In September The Canberra Times published my preview articles on Intensely Soul, a program by Odissi dancers Nirmal Jena and Pratibha Jena Singh, and on Swan Lake, the Australian Ballet’s new production with choreography by Stephen Baynes and design by Hugh Colman. The Intensely Soul preview was also syndicated into The Sydney Morning Herald under the heading ‘Siblings dance father’s philosophy into being’.
Sydney Long: spirit of the land
On 6 September I gave a lunchtime talk in conjunction with the National Gallery of Australia’s exhibition Sydney Long: spirit of the land. The text for the talk is available at this link. Images used can be seen at this link. As a follow up, I appeared with the curator of the exhibition, Anne Grey, on Radio National’s program Books and Arts Daily hosted by Michael Cathcart.
The Australian Ballet in 2013
The Australian Ballet launched its program for 2013 this month. I mentioned Garry Stewart’s commission to create a new work, Monument, in a previous post. Of the other offerings for 2013 I am looking forward in particular to seeing what Alexei Ratmansky creates for his Cinderella, which will premiere in Melbourne in September. I have very divided thoughts at the moment on Ratmansky’s choreography but am hoping his Cinderella will be as thrilling, choreographically speaking, as his Seven Sonatas.
I am also looking forward to the triple bill program Vanguard opening in Sydney in April most especially to see Jiri Kylian’s luscious Bella Figura again. George Balanchine’s Four Temperaments and Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929, first seen in Australia in 2009, will provide startling contrasts to Bella and the program promises to be a challenging and exhilarating one for dancers and audiences alike.
Helpmann awards
The 2012 Helpmann Award winners were announced at the end of September. Open this link to see all the awardees who in the dance category included Stephen Page, Paul White and DV8 Physical Theatre’s production, Can we talk about this? (UPDATE August 2020: Link no longer available)
I was especially pleased to see that Sydney Dance Company’s Charmene Yap was the winner of the best female dancer in a dance or physical theatre work for her performance in Rafael Bonachela’s 2 one another. Her performances have been consistently thrilling since she joined Sydney Dance Company. Here is Yap in an ‘artist snapshot’ in which she talks about auditioning for Sydney Dance Company, creating her solo Bonachela’s 6 Breaths and her duet in Jacopo Godani’s Raw Models.
Dance also featured in the category best original score (David Page and Steve Francis for Bangarra’s Belong program) and best costume design (Toni Maticevski and Richard Nylon for BalletLab’s Aviary: A Suite for the Bird).
Tag cloud: popular tags
The ten most popular tags for September were: Graeme Murphy, Hannah O’Neill, The Australian Ballet, Benedicte Bemet, Dance diary, Madeleine Eastoe, Ty King-Wall, Ballets Russes, Canberra dance and Adam Bull. Some could probably have been predicted in advance, others perhaps not.
Hannah O’Neill, Paris, May 2012. Photo: Michelle Potter
Today Canberra 100, the Canberra Theatre Centre and the Australian Ballet released their programs for 2013. It looks like Canberra will have a bumper year of dance in 2013—what a change!
The month of May will see the long awaited return of the Australian Ballet to the Canberra Theatre stage due largely, I suspect, to Robyn Archer, creative director of the Canberra 100 celebrations. Archer commissioned a new work from Garry Stewart for the centenary celebrations and Stewart will make Monument on dancers of the Australian Ballet. Stewart can claim a connection to the Australian Ballet School where he was a student between 1984 and 1985 but Monument will be his first commission for the Australian Ballet.
We will have to wait to see how this work develops but media releases currently say that Stewart will engage with the design principles behind the architecture of Parliament House to generate movement. Stewart will have as a creative consultant Aldo Giurgola, architect of Parliament House and a truly generous man who loves the city of Canberra. Fingers crossed for a great world premiere.
The Canberra program will also include Harald Lander’s Etudes, a showcase of classical ballet first made for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1948. It has been in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire since 1986 and its inclusion on the program is an interesting one as it too is somewhat architectural in nature. The American critic Arlene Croce one wrote that Etudes shows ‘that classical forms [in ballet] have a structural coherence’. The program of two works has been given the collective name of Symmetries.
