Choreography by Tim Harbour. Danced by Kevin Jackson to a score by George Bokaris.
Kevin Jackson was a dancer with the Australian Ballet from 2003, following his graduation from the Australian Ballet School, until his retirement in 2021. What remains was created for him by Tim Harbour, also a former Australian Ballet dancer now working freelance. It was filmed in an unexpected setting—an underground carpark at the University of Melbourne.
What Remains is an intimate portrayal of the artist after their life on stage, articulating the grief of losing their connection with the audience and anxieties going into the future. This is mirrored through Kevin Jackson’s own retirement from The Australian Ballet, with his final performances cancelled due to covid lockdowns. (The Australian Ballet, Behind Ballet #296).
What remains is a short work (about 5 minutes in length) and the film created around it is preceded and followed by brief discussions between Jackson and Harbour. The choreography shows the exquisitely fluid movement that characterises Jackson’s dancing and I loved that it revealed Jackson in quite a new light for me. There was a lack of stress about his dancing that was mesmerising, perhaps partly because it wasn’t a stage production, also perhaps because of the setting where architectural aspects of the space allowed a certain freedom and were used as part of the choreography. There was one moment that especially moved me. It came almost at the end when Jackson lifted his leg into a beautifully wide attitude derrière and lifted his arms to 4th position—simple, and over in a flash. But it marked Jackson as a classical artist who managed Harbour’s particular choreographic style with skill and panache.
The score by George Bokaris was hypnotic and moved between different moods, including a moment or two when a change in mood brought a rush of pleasure to my ears. The filming in black and white, which at times used pools of water on the floor of the carpark space as a kind of mirror, was engrossing. All in all a really beautiful, captivating production with great input from all involved in its creation.
Back in 2017 I had the pleasure of interviewing dancer and choreographer Shaun Parker for the National Library’s oral history program. In that interview Parker talked at length about his childhood in Mildura, his schooling, his interest in science, taking up dancing, his work with Meryl Tankard and the early days of Shaun Parker & Company. I had watched some of his performances with Meryl Tankard’s company in Adelaide and my interest in his career continued when I saw Blue Love in Canberra in 2017. My recent conversation with him, however, focused on KING, a work originally staged in 2019. KING is making its return in February as part of the Sydney WorldPride 2023 before touring to Germany, Luxembourg and Italy in June and July.
The genesis of KING actually goes back to 2015, Parker tells me. With his strong background in science that predates his dance career, he had always wanted to do a work called XY. He envisaged it as a work about gender, behaviour and world politics, all based on macro and micro aspects of chromosomes. When a workshop he set up in 2015 generated a range of ideas about what ‘maleness’ entails, and how that affects us globally, a point of departure for KING was established. At the heart of KING is, Parker says, ‘a different way of thinking about sexual identity and power and how they are linked.’
The current production is set partly in a cocktail bar and partly in a jungle, a double focus that Parker explains as highlighting the difference between rich male-identifying people ‘swanning around in dinner suits with their wine’ and the ‘thousands being slain under the watch of the rich and powerful’.
KING is a music-dance collaboration between Parker and his dancers and Bulgarian vocalist Ivo Dimchev who composed the entire score. Parker says of Dimchev:
Ivo is the protagonist. He is a phenomenal opera, cabaret, blues, pop singer. There is no one like him. He is very tall and wears velvet and tattoo-ed make-up. He sings from gut-wrenching baritone to soaring, ethereal counter-tenor. He can be both male and female sounding. Throughout the entire piece he is always among the men, provoking them, giving them ideas to play with. We watch in an observational way: what will they do now? They end up dishevelled and naked as we follow the deconstruction of power.
The role Dimchev plays is one that Parker himself was originally planning to take on. There are aspects of the work that reflect part of Parker’s life experiences, although he stresses that it is not an autobiographical work. Once he discovered Dimchev, however, and once Dimichev had agreed to take on the role, Parker stepped back. He had plenty to do beyond performing in the work. Dimchev, Parker says, is his ‘Bulgarian arts brother.’
As for the dancers, they are a mix of heterosexual, bi-sexual and homosexual artists and they are from several different cultures. As a result, they all have a unique quality to their performance.
The research and construction of the work seems to have been a complex procedure, but Parker says the result is ‘almost the simplest I have ever done.’ Parker commissioned two dramaturges, Veronica Neave and Felicity Nicol, to be part of KING. He worked extensively with them so that each scene would be clear through the choreography. ‘What can we say through the body?’ Parker asks. ‘The possibilities are endless.’ He is adamant, however, that he has to be tough on himself as he creates. He says he works on a section and then takes it to his dramaturges. He asks them to write down what the section means in just three words: he has no interest in being verbose. His intention must come across clearly to the audience. He wants the audience to see ‘a banger’.
Is KING a banger? To decide, you can see it in Sydney from 28 February to 4 March 2023.
Shaun Parker’s oral history interview recorded in 2017 is available for online listening at this link.
