, Paul Gibson’s Mozart Pieces, Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room. It was also a diverse program showcasing a range of American choreographers, past and present.

I have to admit to being an Upper Room fan and recall with much pleasure the performances given of it by the Australian Ballet now more than a decade ago. So I was surprised by the interpretation given to it by dancers of Pacific Northwest Ballet and it made me ponder on the notion of a vernacular in dance, and also on the role of a personal style in dance. The standout dancer for me was Kiyon Gaines who, especially in the men’s trio towards the end of the work, looked like he was in another space, in the upper room as it were, so engrossed was he in the performance. To me he was the only dancer who really got the ascendancy of emotion and physicality that drives the work to its conclusion. Others put in personal tweaks of expression or added small technical eccentricities but didn’t give the appearance of being in the same show as their colleagues. All in all a bit of a disappointment.

Balanchine’s exquisite Concerto Barocco opened the program. It was nicely danced by the company who have a youthfulness that suits many Balanchine works, including this one, and whose training and heritage give them a particular feeling for the style. I especially admired the two leading ladies, Maria Chapman and Lesley Rausch, both of whom are elegant, long-limbed dancers and who used these attributes to advantage.

Paul Gibson’s Mozart Pieces is a development of an earlier piece made for a Pacific Northwest Ballet School performance. It is a series of showy episodes performed by seven men and two women. Several of the sections are danced to Mozart minuets and there is a certain inevitability to the choreography. But Gibson has counteracted what could have become a predictable work with some unexpected changes of movement and lots of variety in the way the arms and head are used. I enjoyed watching the leading male dancer, Karel Cruz. His feet and ankles seemed amazingly articulate and I could see so clearly how they held together perfectly in fifth in his double tours. This is perhaps a bit of an esoteric comment to make, but the way he executed those tours remains clearly fixed in my mind.

Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven was made in response to Dove’s grief at the loss of friends and colleagues who died from complications associated with AIDS. Originally made on the Royal Swedish Ballet, it is set on three couples and is an unusual work in that it seems confrontingly static. Movements tend not to flow together or even be fluid within themselves. The six dancers periodically come together in a circle, which is also pretty much a static formation, before breaking apart. The whole might be seen as a fractured view of life and the relationships made within it. I found it hard to be emotionally involved so obvious was the movement metaphor.

This was my first viewing of a performance by Pacific Northwest Ballet since the company was in Australia in the 1990s for the Melbourne Festival. There were moments to be savoured but I would have loved to have been uplifted!

Michelle Potter, 24 March 2013

The Rite of Spring. Houston Ballet

15 March, Brown Theater, Wortham Center, Houston, TX

Houston Ballet’s most recent program had the slightly confusing title of The Rite of Spring when in fact it was a triple bill in which Stanton Welch’s reimagining of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was simply the final offering on the program. Nevertheless, it was probably the most anticipated of the three works on show although I’m not sure the extensive media build-up was entirely justified.

Welch dispensed with the narrative of human sacrifice that marked the original, infamous 1913 production of Rite of Spring. His production began in something of a primeval manner with a horde of Neanderthal-looking men whose fearsome arrival onstage caused a band of women to flee the stage, thus establishing a primitive, tribal background to the work. But from there the piece seemed to disintegrate into a mixture of cultural references culminating midway through in some kind of wedding or association between a man and a woman, who for the occasion was bound in white garments by her female friends. Just what happened to the couple later on was not clear to me other than that they danced with the rest of the tribe in a passionate frenzy of movement. The work seemed to peter out at the end.

Nor was it clear just exactly who theses tribes were. Costumes and make-up, which included heavy body markings, recalled Aztec ornamentation, a least to me, although there were times when the grass skirts of Polynesia and Melanesia seemed to surface. Heavy, black eye make-up sometimes made the dancers look like they were wearing sunglasses and at other times made their eyes look quite red as though they had been caught in a camera flash. I thought overall the costume/make-up design was considerably overwrought.

This stood in sharp contrast to two magnificent backcloths created from two paintings by Australian indigenous artist Rosella Namok. Namok’s works, ‘Stinging Rain’ and ‘Marks on the Sand, After King Tide’, were beautifully enlarged by Houston Ballet’s backstage team. They had a strong but simple message and it is curious that Welch, according to all press material and published interviews, chose her work because he thought it had a universal quality to it. Well that’s just what Welch’s production didn’t have. It lacked a simple, strong message and a clear sense of focus and, with its myriad of references to other cultures, couldn’t be called universal.

Choreographically Welch worked very closely with the music and there was scarcely a note that didn’t have a corresponding step. Everything looked very busy and as a result the Stravinsky score sounded quite different. To me it seemed to have lost its integrity.

Creating a new Rite of Spring will always bring out a very personal side of any choreographer it seems. The Welch production was not to my liking I’m afraid and I’m beginning to suspect that the versions that work best for me maintain the links to the original narrative or else diverge entirely from it. Welch was unable to establish a new, satisfying pathway or a link to the old one.

The evening opened with Mark Morris’ Pacific danced to Lou Harrison’s Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano. It seemed a little like a religious celebration possibly because of the constant use of uplifted arms and the placing of the hands in front of the body, palms facing each other, as if holding an devotional item between the hands, or as if in a kind of open praying gesture. Morris’ choreography followed the impetus of the music but the constant bending to the floor as if in homage to something (the music?) also emphasised a kind of religiosity.

Edwaard Liang’s Murmuration, especially created on Houston Ballet and receiving its world premiere in this program, began with a single female dancer moving slowly down a diagonal, But just as one began to ponder the serenity with which she accomplished this walk, the stage was filled with dancers. They formed groups broke apart, met and left the stage in a flurry of movement that lasted for the entire first movement of Ezio Bosso’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Esoconcerto. As explained in a program note the title of the work refers to the intricate patterns formed by starlings during flight and the constantly changing choreographic groupings alluded to these patterns.

The second movement consisted of a series of duets which showed Liang’s emphasis on how bodies can work together as they intertwine and contort, and in so doing how they often appear as one. The men hold our attention in the third movement and for a while the women group themselves at the back and watch the men display their athleticism.

Murmuration is beautifully designed. The simple, grey costumes, designed by Liang and Houston Ballet’s wardrobe manager Laura Lynch, move beautifully with the dancers. The pale grey leotards with attached chiffon panels for the women, and the wide legged trousers softy gathered at the waist for the men enhance and never detract from the choreography. The background, which relies on Lisa J. Pinkham’s lighting for its strongest effect, changes from a simple grey-lit cloth in the first movement to what looks like a cascade of fireflies in the second. And as the third movement progresses the fireflies turn to small white shapes (of paper I guess) falling softly to the ground.

Murmuration deserved the ecstatic reaction it received from the audience at the performance I attended although there were times when I thought there was a little too much repetition in the choreography.

Michelle Potter, 18 March 2013