The Canberra 100 program is an incomplete listing at this stage but it does include the Canberra Theatre Centre’s program ‘Collected Works Australia 2013’. Symmetries is listed as part of ‘Collected Works’.
In June, also as part of ‘Collected Works’, Garry Stewart will be back with his Australian Dance Theatre and their production of G, a ‘reinvention’ of Giselle. It has photography by Bill Henson and music composed by Luke Smiles, whom Canberra dance-goers may remember from the mid-1990s when he was a dancer with Sue Healey’s Vis-à-vis Dance Canberra. G may or may not stir the hearts of those who are aching for a Giselle fix in their dance lives, but it will certainly deliver a contrast to the forthcoming Australian season by the Paris Opera Ballet, which will be showing a traditional production of Giselle in Sydney in January and February.
Indigenous dance will feature in two programs in Canberra in March. Elizabeth Cameron Dalman will be combining with Albert David, Djakapurra Munyarryun and cultural consultant Uncle Banula Marika to direct The Morning Star a cross cultural collaboration between Dalman’s Mirramu Dance Company and dancers from the Yirrkala community. The Morning Star will be at the National Gallery’s James O. Fairfax Theatre.
Wesley Enoch, a Stradbroke Island man and currently director of Queensland Theatre Company, is artistic director of of Kungkarangkalpa: the Seven Sisters Songline. It will have an in-progress showing at the National Museum also in March and will feature senior desert dancers from the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands. This is a pilot performance of a larger work being developed over four years under an Australian Research Council grant.
In July KAGE, a Melbourne-based company led by former Canberran Kate Denborough and her artistic collaborator Gerard van Dyck, will show Team of Life—First Stage at Gorman House. This work is being made in conjunction with the Dulwich Centre Foundation, a charitable association dedicated to responding to groups and communities facing mental health difficulties as the result of significant hardships. Team of Life uses sport, in particular AFL and soccer, to tell stories of the search by young people for different kinds of freedom. The project will be performed by professional dancers and actors and informed by workshops with young refugees and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Team of Life is set to dissolve the boundaries between sport, theatre and identity.
Also in July Bangarra Dance Theatre will bring BLAK to Canberra. BLAK is a new triple bill production about the challenges to and rewards for Aboriginal young people making transitions to adulthood. Daniel Riley McKinley will choreograph Scar, Stephen Page Yearning, and the two will combine in Keepers. BLAK is part of the Canberra Theatre Centre’s 2013 program.
Sydney Dance Company will be back in Canberra in September with two works by Rafael Bonachela: Project Rameau in collaboration with Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and 2 One Another. Project Rameau has grown from Bonachela’s and Tognetti’s mutual passion for the music of Baroque composer Rameau, while 2 One Another celebrates relationships, interactions and the sheer beauty of the human form. Sydney Dance Company is one of the few companies that has toured to Canberra consistently since its beginnings in the 1970s. What a pleasure it will be to see them again as part of ‘Collected Works’.
Dance in Canberra’s centenary year looks promising. Other events and more dance performances are listed on the Canberra 100 website. [UPDATE August 2020. The website with listings is no longer available. The following quote, however, appears on the site:
“One of the great achievements of the Centenary of Canberra, in my mind, has been the unearthing of community and city pride. This is something we must carry forward as a legacy–the means to a permanent departure from Canberra bashing and self-deprecation about our city. A city brand is far more than a logo. It’s a collective idea–and a collective advocacy–about who we are and what we have to offer.”]
Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, 2013 Blackfriars Lecture at the Australian Catholic University
This month my essays in the series America’s irreplaceable dance treasures: the first 100 went online on the website of the Dance Heritage Coalition. I was commissioned to write on Merce Cunninghamand Rudolf Nureyev. The Irreplaceable treasuressite is something to be treasured in itself. It is a continuing source of regret to me that in Australia we no longer have something similar. See my previous post on the demise of Australia Dancing: the Australia Dancing site was admired and used not just in Australia but around the world. [Update: Well it seems that the Dance heritage coalition website has also been taken down! so I have removed the links]
Tammi Gissell
I continue to be impressed with dancer Tammi Gissell who earlier in August was the solo performer in Liz Lea’s work in progress‘Seeking Biloela’. A follow up conversation with Gissell revealed her strong and much treasured connections to her indigenous heritage. It was also interesting to hear her thoughts about working with scientists at CSIRO. She said: ‘What is also exciting for me in working with Liz is the opportunity to work with the scientists at CSIRO and to see the absolute relationship between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge and how they support each other. For example, the scientists confirm that the Black Cockatoo rides ahead of the rain currents, heralding fertility for the land and people’.