The featured image for this post shows dancers of the Royal New Zealand Ballet in rehearsal for a new work from Loughlan Prior, Woman of Words, which will have its premiere at the Wanaka Festival of Colour with two performances on 27 March 2023. Woman of Words focuses on the career of New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, and in a recent newsletter Prior writes:
Mansfield played a central role in modern literature by experimenting with style, subject matter and theme, with the analysis of anxiety, sexuality and existentialism embroiled within her writing. In remining true to her brilliant and singular voice, she created a body of work that redefined the genre.
Katherine’s intense, captivating and all too short a life is brought to the stage using integrated text and sound design in collaboration with award winning editor Matthew Lambourn. Beginning with her early years growing up in Wellington, to the height of London bohemia and the Bloomsbury group, to her death at the age of thirty-four, Woman of Words celebrates Katherine’s winding journey and her passion for creativity, love and life.
See this link for more about Loughlan Prior. And if Prior’s recent works are anything to go by, Woman of Words will be a courageous production.
But to my surprise (and pleasure), I was reminded that another choreographer is looking at a woman writer as the subject of a new dance work, this time for Queensland Ballet. British-born Cathy Marston is preparing a one act ballet that focuses on the work of Australian writer Miles Franklin (full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin). It will premiere in Brisbane on 16 June as part of a triple bill season named Trilogy. Marston has been called a ‘narrative ballet choreographer’ so it will be interesting to see how the narrative unfolds in My Brilliant Career. But two women writers as subject matter within the space of just a few months has to be somewhat remarkable!
Publicity image for Cathy Marston’s new work, My Brilliant Career.
For more about Cathy Marston and the development of My Brilliant Career, see this link from Queensland Ballet. Another link will take you to an interview with set and costume designer for My Brilliant Career, David Fleischer.
Russell Kerr Lecture 2023
From my colleague Jennifer Shennan, here is the news about the next Russell Kerr Lecture.
The fifth Russell Kerr Lecture in Ballet & Related Arts will focus on Patricia Rianne, New Zealand dancer, choreographer and teacher with an extended career both here and abroad. She was a member of New Zealand Ballet, Ballet de l’Opéra de Marseilles, Ballet Rambert (in its new guise after Norman Morrice took over the directorship from Marie Rambert), Scottish Ballet, and was memorably partnered by Rudolf Nureyev, Peter Schaufuss, Ivan Nagy and Jon Trimmer. Trisha staged classic productions and choreographed for RNZ Ballet, also in China and Hong Kong, and taught at NZSchool of Dance and London School of Contemporary Dance. Her choreography for RNZB, Bliss, inspired by the story by Katherine Mansfield, will also feature within the lecture.
Sunday 4.00—6.00pm, 26 February 2023 The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington. email jennifershennan@xtra.co.nz for registration
Patricia Rianne as the Dowager Princess in Swan Lake. Royal New Zealand Ballet, 1985.
News from James Batchelor
It is always interesting to hear James Batchelor’s latest news as he traverses the world making work. In 2023, however, in addition to being in Europe on several occasions, he has a number of engagements in Australia, especially in Canberra and Melbourne. He lists the following as ‘upcoming in 2023’:
Performances of Deepspace and Hyperspace in Europe soon to be announced.
Performances of Shortcuts to Familiar Places in Ngunnawal Country/Canberra and Naarm/Melbourne.
Long-form workshop and creation for Canberra Dance Theatre.
New creation with students from the Victorian College of the Arts.
Residencies in Turin, Potsdam and Nîmes for research and development of collaboration Echo Field with Arad Inbar and Leeza Pritychenko.
New creation with Norrdans in Sweden.
Below is a brief trailer for Shortcuts to Familiar Places, a work in which Batchelor explores a movement lineage through his childhood dance teacher Ruth Osborne to the modern dance pioneer Gertrud Bodenwieser.
Talking to Shaun Parker
Just recently I had the pleasure of talking to Shaun Parker about his return season of KING to take place at the Seymour Centre from 24 February to 4 March as part of Sydney WorldPride. I am planning to include a longer website post ‘Talking to Shaun Parker’ in February.
20 January 2023. Carriageworks, Eveleigh. Sydney Festival
In 2012 I self-published a biography of Meryl Tankard, which for better or worse I entitled Meryl Tankard. An original voice. Well rarely has that ‘original voice’ been so noticeable as it was in Tankard’s latest work, Kairos. The word ‘kairos’ means (in Greek) ‘the right or opportune moment for doing, a moment that cannot be scheduled’ and media information tells us that Tankard’s Kairos was a response to the uncertain and challenging times in which we live, and especially the circumstances in which the work was made. ‘The right and opportune moment is now’, we were told.
The work was really a collection of solos for each of the six dancers Tankard worked with to create Kairos: Lillian Fearn, Cloé Fournier, Taiga Kita-Leong, Jasmin Luna, Julie Anne Minaai and Thuba Ndibali. A young girl, Izabelle Kharaman, joined the group on two brief occasions. As is her usual practice, Tankard acknowledged the dancers as collaborators, although it is hard to know just how much of each solo was from the dancers and how much from Tankard. Each dancer had a very distinctive way of moving so there was no strong choreographic through-line, although there were moments when Tankard-esque features surfaced. The frequent tossing of her long hair by Lillian Fearn, especially towards the end of the work, was one such feature. But only rarely did the dancers work as a group.
