The Silver Rose. The Australian Ballet

Elsewhere on this website I made a comment that referred to Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose, which I saw just recently towards the end of its Sydney season by the Australian Ballet. My comment was in response to what I thought was an excellent argument about the new magazine Fjord Review, which also brought up other issues relating to leadership and marketing of dance and dancers and in particular to perceived problems with Australian Ballet dancers ‘nailing the right atmosphere’ in their performances. My comment in its turn generated another comment picking up on The Silver Rose. All the comments are available at this link but I am reposting the last one below.

I was hoping Michelle would open a thread about The Silver Rose. I seem to be in a minority in thinking that Murphy acquitted himself well in the enormous task he set himself and his designer in taking on a danced version of Der Rosenkavalier.

Well, I was very disappointed with The Silver Rose. I thought the final trio for the Marschallin, Sophie and Octavian was brilliantly choreographed and well performed by Danielle Rowe, Amber Scott and Luke Ingham. It was a moment of nostalgia and in true Murphy fashion all the yearning, wistfulness and regret contained in that particular emotion came through in the choreography. But, there wasn’t all that much else in it for me. The first act, which had to establish the characters, cried out for words or surtitles or program notes that lit up in the dark, anything. The complications of who was who just couldn’t be established through choreographic means. I also found the pantomime of the hairdresser, couturier and make-up artist so over the top that it made me cringe. Personally I like my pantomime to be a little more subtle, and I don’t think that’s a contradiction in terms.

But the point I was making in the comment posted earlier was that I didn’t think the dancers of the Australian Ballet, with a few exceptions, really got the feel of Murphy’s brand of choreography on this occasion. There were so many moments when they simply looked awkward. It reminded me of Carolyn Brown, that great, great Cunningham dancer from the mid decades of the twentieth century, who said that when the Cunningham company went to watch Cunningham’s equally great, great work Summerspace performed by New York City Ballet (in 1966) that they all sat in the auditorium and cried.

However, this post is now open for comments.

Michelle Potter, 26 April 2010.

Diaghilev. A life. Sjeng Scheijen

In 1951 Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, later to become Jacqueline Kennedy, won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris for a short essay entitled ‘People I wish I had known’. She wrote about three men, one of whom was Serge Diaghilev. She described him as an ‘alchemist unique in art history’. Kennedy is not alone in naming Diaghilev as a man of singular importance in the development of the arts in the West. The Australian-born writer and cultural critic Clive James included Diaghilev in his recent collection of essays, Cultural Amnesia, for example. And one of Diaghilev’s biographers tells the story of the vegetable seller at Covent Garden who said to him, ‘Did you know Daggyleff? He was the greatest dancer that ever lived.’

Neither Jacqueline Kennedy, nor Clive James, nor the unnamed vegetable seller knew Serge Diaghilev personally and yet for each the name Diaghilev resonated in a particularly powerful manner. It is now 81 years since Serge Diaghilev died in 1929, so what was it about this man and his exploits that continues to have an impact across continents, professions and social strata?

The obvious answer is that Diaghilev changed the face of dance by establishing an aesthetic of collaboration such as the dance world had not previously known, and in so doing surrounded himself with the most innovative thinkers and artists across all fields of endeavour. The year 2009 saw the centenary of the first Paris season of his famed Ballet Russe company and the world has been flooded with exhibitions and publications celebrating that event and its ongoing influence. More are planned for 2010.

But in addition, Diaghilev had personality plus! And it is this aspect of his life that comes out very clearly in Sjeng Scheijen’s biography Diaghilev: a life published in 2009. It is in fact a beguiling book. It places the whole Diaghilev enterprise in a very personal context—the troubles, the strife, the arguments, the sex, the weeping, the dramas, the networking, they’re all there. I probably didn’t learn all that much more about the works in the Diaghilev repertoire and this might be seen as a limitation of sorts. But I did learn much about the social and personal environment in which that repertoire got to the stage and Diaghilev’s personality grew bigger and bigger and more and more complex as the book continued.

My favourite anecdote, however, is a somewhat surreal one. It concerns the persuasive Misia Sert, pianist, patron and one time wife of painter Jose Maria Sert, and her input into Red Cross efforts during World War I. It is surreal in its juxtaposition of art and reality. It reads:

‘Many celebrated artists entered military service, though few fought at the front. Most joined army nursing corps or signed up with the Red Cross. Misia managed to persuade her couturier friends to provide a number of vans, which she converted into ambulances. Manned by artists and socialites, they sped to the aid of troops in northern France. Her nursing staff included Cocteau, sporting a natty little uniform designed by the couturier Poiret. Maurice Ravel also drove an ambulance, though in a regular army unit. Ida Rubinstein, too, worked as a nurse, though her uniform was designed by Bakst.’

The main strength of the book is the depth of research that has gone into its creation. It draws on sources, many of them valuable primary resources from Russia, which have not been and are still not easily available to other researchers. These sources make this biography quite unique. However, the use of personal material is not without its problems and in my opinion any publication that relies heavily on very personal material such as letters, diaries and the like needs to be taken with a grain of salt and its sources considered and reconsidered, checked and rechecked against other material. Scheijen relies heavily on such material and little else, which makes me wonder whether or not the book will in the future be seen as a collection of gossip and anecdote. Nevertheless, the book is a great read.

One little annoyance: I disliked finding reference to Le Boutique fantasque. The name of the work is beautifully written with the adjective beginning with a lower case ‘f’ as is absolutely correct from a French language point of view. But as far as I know ’boutique’ has always been feminine gender—’la boutique’.