Gissell has recently been commissioned to create two new works for the Perth-based Ochre Contemporary Dance Company for a forthcoming season. She will choreograph one herself and make the other in collaboration with Jacob Lehrer. She is also currently in discussions with Queensland Theatre Company to develop a new work in 2013.
Claudia Gitelman
I was sorry to hear, just a day or so after posting my review of On stage alone, edited by Claudia Gitelman and Barbara Palfy, that Claudia Gitelman had died. Gitelman was associate professor emerita at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, and was well-known for her uncompromising scholarship. Her published writing includes a study of Hanya Holm. She also co-edited and contributed to a critical analysis of the work of Alwin Nikolais with whose company she performed.
Time in motion
The exhibition venue at the State Theatre in Melbourne is currently showing an exhibition celebrating the Australian Ballet’s 50th anniversary. Called Time in motion: 50 years of the Australian Ballet and curated by Margot Anderson, the Arts Centre Melbourne’s curator of dance and opera, the exhibition shows a diverse range of material including footage (some of which is archival), photographs, designs and memorabilia. It covers, if randomly, the company’s history from its first performance of Swan Lake in 1962 up to the triple bill, Infinity, staged in 2012.
I was especially taken by the works on paper from set and costumes designers working for the Australian Ballet across the decades. They ranged from highly detailed works, such as that by Kristian Fredrikson for Franz in the 1979 production of Coppélia, to others that were simply pencilled shapes, such as the designs by Moritz Junge for Wayne McGregor’s 2009 production, Dyad 1929. I especially liked the designs by Akira Isogawa for Graeme Murphy’s Romeo and Juliet (2011). They looked like they had been drawn in fine black pen on cloth rather than paper and were careful works of art with fabric swatches attached to become part of the art work rather pinned or stapled on in a less than careful manner. But probably my favourite was Michael Pearce’s design for the character played by Simone Goldsmith in Stephen Baynes’ At the edge of Night (1997). I loved how it was presented as a collage of sources with costume drawings complemented by historical images and a fabric swatch carefully placed to enhance the total effect.
My one gripe is that there were some issues with the display of archival footage. Some of the footage made the dancers look decidedly short and dumpy. While one can make excuses (perhaps) for the 1960s footage, there is no excuse for having Lisa Bolte and Robert Curran look short and dumpy in footage of Baynes’ beautiful pas de deux from Edge of night. I know they don’t look like that and suspect that something as simple as a change of monitor might have made a difference.
Time in motion finishes in Melbourne on 23 September 2012 and then goes to Sydney where it will be hung at the State Library of New South Wales, 12 November 2012–10 February 2013.
I was saddened to learn that Moya Beaver, whose dance links go back to Louise Lightfoot and Mischa Burlakov and the First Australian Ballet in the 1930s, had died on 13 June 2012. Beaver performed in many of the Lightfoot/Burlakov productions and was partnered often by Gordon Hamilton. She later travelled to Europe where she studied in Paris with Lubov Egorova. Beaver then performed with Egorova’s Les Ballets de la jeunesse, touring with them to Denmark. On her return to Australia she danced in the J. C. Williamson musical Funny side up before settling into family life and a long career as a teacher in Sydney.
Moya Beaver and Gordon Hamilton in Le Carnaval, First Australian Ballet 1937. Photo Nikolai Ross. Courtesy National Library of Australia.
In July I presented a paper, ‘The desire to conceal: two case studies’, at the 2012 IABA conference, Framing Lives. In this paper I looked at the problems encountered in writing a biography when a subject expresses, either directly or indirectly, a desire to conceal certain aspects of his/her life and career.
