My review of the premiere of Ascent, the latest triple bill program from Sydney Dance Company, has been posted on Dance Australia. See this link.
Two of the three items in the program were world premieres. The third, Antony Hamilton’s Forever & Ever, was first staged by Sydney Dance Company in 2018. One of the most interesting features of Ascent was in fact seeing Forever & Ever once more. When I reviewed it earlier on this website—see this link—it was the extraordinary costuming that stood out for me. Seeing the work again I was prepared for the costumes, and the way they changed and changed over the course of the work. So this time there were other things to look into, in particular the pounding score by Julian Hamilton, and the remarkable choreography, especially that for the closing scene and how well it reflected that score (and vice versa).
Below are images from Rafael Bonachela’s I Am-ness, which opened the program, and from Marina Mascarell’s The Shell, a Ghost, the Host and a Lyrebird, which was the middle work. They complement the images available on the Dance Australia page.
9 March 2023. Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre. Te Ahurei Toi o Tamaki/Auckland Arts Festival, reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
Revisor is created and directed by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young, both highly original and hugely prolific theatre makers, movers and shakers, of Canadian provenance but now widely internationally acclaimed. The work is a knock-out tour-de-force of theatre, developed from Revizor, aka The Inspector General, the work of Russian playwright Gogol, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1836.
The story goes that the five-act play was performed before the Czar who laughed and applauded throughout, not realising the play was satirical farce, ‘a comedy in disguise’. The Czar claimed to have ‘got it’, though one might add ‘in the neck’—it’s just that it took decades of Russian history for that to (continue to) reach dénouement. The play deals with themes of ambition for power, of greed and bribery, confidential lies and cover-ups that echo with painful relevance in many times, then and now, and places, there and here.
There’s a finely chiselled program essay from which I quote …
Since the 1830s, the play has been translated and adapted countless times. We approached the original text as a matrix for both voice and body, and found it to be malleable and resonant. Our quest has been to locate and portray a glimpse of the soul within this most unlikely frame: a well-worn farce about corruption and deceit.
Underneath the superficial subject of mistaken identity there were of course deeper subjects such as deceit, tyranny, greed and corruption; willful blindness and complicity; bureaucracy and officialdom; human suffering; the coming storm; the promise of change; imminent overthrow; salvation on the horizon; retribution at the corner; justice at the gate.
Ambitious incompetent individuals manipulate and bribe the bureaucracy while working their way into positions of political power and authority. Corruption, duplicity and control of propaganda are found at every turn, at every crossroad. Sound familiar? —think Putin and his treatment of Navalny, think Ceaucescu and wife, think Trump and Murdoch, think North Korea, think mediocre and ambitious bureaucrats everywhere. Think of all those who believe they live in a democracy which in truth is just rampant consumerism. It’s a long list.
Those who won’t go to the Ballet (capital B) because they ‘can’t hear the words’ would have ‘got’ this show because the playscript is pre-recorded and functions as the ‘music’ to which the ‘dance’ is performed. You know where you are because you ‘can hear the words’. The trouble is the script is deliberately riddled with clichés and double-entendres, lies, interrupted sentences and contradictions, so you actually haven’t a clue where you are—nor have the players—and therein lies the plot. The Inspector General is not actually The Inspector General, though some don’t know that, and those who do know are paid to shut up about it.
Pite and Young share their directors’ vision for the work so that boundaries between playscript, stage directions, deportment, gesture, mime, dance, plié and pause, gait and gavotte are seamlessly blurred throughout the 90 minute performance. The eight dancers make multiple entries and exits with superb timing and great aplomb, always using impeccable technique to serve the expressive needs of the dramatic action. [How refreshing to be spared the all too frequent conventions of balletic virtuosity that dancers are often required to display, thereby drowning out storyline and musical aesthetic. These are enormously skilled dancers but you won’t be seeing them in The Nutcracker any time soon.]
Individual performers are all outstanding but Gregory Lau as the Revisor, and Rakeem Hardy as Postmaster Wieland deserve singular mention. A number of sculptured group sequences are testament to how well these players know each other’s work so can all move together as one. An enigmatic figure wearing deer antlers plays several ritualised prayerlike sequences with mystical effect. The lighting concept and design make breathtakingly beautiful imagery, ephemeral backlit smoke patterns that point to the enduring questions echoed in the script …’Why am I here? What does it mean?’