I also puzzled for a while over how Diaghilev could have seen the Olympic Games in Athens during a trip to Europe in 1906, as Scheijen observes, when I had always believed that Athens hosted the Olympics in 1896 and that 1906 was not an Olympic year. But the puzzlement was my ignorance. Eventually I discovered that Athens hosted an ‘Intercalated Games’ in 1906. The argument about whether or not the 1906 Games were really ‘Olympic’ has been an interesting side-step for me.

Michelle Potter, 14 April 2010

Rafael Bonachela’s dancers

Last week a group of dancers from Sydney Dance Company (SDC) made a brief guest appearance on So you think you can dance Australia. They performed a short excerpt from 6 Breaths, the most recent work created on them by their artistic director Rafael Bonachela. Without wishing to detract from the six dancers who had reached one of the last stages of the So you think you can dance competition, the SDC dancers were absolutely mesmerising. With their streamlined bodies, clearly defined musculature and eloquent limbs it was clear that they were reaping the benefits of strong leadership and vision and, as well, of a particular kind of dance teaching.

Dancers of Sydney Dance Company in *6 Breaths*. Photo: © Jeff Busby. Courtesy of Sydney Dance Company

I was lucky that I had an interview set up with Bonachela the following weekend for an article to be published elsewhere, so I couldn’t wait to ask what was happening in the SDC studios. What was producing dancers with such an exceptional capacity to articulate movement and with such a clear sense of focus? I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall (or on the dancers’ bodies) and twigged that Merce Cunningham was in there somewhere.

Bonachela told me that his dancers take both classical ballet and Cunningham technique classes in fairly equal proportions. Cunningham technique, he said, gives the torso extra strength and flexibility. Springing to his feet he demonstrated a classical attitude (think of the familiar statue of Mercury), and then the way the same pose can be used by Cunningham where the spine, still elongated, can be pitched forward in a totally different, contemporary alignment (think of Cunningham’s Beach Birds or Beach Birds for Camera).

Watching 6 Breaths in full shortly afterwards, I looked on with this new knowledge and, while Bonachela is absolutely right about the torso, his dancers also show that every part of the body is an articulate component of the choreography. In addition, they have that rare ability to highlight the space in and through which the body moves and which surrounds each part of the body. Their movements have ‘weight’—and I don’t mean here that they are heavy! Both the notion that every part of the body can be articulate, and that the body moves in space, are deeply embedded in Cunningham’s work.

And lest this should sound as though 6 Breaths is choreographically dry and abstracted, I have to record what is perhaps my favourite moment in the work. Chen Wen enters quietly from a downstage wing. Coming to a halt, still on the side of the stage space, he places two hands on his right hip and slowly lifts his right leg to arabesque, foot flexed at the end of the arabesque line. The ‘hands on the hip’ move is a very deliberate one, as if to show that when the leg lifts to arabesque the pelvis must tilt forward. But as this kind of analytical testing comes to an end when the arabesque reaches full height, Chen Wen’s torso stretches upwards and the breath that gives birth to this expressive and lyrical stretch continues through the neck as the head tilts slightly backwards. From there the movement swirls smoothly into the next phrase. It’s over quite quickly but it is just breathtaking in the way it generates so many thoughts about so many aspects of dance.

6 Breaths is an exquisite work even without any kind of technical analysis. Apart from the choreography and the performance of it, in terms of music and design it looks forward to a new and exciting collaborative aesthetic from Sydney Dance Company. But as I left the theatre I could not help but hope that Bonachela will be that rare kind of artistic director who will always be searching for an understanding of the innate qualities of movement, for whom physicality (not just physical tricks) is what makes dance dance—whatever kind of dance we might be talking about—and who wants his dancers to know these things too and be able to translate that knowledge into movement. Now that would make Sydney Dance a quite remarkable company. It would also make Bonachela one of the very few truly outstanding dance leaders.

Film clip from Stella Motion Pictures, with thanks.

Dancing across borders. A film by Anne Bass

For two months in early 2007 I worked with Anne Bass on the initial stages of what would eventually become Dancing across borders, a documentary film on the career to date of Sokvannara Sar, a dancer who grew up in Cambodia and who is now dancing with Pacific Northwest Ballet. The film has been hugely successful since its release in 2009 and the website that documents its production, and that also gives contextual material about other initiatives including the Khmer Dance Project, is well worth a look.

Michelle Potter, 8 April 2010

Postscript to Graduation Ball. The sequel

On 9 July 1955, a short news article appeard in the Melbourne newspaper The Age announcing the engagement of David Lichine to produce Francesca da Rimini and Girls’ Dormitory for the Borovansky Ballet. Towards the end of 1955 Lichine did stage a new production of Francesca. It had designs by William Constable and featured Jocelyn Vollmar, Arvids Fibigs and Royes Fernandez in the leading roles. During the same engagement Lichine also created his very popular Nutcracker for the Borovansky Ballet. It premiered in Sydney on 19 December 1955 and became the highlight of future Sydney Christmas seasons by the Borovansky Ballet.

Girls Dormitory was never staged by the Borovansky Ballet. The suggestion that it was to be staged is interesting, however, and one wonders, given that the Buenos Aires staging (see previous post) had such a short life span, whether the Benois designs held in Boston, and dated 1949 (post Buenos Aires), were created for a new version that Lichine was contemplating.

Note: The article in The Age erroneously gives the date and location of the world premiere of Graduation Ball as Melbourne 1939. It was in fact Sydney 1940.