Former Australian Ballet dancer (and a graduate of the Australian Ballet School), Remi Wörtmeyer, has been appointed artistic director of BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio. The press from BalletMet has further information and some online examples of his dancing and choreography. Follow this link.
Wörtmeyer’s career has been diverse to say the least. In addition to his dance-related activities, which include the creation of some 30 ballets for companies around the world, he established Maison Remi, an organisation that produces some incredible fashion accessories, including handbags, rings and more.
An item from Maison Remi.
For mentions of Wörtmeyer on this website see this tag.
News from Queensland Ballet
Queensland Ballet goes from strength to strength as an organisation. The company recently announced it had taken another step towards its ‘Three Sites: One Vision’ concept by purchasing land in Brisbane on Montague Road close to the Thomas Dixon Centre. The new site will eventually house the company’s sets and costumes. ‘Three Sites’ includes the Thomas Dixon Centre with its exceptional small theatre and administration and classroom areas. The second site is the housing of the Queensland Ballet Academy at the Kelvin Grove State College Campus. The new site to house costumes and sets will be the third.
In another recent announcement, the company advised that it had become the first performing arts company in the world to become WELL CertifiedTM at the Platinum level. This recognition came as a result of the restoration of Queensland Ballet’s home, the Thomas Dixon Cente. The media release reads, in part:
The WELL Building Standard is an evidence-based performance certification system hat marries best practices in design and construction with policy and operational strategies. The Thomas Dixon Centre earned the distinction based on ten concepts—Air, Water, Light, Nourishment, Movement, Thermal Performance, Sound, Materials, Mind and Community.
Isadora Duncan
In last month’s dance diary I mentioned a 2001 publication, Isadora. A sensational life, by Peter Kurth, which I had just read. The book encouraged me to read some more of the books about Isadora, which have been languishing on my bookshelves—it has been years since I looked at them. Isadora’s autobiography, Isadora: My life originally published in 1928, was hugely personal (as I guess is typical of any autobiography). But it gave a clear picture of her approach to dance, and of her distaste for ballet as a style, although there were times when it seemed she was simply making sweeping generalisations. But it looked at events in her life from a different perspective from the way Kurtz described those occasions. The book I enjoyed most was The search for Isadora. The Legend and Legacy of Isadora Duncan by Lillian Loewenthal, published in 1993. It was the most analytical and perhaps divorced from hysteria of one kind or another.
Three very different approaches! It made very clear how much of a person and his/her/their background is revealed in a publication. Now I have Isadora Duncan. Une Sculpture Vivante, to examine. Published in 2009, it an exhibition catalogue, with some essays, from the Musée Bourdelle in Paris.
My comments on Kurth’s book are in the dance diary for May at this link.
Press for June 2024
Bangarra’s ‘Horizon’. Dance Australia, 17 June 2024. Online at this link. SDC ‘Momenta’. Dance Australia. 24 June 2024. Online at this link.
27 June 2024. The Vault, Dairy Road Precinct, Canberra
The Dataset took place in the Vault, an expansive, untheatrical space in the Dairy Road Precinct in Fyshwick, a largely industrial area in Canberra. The Vault has been used effectively before by Alison Plevey’s Australian Dance Party, in particular with From the Vaultin 2019. But it needs an exceptional production to ensure that the characteristics of the space, especially its dark and unwelcoming environment, are used to advantage. The Dataset was unappealingly dark at the beginning, although it brightened up somewhat, at least in terms of lighting, as the work progressed.
Indeed as the work progressed, the two dancers who formed the cast, Alison Plevey and Sara Black, who were wearing identical white outfits, were subjected to examination by a program in which every conceivable aspect of the dancers’ bodily and emotional characteristics were measured by what appeared to be an artificial intelligence program. We could see the program unfolding in words on the large back-screen in the performing space. Those words were also spoken aloud by an American voice. We watched as the dancers attempted to address the suggestions the AI program offered them.
Eventually, presumably because the AI program suggested that friendship was the next step, the dancers removed their short white jackets, under which they were wearing an individually distinct, decorative black and white top. They danced together with choreography that (perhaps unsurprisingly) was very much in the style we have come to expect from Australian Dance Party—lots of floor work, lifts with stretched limbs emerging out of the shapes formed, along with a variety of twisted poses.
Slowly, however, the data on the screen began to fall apart, with words breaking up and lurching around. AI was no longer working well. In the end, darkness descended and the dancers made their way around the space using torches as they set up a kind of camp site to which they invited several audience members to join them. The work came to the end in this calm and very different environment.