Kathryn Bennetts
I also had the great pleasure in July of recording an oral history interview with Australian expatriate Kathryn Bennetts who recently resigned from a seven year term as artistic director of the Royal Ballet of Flanders in Antwerp. Bennetts was in Sydney briefly before returning to Europe to continue work as a much sought after teacher and as a stager of ballets, especially those of William Forsythe, for companies across the world.
The Oracle and Meryl Tankard
Also during July The Canberra Times published my article on Meryl Tankard’s 2009 work The Oracle, which I was inspired to write after hearing that negotiations were underway for The Oracle to tour in the United States
Ethan Stiefel
News came through this month too of Ethan Stiefel’s final performance on 7 July as a dancer with American Ballet Theatre. Here is a selection of online news:
I loved Roslyn Sulcas’ comments in the review: ‘His performance was daring, explosive. Pirouettes, jumps and whole phrases started at what seemed to be full power and then amazingly turned up a notch. Risk was palpable, and yet classical form was never distorted’.
After reading the reports I looked back to a letter I had written to a friend following Stiefel’s performance as Solor in La Bayadère with ABT in 2007 (with Diana Vishneva as Nikiya). I wrote: ‘Those double cabrioles in his Act I solo! So exciting to see, partly of course because he has such amazing legs in terms of strength and in terms of the long lean look they have. Then I was watching his manège of grands jetés in the same solo and was absolutely taken by the way he stretched out the front leg. You could see its trajectory carving or pushing a line in the space ahead of him.’
What a performance that was and, to my absolute surprise as I am not normally a fan of La Bayadère, I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat for the entire performance.
Steifel and his partner Gillian Murphy are now back in Wellington with the Royal New Zealand Ballet where a new production of Giselle by Stiefel, in collaboration with Johan Kobborg, is something to anticipate later this year.
It is with deep regret that I note that Australia Dancing, the National Library’s dance portal, has ceased to be an active website. ‘Australia dancing leaps into Trove’ we are told when we open the site’s URL www.australiadancing.org. (Update August 2020: This page cannot be found says the link)
Well Trove has its place as a search engine, or discovery service as it is called, and its newspaper service is absolutely brilliant. But it is not the ‘exciting and rapidly expanding service for dance researchers’ it claims to be in the redirection notice. If I look up Giselle for example I get a variety of unwanted items—a photo of someone whose name is Giselle and who recently got married in Canberra; a book called Sweet Giselle available from Amazon for which the description begins:
Giselle thinks she has the perfect life. Her fine and sexy husband, Giovanni, is obsessed with his perfect wife and gives her whatever her heart desires. Giselle thinks her husband can do no wrong. What she doesn’t know is that Giovanni’s seedy dealings put her in danger;
A whole bunch of Giselles under ‘People and Organisations’ who have nothing whatsoever to do with dance; and so on. At least under ‘Maps’ it says ‘No results’, which is better than what comes up for Australian Dance Theatre, which has four results under ‘Maps’ the first of which refers to editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.
Times change and money is short but it is regrettable that the Australian dance community has lost what Alan Brissenden referred to in his book Australia Dances as ‘that essential resource’, especially given that Australia Dancing was established using specifically focussed public money. But then the site has been badly neglected recently. It has needed a redesign for some years. Many of the entries are now out of date and some contain incorrect information. I am not sure whether the material will ever be updated or corrected now that the site has taken a flying leap.
Vale Australia Dancing because moving it to Trove has destroyed its integrity as a dance resource.
To celebrate the start of NAIDOC Week, and in conjunction with its current exhibition of indigenous art, unDisclosed, the National Gallery of Australia invited artist Alick Tipoti and three of his colleagues to perform at the Gallery. Tipoti, a Torres Strait Islander, is a maker of ceremonial masks traditionally worn by a mawa (sorcerer). The performance took place in front of five such larger-than-life masks on show in unDisclosed.
Tipoti is a multi-talented visual artist who also choreographs, dances, sings and plays traditional instruments. He described the performance as ‘short, sweet and simple’, but it was a satisfying experience to see a performance in which so many cultural elements came together so well. ‘I am proud of my culture’, Tipoti said at one stage and the performance brought home very clearly the links between dance and spiritual life in Torres Strait Islander communities.