Any dance educators who think ballet (lower case b) might not be ‘relevant to audiences within the changing demographic’ would do well to take their students to such a production as Revisor. The relevance of the choreography could not be more present or obvious. So why were there so many empty seats, or any empty seats at all? The audience barely breathed throughout the entire performance, stunned at the tight skills they were witnessing, and come the curtain call couldn’t wait to get to their feet for a prolonged standing ovation which carried a sense of appreciative urgency.
Auckland Arts Festival managed a coup in booking this act, following several years of its international touring. Those who saw Revisor here have witnessed the final season of the work. You should remember it, keep the program (a free handout—top marks again to the Festival), make notes, tell your grandchildren what you saw.
4 March 2023. Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney (in association with Sydney WorldPride Arts)
KING begins with Bulgarian singer/songwriter Ivo Dimchev walking down an aisle of the auditorium and taking his place onstage in front of the still-lowered front curtain. With a keyboard in hand he starts singing in his mesmerising voice, at times as a bass, at others as a counter-tenor. As his song ends, the curtain rises to reveal a combination set—a jungle of green growth and a mini cabaret setting represented by a chandelier. Against this background stands an all-male cast of ten dancers dressed formally in black-tie dinner suits. They are ready to dance.
The early choreography was fast-paced and extremely acrobatic, almost circus-style with overtones of street dancing. It was also quite formalised with group shapes appearing and disappearing and hands and arms forming group patterns, sometimes still and picture perfect, sometimes in motion. It’s transfixing to watch and seems to say, ‘Look, this is how men can be and behave, and how we can connect with each other. We have power’
But slowly individual contacts were made amongst the group, many with obvious sexual overtones. The dancers then removed their coats, ties and shirts and began a different kind of connection with each other. The way that identity and power showed themselves in the opening scenes was slowly changing into a kind of aggression and anger, and perhaps also resentment of a kind. Dimchev continued to sing and provoke the performers.
Choreographically there were changes too. The men started to look progressively more animal-like, less than human at times. There were even moments when the Faun from Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun flashed across my mind. Toby Derrick and Joel Fenton, as the two main protagonists, held one’s attention. Derrick by this stage was completely nude and Fenton, who was seen as too close to Derrick for the liking of the others, were set upon until both ended up on the floor, motionless and covered with leaves from the jungle. Slowly darkness brought the show to an end.
I was interested in the audience reaction as the work unfolded. In the beginning, as we watched moments that were sometimes playful, sometimes with sexual overtones, often spectacularly physical, and often showing a certain strength in uniformity, there were chuckles of pleasure from the audience as they sat back and watched in a relaxed manner. But as the connections between the dancers began to unravel somewhat, and become more aggressive, there was silence and many of the audience leaned forward in their seats wondering (perhaps anxiously) what was going to happen next. Were they surprised? Were they expecting what occurred or not?
When I spoke to Shaun Parker earlier this year he told me that KING was about ‘a different way of thinking about sexual identity and power and how they are linked.’ KING was not by any means a hagiography of the male sex, that is there was no undue reverence to, or idolising of the male. But then perhaps nor was there any suggestion of denunciation or disapproval of the changes that slowly took place. It seems to me that Parker was presenting us with a possible view of male identity and power rather than implying any positive or negative judgement.
This was an engrossing show from Shaun Parker & Company in terms of its choreography, its performance by all ten dancers, its musical background and input from Dimchev, and its visual elements.
Hannah O’Neill trained as a dancer in Japan, New Zealand and Australia, before being accepted into the Paris Opera Ballet in 2011 on a seasonal contract. After another seasonal contract in 2012, in 2013 she was offered a lifetime contract and rose through the ranks until, following a performance of George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial in March 2023, she was promoted to the highest rank, that of étoile.
Watch O’Neill below as Myrthe in Giselle in an extract from a 2021 Paris Opera Ballet production.