(l-r) Lillian Fearn, Cloé Fournier, Thuba Ndibali, Julie Ann Minaai in Kairos, 2023. Photo: Régis Lansac
I especially enjoyed Thuba Ndibali’s movement, especially the way he used his long, loose limbs, although not so entertaining was his duet (of sorts) with Taiga Kita-Leong when Ndibali treated Kita-Leong as a kind of dog (slave?). I also admired Fearn whose elegance and strength of presence was mesmerising. But each performer seemed involved in his or her own activities and thoughts so there seemed to be no narrative through-line. In the end I gave up trying to decide what each moment meant. They could have meant anything according to how one was feeling or thinking at the time.
One or two moments were annoying, to me anyway. But then perhaps that was part of the whole. Not everything makes us happy, not in troubling times, not ever really. I wondered why, for example, at one stage the dancers appeared with boxes over their heads with the boxes having pictures/photos(?) on the front of the box. They were meant to refer to a period in the life of Australian artist Sidney Nolan when he was creating portraits using a particular medium that Tankard and her creative team found unusually interesting. But for me the parading with the boxes was pretty much meaningless and perhaps even insensitive to Nolan’s practice.
Another moment that was frustrating was when Cloé Fournier stood on a stool and recited in French a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, Le dormeur du val (The Sleeper in the Valley). The French is not difficult to understand but I could not hear every word being spoken. There was a lot of ambient sound and Fournier’s projection was not always strong enough to overcome other noises. This was a shame because the poem is fascinating for the way it presents the image of a soldier apparently asleep but actually dead, having been shot. Here was one moment when at least one idea stood out—appearances can be deceptive—but we missed it by not hearing the full version of the poem.
Looking more positively, however, visually and musically Kairos was completely absorbing. Régis Lansac’s video design and photography were brilliant. I was especially taken with some early moments in the work when the backcloth of scrims had changing images of a bush landscape projected on it. Mysterious figures hovered in the background, and bird sounds and other bush noises filled the air. Such atmosphere! The lighting by Verity Hampson was also outstanding. The accompanying and inspiring score was by Elena Kats-Chernin, who performed live on a grand piano that was situated mostly in a downstage corner, but that was pushed by the performers into a centre stage position towards the end of the work.
Tankard’s original voice was certainly there on show in Kairos. It was especially obvious in her powerful aesthetic of collaboration, but not always in the positive manner that I remember from her works made in Canberra and Adelaide. There was much that was puzzling about Kairos, largely because of a lack of easily understood themes and from choreography that seemed messy in its diversity, even though it was mostly performed skilfully. As a result, I thought that for the audience a certain negativity permeated the work. Kairos reminded me of an article by Helen Shaw, which appeared recently in The New Yorker entitled New York’s Theatre Festivals Imagine a World After Mankind. In it Shaw examines ‘visions of the future’ and finds that in several shows she has seen recently she has been somewhat dismayed to notice in the performances a delight in, and savouring of the disappearance of the world as we have known it. Dance doesn’t have to be like that, although it seems more and more as if that is the way it is going.
Michelle Potter, 22 January 2023
Featured image: Lillian Fearn in Meryl Tankard’s Kairos. Photo: Régis Lansac
‘Once a dancer, always a dancer’ is a phrase that springs to mind when looking at how David McAllister is managing retirement after serving for two decades as artistic director of the Australian Ballet. Since leaving that directorship role at the end of 2020, McAllister has published Soar, his autobiography; created a new Swan Lake for the Finnish National Ballet; been honoured with various awards; and taught for many organisations and dance schools across Australia (amongst a variety of other activities).
But the most recent news is perhaps the most interesting of all his recent engagements. In a commission that he has described as ‘an exciting retirement opportunity’, he will act as interim artistic director for the Wellington-based Royal New Zealand Ballet until a replacement is chosen to take over from Patricia Barker, who has announced her retirement. McAllister will take up the role early in March. Barker will return to the United States following the regional tour, Tutus on Tour, which concludes on 12 March.
Barker’s retirement comes at a significant point in RNZB’s history. The year 2023 is the 70th anniversary of the company’s foundation in 1953 by Poul Gnatt. Over those 70 years, and looking at the book The Royal New Zealand Ballet at 60 (edited by Jennifer Shennan and Anne Rowse), it is clear that the company has appointed directors from around the world. But was the last New Zealander to hold the post really Bryan Ashbridge in 1971? One wonders if, in celebration of the company’s stellar history, it is an appropriate time to appoint once more a New Zealander as director? Time will tell and, in the meantime, I’m sure McAllister will do a terrific job and will be admired by all involved. Interesting times for dance in New Zealand.