Alick Tipoti (second from left) and dancers, National Gallery of Australia, NAIDOC Week 2012
Tipoti discusses his work, and in particular the masks on display in unDisclosed, at this link on the National Gallery of Australia’s website.
Michelle Potter, 3 July 2012
*NAIDOC is an acronym for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee
In mid-June I attended a performance by graduating students of the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) in Melbourne. Their show, Lucy and the lost boy, was devised and directed by Sally Richardson and I was pleased to see the two NICA students I had interviewed for the Heath Ledger Project, Josie Wardrope and Simon Reynolds, taking major roles in the show. In fact the ‘Lucy’ of the show’s title was Josie Wardrope. Wardrope’s performance on flying trapeze in the closing scene was thrilling, while the variety of skills at which Simon Reynolds excels is remarkable.
It was, in addition, a pleasure to see other talented students from the graduating year in the show. I especially enjoyed the performance of Skip Walker-Milne, who took the role of the Lost Boy. He was a strong performer and I hope to follow his career in the future. But from a dance perspective I got particular pleasure from a vignette by three clowns, Jamie Bretman, Jack Coleman and Simon Wright, who were named in the show as ‘The Clown Kings’. While they had a role throughout the show, including amusing the people standing in the queue to get into the auditorium, I especially loved a sequence in which they performed to the ‘Little Swans’ music from Swan Lake.
Meredith Kitchen was named as choreographer for the show, so I assume their performance was her doing. I have long been fascinated by the place the ‘Little Swans’ dance has beyond the strict confines of a classical production of Swan Lake. These Clown Kings, with their roller bins, their deliciously clumsy coupé steps, and their innocent expressions, gave me huge pleasure.
I continue to be impressed by Rafael Bonachela’s choreography and the remarkable performances the dancers of Sydney Dance Company give.
Oral history: James Mollison, AO
Also in June I also had the pleasure of recording an oral history interview with James Mollison, whose many achievements include his role as inaugural director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Mollison was also responsible for acquiring the major portion of the Diaghilev costume collection, of which the Gallery is the envied owner. ‘Why does Canberra have those costumes?’ I have often been asked by people in the northern hemisphere. My reply has always been, ‘It’s because Canberra had a forward-thinking inaugural director of the National Gallery.’ The collection has formed the basis of three exhibitions by the National Gallery of Australia, most recently in 2010-2011.
The Australian Ballet in New York
The question of the New York reviews for the Australian Ballet’s recent visit to Manhattan has been discussed briefly amid comments on the Romeo and Juliet post on this site. Another review that I found especially interesting came from Ryan Wenzel on his website ‘Bodies never lie’. Wenzel appears to have reviewed only the mixed bill, at least at this stage, but his comments on repertoire are worth considering. He writes, for example: ‘The choreography too rarely stretched the mind, entertained, or provided innovative commentary on ballet as an art form’.
In May, on a very grey Parisian morning, I continued my interviewing for the Heath Ledger Young Artists Oral History Project with an interview with Hannah O’Neill. O’Neill is currently dancing on a seasonal contract with the Paris Opera Ballet, having dreamt of dancing with this company since she was a young child.
Hannah O’Neill at the Pont neuf, Paris, May 2012
O’Neill graduated from the Australian Ballet School in 2011 and in that year she also auditioned for the Paris Opera Ballet. She was placed fourth in a field of over 100 and as a result of the audition received a seasonal contract. Confident and articulate and looking every inch the dancer, she is taking Paris in her stride. She has recently had her contract extended until the end of July when she will have to audition again for a place in the company. In the meantime she is looking forward to a forthcoming season of La Fille mal gardée.
Meryl Tankard at the Cannes Film Festival
Over the past few years Meryl Tankard has been focusing her considerable talents on film making. She graduated from the directing course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in 2010. It is a testament to her success in this endeavour that a short film she made called Moth was shown in May at the Cannes Film Festival. A glance at the program for the non-competitive Australian and New Zealand section of the Festival, Antipodes, puts her in exceptional company.
Tankard’s website has the following to say about Moth:
Moth is the story of three young women’s determination to be free, and is inspired by the stories from many reform schools in Australia in the 60s and 70s, and the brutal methods used to discipline the girls.