The Dataset falls within the Australian Dance Party’s focus on social and environmental aspects of the world in which we currently exist. Media material from the company explains that the work ‘imagines a world where we physicalise the data that forms us and interrogate its purpose and power. What happens when the system rules us? What happens when the system is broken? The Dataset highlights our adaptability as humans in the face of adversity.’ It is certainly an interesting concept to address and the collaborative elements were at times engrossing and entertaining, especially the ever-changing images that flashed across the back-screen as the dancers were developing their friendship.
But from the beginning of The Dataset my mind kept recalling Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published 1932) and George Orwell’’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (published 1949). Both were dystopian novels that examined potential changes in society, and their effects on humanity, by developments in fields such as science, economics and the like. The Dataset had a similar narrative, although I wondered constantly whether dance could address such issues as effectively as the written word. In the case of The Dataset I think the answer is no. In this case the choreography, which is the heart of dance, seemed unnecessary as the work unfolded.
22 June 2024 (matinee). The Playhouse, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane
I didn’t see Greg Horsman’s version of Coppélia, a joint production between Queensland Ballet and West Australian Ballet, when it was first performed back in 2014. But, having admired his reimagining of La Bayadère (despite efforts by some to remove it, and other productions of Bayadère, from the world-wide repertoire), I was looking forward to Queensland Ballet’s presentation of Horsman’s Coppélia. I was not disappointed.
Horsman has kept enough of the original storyline of Coppélia so that the work is recognisable to those of us who have been brought up on the traditional version. Dr Coppélius is bent on bringing a doll to life while the people of the town try to discover what is happening inside his house. And there is the usual love interest wending its way through the story. But Horsman has set this Coppélia in South Australia, in the small town of Hahndorf, which was the home in the early 1800s of German settlers.
But before Act I begins, with its presentation of the activities of the Hahndorf townsfolk, we are given some background in an outstanding prelude. It introduces us to Dr Coppélius and his daughter Coppélia as they prepare to set out on a journey to settle in Australia. The prelude contains a brief moment on stage and then some film (stills and footage) as the boat traverses the oceans. As the voyage continues we see Coppélia’s death and her burial at sea.
The scene then moves to Hahndorf and follows the story largely as we know it, with some exceptions and additions. A notable addition is a brief, moving moment when we see Dr Coppélius (D’Arcy Brazier) making the decision to try to return Coppélia to life. Then there are changes to how the music is used choreographically. The Mazurka from Act I becomes a celebration of a recent win by Hahndorf’s football team. Later, parts of the music for the Czardas in Act I become an accompaniment to a German-style dance with lots of slapping of the knees.
Act II keeps closely to the traditional production as Swanilda (Laura Tosar) and her friends discover the studio of Dr Coppélius, and Franz (Edison Manuel) climbs through a window in Dr Coppélius’ house to make his own discoveries. Act II ends as we might expect with Swanilda and Franz escaping while Dr Coppélius is left holding the doll he was hoping would be his daughter brought to life.
Act III adds some developments to the original story, including the appearance of an angry Dr Coppélius, who usually does not appear in this last Act, carrying his lifeless doll. But after a scuffle or two peace is reached between him and the townsfolk. Swanilda and Franz make plans for the future and the work ends happily.
I was at the second last performance of this Coppélia and, as often happens in such situations. it is not always principal artists who take on leading roles. In particular, I enjoyed immensely seeing company artist Edison Manuel dance Franz. He was engaging in his characterisation and displayed a nicely placed and developed technique. He is someone to watch over the coming years.
There was so much to like in Horsman’s Coppélia. It was appealing in design with lighting by Jon Buswell, set design by Hugh Colman, and costumes by Noelene Hill. But what I especially loved was the way Dr Coppélius had been transformed. Gone was the bumbling, eccentric pantomime-style character that we so often see in traditional productions. Horsman’s Dr Coppélius was a man whose life had been rocked by the death of his daughter and we could see in his every move that he was not the eccentric person of the traditional ballet but someone whose emotions are like our own.
Some of the best choreographers in Australia and overseas have reimagined old stories and made them more relevant in some way. Greg Horsman has joined them and created a thoroughly enjoyable ballet with a coherent, Australianised storyline.
21 June 2024. The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre
Below is a slightly enlarged version of my review of momenta, originally published online by Dance Australia on 24 June 2024. A link to the Dance Australia version is at this link.
The word momenta is the plural form of momentum, a word that means ‘the product of the mass and velocity of an object’. Momenta is also the title of the latest work from Rafael Bonachela, current artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, and there have been several explanations of why Bonachela titled the work as he did. Some are quite complex and don’t help much with understanding what Bonachela was considering as he created the work. But no matter how we might discuss the word, Bonachela’s work momenta was certainly filled with mass and velocity with the ‘objects’ being the extraordinary dancers who make up the current composition of Sydney Dance Company.