Or for some brief footage that shows O’Neill in a different light, watch her in the third variation from the Kingdom of the Shades scene in La Bayadère from 2020.
And especially for my New Zealand colleagues, when O’Neill was interviewed in 2021 for the French weekly, Le Point, she said, ‘Je suis une Kiwi. Pour toujours.’ The interviewer, Brigitte Hernandez, then added, ‘Kiwi, comme le petit oiseau qui ne vole pas, cette grande beauté du ballet de l’Opéra de Paris? Eh oui! Et chaque année, avant de se présenter en tutu devant le jury du concours de hiérarchie du ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, Hannah O’Neill, visage énigmatique à la Brancusi, bras infinis, jambes sublimant les arabesques, enfilait le tee-shirt des All Blacks et exécutait un petit haka pour se porter chance.’
I had the good fortune to interview O’Neill in Paris 2012 for the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) as part of the Heath Ledger Project (sadly the project lasted only a couple of years). The interview appears on the catalogue of the NFSA—brief details at this link. Below are two images I took of O’Neill after the interview had been completed, one at the Pont neuf, the other in the foyer of the hotel where the interview was conducted.
This month’s dance diary focuses on just one event—the 2023 Russell Kerr Lecture in Ballet and the Related Arts held in the Long Hall, Wellington, on Sunday 26 February.
Russell Kerr Lecture 2023
The fifth Russell Kerr Lecture in Ballet and the Related Arts focused on the career of New Zealand-born dancer, Patricia Rianne. Rianne’s career has been astonishingly diverse beginning in 1959 with New Zealand Ballet, then under the direction of the company’s founder, Poul Gnatt, and continuing across the world while being interspersed with return visits to New Zealand to perform again with the national company.
Patricia Rianne as the Dowager Duchess, with Carl Myers and others, in Swan Lake. Royal New Zealand Ballet, 1985. Photographer not identified
This fifth Russell Kerr lecture was somewhat different from previous ones in that it was not so much a lecture as an event in which the various parts, spread over the length of the session, came together in a theatrical whole. It began with dance and music from Workbook created in the early 18th century by Kellom Tomlinson and performed on this occasion by Robert Oliver on bass viol and dancer Keith McEwing performing a Sarabande from the Tomlinson repertoire. And how many of us knew of the extent of the beats and turns that characterise this dance form—I didn’t so it was a thrill to see the dance close up. Then followed, with Rianne seated in the front row of the audience, a short biography of Rianne spoken by Jennifer Shennan with input from Anne Rowse. Throughout this spoken presentation, images of Rianne in a variety of roles were projected onto a screen giving us a clear idea of the range of companies and works in which she had appeared, and of her illustrious partners who included Peter Schaufuss, Ivan Nagy and Rudolf Nureyev.
Next up, singer Pamela Gray entertained us with a truly remarkable rendition of a Maori song E Hine (A Woman), sung a cappella (except for a moment when Gray played, briefly, a ukulele-type instrument). Riveting and very moving. Then Rianne took the floor herself and engaged in a conversation with Geordan Wilcox. This conversation was definitely a highlight, especially as Rianne explained much about her work with Russell Kerr giving those of us who did not know him personally, or work with him in any way, an insight into his methods, his choreography and his teaching and coaching skills. Very appropriate given that the lecture series honours Kerr.
The conversation concluded with video footage from Bliss, a work choreographed by Rianne in 1986 based on a short story by Katherine Mansfield.
Following her retirement from performing following the birth of her second child, Rianne began a new career in dance as a teacher, director and choreographer.
The Russell Kerr Lecture series began with the aim of presenting five events, an aim that has now been achieved, albeit with a slight hiatus due to the COVID pandemic. It is not yet clear whether a second series, or even a single 6th session, might be presented. All five in the first series have been remarkable achievements and we can but hope that somehow the series will continue.
The series: 2018 Dr Michelle Potter on the career of designer Kristian Fredrikson. 2019 Dr Ian Lochhead on the visits to New Zealand of Russian ballet companies, 1930s and 1940s. 2020 Jennifer Shennan on the life and work of Douglas Wright 2021 Anne Rowse on the life and career of Russell Kerr 2023 Patricia Rianne (as above)