The work began with some remarkable unison dancing and this is an aspect of Bonachela’s choreography that I have admired over several decades. He has a gift for grouping dancers in constantly changing arrangements, and for giving those dancers such a varied selection of movement, poses and uses of space within a unison component. The opening section of momenta often had the dancers working on the floor and using their lifted legs as a focus, which initially seemed somewhat unusual as a component of Bonachela’s approach to unison work. But no matter how or where the dancers were positioned, they responded with an input that took the breath away.
Those opening moments set the scene for what followed and as momenta progressed the large groupings broke down into solos, duets, trios and other arrangements of performers until we reached the end sections when the unison work began again. Momenta was very much an abstract work for me, but it was compositionally varied within that overall abstraction and as such the choreography never lost its engrossing quality.
An absolute highlight was a duet between Naiara de Matos and Piran Scott, while the work of Emily Seymour also stood out. But it is quite astonishing to watch the flexibility, the fluidity, the energy and the absolute attention to the tiniest choreographic detail from every single dancer in the current company, many of whom are relatively new performers of Bonachela’s work.
In terms of collaborative input, the highlight was the lighting from Damien Cooper. It was mostly relatively dark, although the colour of that darkness was not always the black we might have expected. As the work progressed, there were hints of dark green, sudden flashes of red, a burst of white cloud, at times a sudden brightness, and at others a mysterious hazy quality (especially, although not exclusively, when that white cloud began to dissipate). The lighting design was enhanced by the constant presence of a circular rig of 19 spotlights that moved up, down and around in the performing space and limited, at times, where the dancers could gather. The movement of the rig was beautifully controlled so that it appeared to be an essential part of the choreography.
The soundscape came from Nick Wales whose original, commissioned composition incorporated Distant Light by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks. Costumes and set were by Elizabeth Gadsby with assistance from Emma White. The costumes were varied (a little) in style and colour but there was a minimalist quality to them in keeping with the overall abstract quality of the work. Their simplicity gave the dancers every opportunity to show that the focus of momenta was the body in motion.
The work closed with showers of small pieces of sparkling cellophane falling onto the stage and out into the auditorium. I’m not sure why this happened and it was perhaps the one aspect of momenta that seemed entirely unnecessary. But momenta was such an absorbing production that this odd addition could just be pushed aside and basically forgotten.
The work is a huge credit to the underlying approach to contemporary dance that we have come to expect from Bonachela in his leadership of Sydney Dance Company.
Postscript: There were some great production shots from momenta but they were not captioned with the names of dancers. Why? As a result I have limited myself to just three shots, one of which I was able to caption (hopefully correctly).
10–20 April, 2024. Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London reviewed by Sonia York-Pryce
It has been 10 years since the inaugural Elixir Festival, the brainchild of Chief Executive & Artistic Director of Sadler’s Wells, Alistair Spalding, and Artistic Programmer and Producer of the Elixir Festival, Jane Hackett. Created in 2014 as ‘a celebration of creative ageing’, the 4-day festival thrust the subjectivity of dance and ageing into the spotlight, highlighting the artistry of older professional dance artists. It featured works by Mats Ek, Pascal Merighi, Hofesh Shechter, Matteo Fargion and Jonathan Burrows with performances by Dominique Mercy of the Pina Bausch Company, Mats Ek with his muse Ana Laguna and Argentina’s Generación Del Ayer, plus former members of London Contemporary Dance Theatre returning to the stage. This program drew a full house confirming that audiences were interested in seeing diversity, with great artists performing irrespective of their age. The Company of Elders, Sadler’s Wells longstanding community dance company, performed alongside other amateur companies from the UK. The Art of Age conference brought together dance scholars, and educators to discuss the continuing age bias and the need for more inclusivity within the field of Western dance.
Move on a decade and the Elixir Festival 2024 has grown in stature and prominence. The festival has been co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union, as part of DANCE ON, PASS ON, DREAM ON. Spanning over eleven days, featuring performances from international professional dance artists from 12 countries, amateur dancers, workshops, Elixir on digital stage and talks. Dance featuring seasoned performers is certainly becoming more mainstream, but progress is still needed to maintain a permanent presence. Headliners included the Mother of African dance Germaine Acogny, performing alongside, Malou Airaudo from Pina Bausch Company, Louise Lecavalier, Charlotta Öfverholm, Dance On Ensemble Berlin, Ben Duke and Christopher Matthews to name but a few, accompanied by Sadler’s Wells Company of Elders, with UK based amateur performance groups.
The opening night’s triple bill was a feast of creative ageing and life experience. Germaine Acogny (79) founder of Senegal’s École des Sables and Malou Airaudo, who incidentally was celebrating her 76th birthday on the night, performed their first work together, Common Ground[s] to Fabrice Bouillon LaForest’s accompaniment on strings. Beautifully lit by Zeynep Kepekli to highlight the two acclaimed performers, with costume design by Petra Leidner, it is a work that shows them in a variety of modes, as warriors and survivors of dance. Whilst giving each other respect, there is tenderness, and a mirroring of motion. The audience were delightfully receptive to these two dance elders, and it certainly made a strong statement that seeing ‘age on stage’ was receiving the respect it warranted. This work has toured internationally as a worthy partner alongside Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. Bausch was an early advocate for intergenerational dance, valuing the assets ageing brought to the performance.
To follow Louise Lecavalier (65), the punk princess of contemporary dance, famed for her incredible gravity defying performances with Edouard Lock’s La La La Human Steps in the 1980s, performed her work, Minutes around late Afternoon. She has come to choreographing late in life but through this work she continues to thrill with her ceaseless moving, arms in constant motion, mirrored by those feet as she bourrées endlessly, gliding across the stage, effortlessly. Dressed in black by designers Yso & Elizabeth Duran, she is defined by the starkness of the stage lighting by Alain Lortie and François Blouin, with her face at times obscured by her blonde tousled hair cascading out of a hoodie. She could be a teenager, judging by her unlimited stamina and presence as she moves continuously, with hardly a breath exhaled as she balances ceaseless motion with the accompanying sound mixing of Benot Beaupre. Music by Antoine Berthiaume (Lien 3), The black dog (Bass mantra, Greddy gutter guru), Dawn of midi (Atlas), are laudable partners to her performance. Lecavalier gives a masterclass in ‘seeing is believing’, defying all concepts that you are too old to thrill. She is just as exhilarating to watch now as she was when a ‘no limits barred’ dancer back in the 80’s. May she never stop!
The final work for the evening White Hare, was commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, and is described as a trio for 2 dancers and a tortoise. Choreographed by artistic director Ben Duke of LOST DOG with fantastic performances by 50 somethings Christopher Akrill and Valentina Formenti as a middle-aged couple navigating life. Duke is known for producing work with a dark satirical edge and this is no different as it traverses life in reverse with issues of Armageddon, survival, and trivialities of life. This alongside the aptly named Tipple the tortoise, who perhaps appears as a metaphor for longevity. It’s a beautiful, humorous piece with exuberant dancing from both, with the set design by Delia Peel and sound by Jethro Cooke. It is a fitting foil to end the evening’s wonderful inspirational performances.
Throughout the festival choreographer, performer and visual artist Christopher Matthews/FORMED VIEW premieres ACT 3, the final work of his trilogy, following on from My Body and Lads. Here Matthews explores queer masculinity, obscured emotions, identity, fragility, intimacy, ageism and the male gaze in later life. In an artist talk during the festival with Nicola Conibere he revealed how he needs to re-think dance history, questioning how masculinity is defined in dance. For ACT 3 he references Kenneth MacMillan’s bedroom scene from Romeo & Juliet, imagery from New York based photography collective PaJaMa, queer writers of the 1930s and 40s with further inspiration from the nude male Greek and Roman marble sculptures in Munich’s Glyptotek. The work features a cast of male collaborators all over the age of 60, Donald Hutera, Bruce Corrie, Andy Newman, Roberto Ishii, John Charles Marshall, Markus Trunk and Stephen Rowe. This is a statement in itself, as male performers of this age are rare to see performing. So, giving them a place to perform and be seen is a triumph. The set is minimal, a mattress covered in white fabric, the men similarly costumed, and the observed starkness brings for greater visibility of the content. By using the domestic setting of a bedroom, he experiments with intimacy by bending the boundaries of realism and fantasy. The work is improvised with butoh-inspired movements that explore tenderness and connection. Matthews is interested in what is considered high or low art and interrogating how an audience observes performance. The work was first shown on the opening night of the festival in the upstairs foyer of the main theatre then later in a similar space in the Lilian Baylis Studio. It was well received.
On April 12th the double bill brought together Charlotta Öfverholm and Jordi Cortés former members of DV8, In A Cage of Light and Susan Kempster’s Mother in the Lilian Baylis Studio. Öfverholm and Cortés, choreographed and performed the work alongside fellow collaborator Tobias Hallgren, with the score played by composer and musician Lauri Antila. Öfverholm and Cortés bring together a sublime physical theatre performance of wit, balance, showmanship, humour, melancholy, drama, authenticity and life experience. These seasoned performers are so comfortable on the stage. Not for one minute is there any respite for Öfverholm, as she is either swinging on a trapeze high above the stage ready to plummet or hanging by her fingertips from a ridiculously high steel bar fixed perilously high on the wall stage right, or metaphorically assuming the role of a cello artfully played by Cortés. These performers accomplish what we believe is impossible for older dancers let alone older people to achieve. The piece moves at a rapid pace and concentration is essential to keep a breadth of their performance through dance, voice, song or stillness. This is a well performed piece and timing is of the essence. Their love for performing is all encompassing and the audience love the ride.
Kempster’s Mother commissioned by Sadler’s Wells, featured an intergenerational duet which looked at intimacy, ageing and how this is perceived when we look at the relationship between an older woman and a young man or perhaps a mother and son. It is a work that looks at two different bodies, ambiguity and assumptions, contemporary dance partnering, with the connections and perceptions that inspire Kempster. Danced by creative collaborators Charlotte Broom and Harry Wilson, the work is bursting with free-flowing movements filling all angles of the stage with score by composer Dirk Haubrich. The dancers are costumed similarly in stunning bronze fabrics designed by Jessica Cabassa which enhance the movements of the dancers, with lighting design by Ros Chase. To follow on from the physical theatre of Öfverholm and Cortés was a hard task, with the lines of distinction at times blurred, but it was the pure dance that triumphed, and it appeared the dancers enjoyed the experience as much as the audience.
On April 17th in the Lilian Baylis Studio, Berlin’s Dance On Ensemble brought 2 works, London Story a reimagining of Merce Cunningham’s (1963) Story and Mathilde Monnier’s reworking of the former to produce Never Ending (Story). Dance On Ensemble is the first mature dancer company founded since the legendary NDT3, (1991-2006) and is on its second iteration with continued secured funding from the German Federal Government. They also form part of DANCE ON, PASS ON, DREAM ON. Sadler’s Wells is also one of 11 DOPODO partners co-funded by the European Union. Incidentally for Sadler’s Wells that partnership will come to an end after Elixir 2024, which is a great loss for the establishment and UK dance in general. Story featured dancers, Ty Boomershine, Tim Persent, Marco Volta, Emma Lewis, Gesine Moog, and Jone San Martin. The original improvised work was performed numerous times with constant changes and alterations allowed at each performance; with only one filmed version in 1964 for reference. So, the archive is indeed limited and much remains unknown other than some notes from Cunningham himself. With this in mind DOE has chosen to re-imagine the work with the assistance from Cunningham re-stager Douglas Squires. Centre stage is set with a huge pile of clothes that the cast rummages through, puts on, takes off and changes numerous times. The scenery consists of 2 black boards with text charting time changes, transitions, performance and movement notes, all are markers for the audience to understand how the performance will progress. Matching this is the score by Toshi Ichiyanagi with live music provided by Mattef Kuhlmey, with a digital clock that sets the pace as it runs simultaneously throughout the performance, clocking the clothing changes, transitions, changes of direction and much more. This version is colourful, joyful, amusing and certainly retains its modernity. The re-imagined choreography gave the cast wonderful opportunities to highlight their capabilities and they work beautifully as an ensemble. With lighting designs by Martin Beeretz, costumes by Sophia Piepenbrock-Saitz and visual artist Christopher Matthews assumes the role of Cunningham collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, providing ready-made stick images in primal coloured tape depicting dance moves offering further embellishment and humour to the work.
Mathilde Monnier’s Never Ending (Story) is her response to Cunningham’s Story using the poetry of David Antin (1932-2016), a contemporary of Cunningham and John Cage. Monnier experiments with how thought and movement come together. This work is the antithesis of Story in that it is a structured composition with the dancers constantly on the move. The contrast between Antin’s poetry and Monnier’s choreography frequently produces moments of real humour. The cast of Ty Boomershine, Marco Volta, Gesine Moog, Emma Lewis, and Jone San Martin, bring together, voice, movement, thought and repetitions in an altogether entertaining piece. Light design is by Martin Beeretz, costumes by Mathilde Monnier and sound design by Mattef Kuhlmey.
These two works illuminate the skills of Dance On Ensemble and demonstrate that artistry is at the forefront here. How fortunate the audience is to see this company demonstrate that dance need not have an expiry-date, but that age and life experience become assets that embellish and imbue a performance.
Sonia York-Pryce, 20 June 2024
Featured image: Elixir Banner, featuring Germaine Acogny and Mailou Airoudo. Image credit: Sadler’s Wells