Pablo Picasso’s curtain for Parade
It was a surprise to discover hanging in the still quite new Pompidou Centre in the north-eastern French city of Metz the curtain from the 1917 Ballets Russes production of Parade. Conceived for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes by Jean Cocteau and first performed in Paris in May 1917, Parade had choreography by Léonide Massine, music by Erik Satie and costumes and settings by Pablo Picasso. The curtain is hanging in an exhibition entitled 1917, which has drawn together an array of visually disparate items, including some associated with war as well as with art in many of its manifestations. 1917 sets out to question the links between destruction, reconstruction and creation in a decisive year of World War I.
Curtain for Parade (detail). Photo: Michelle Potter
The exhibition carries some additional items relating to Parade, including a program and some interesting photographs of the 1917 cast. But it was, of course, the curtain that attracted my attention. Although it is of monumental proportions, it is quite an intimate, even gentle piece of art. Its colours are soft and blend easily with each other and the picture is built on exceptionally complex, allegorical imagery. In gives no clue to the strident characteristics of the performance and the antics of the dancers in Parade whose role is to attract an audience into the circus tent, which we see before us on the curtain.
I was in the fortunate position of being able to see a performance of Parade in 2005 when it was staged by the Ballet of Bordeaux at the Diaghilev Festival held in Groningen, the Netherlands. The article I wrote for The Canberra Times about the Festival was also published online by the magazine of the ballet.co site. Here is what I wrote about Parade:
Leonide Massine’s Parade was one of the most anticipated works of the festival and it did not disappoint as a significant collaborative work of the period. With designs by Pablo Picasso, libretto by Cocteau and music by Erik Satie, which incorporated the assorted sounds of a siren and a typewriter and several pistol shots, Parade was created in response to the well-documented demand from Diaghilev to Cocteau—’Astonish me!’ It was also inspired by the Cubist movement in the visual arts and brought Cubism off the canvas and into the theatre. Set outside a travelling theatre with the slight narrative centring on the attempts of the characters to entice an audience into the show, the work premiered in 1917 in Paris and was recreated by the Joffrey Ballet in the 1970s. In Groningen it was performed by the Ballet de Bordeaux and, while it will perhaps always remain slightly eccentric, its apparently simplistic and unadorned choreography is a perfect foil for its idiosyncratic designs and music.U
Canberra dance
I was not in Canberra in May when Liz Lea presented her latest staging of 120 Birds. It also had a brief showing in Sydney at Riverside, Parramatta, after the Canberra season. Lea has a site that gathers together reviews of 120 Birds, including those for the 2012 Canberra/Sydney staging. In addition, here is a link to a preview piece I wrote for the one-woman version of 120 Birds, made for the National Gallery of Australia early in 2011 in conjunction with its exhibition Ballets russes: the art of costume.
New York Public Library
Over the past two months I have been following with considerable interest the upheavals at the New York Public Library, which have been reported upon in The New York Times and other outlets. The most comprehensive background account of the situation is ‘Lions in winter’ by journalist Charles Petersen and appears in n+1 at this link.
Many have wondered why I left New York in 2008 after eighteen months as curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, given that it appeared to be the job of a lifetime for me. Well the issues that led to my resignation are complex (and it was not to get married as one report suggested!), but the majority can be grouped under questions of professionalism and accountability (or lack thereof in my opinion) in certain areas of the Library. In addition, I was dismayed by attitudes to curatorial autonomy, which in most cases did not fit with mine. It should, therefore, be fairly obvious where my opinions lie with regard to the present discussions.
Whether the Dance Division, and other research divisions at Lincoln Center, will be affected in the short or long term by the new plans reported upon by Petersen and others is not clear. However, I believe that the Dance Division is now but shadow of its former self and has been heading this way for some time.
In April I conducted two more interviews for the National Film and Sound Archive’s Heath Ledger Young Artists Oral History Project. This time, with cameraman John Parker, I recorded interviews with two emerging circus artists currently in their final year of training at the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) in Melbourne.
Josie Wardrope is specialising in hand stands and swinging trapeze—she loves the feeling of flying—and in the group activity of risley. The term ‘risley’ sent me to a dictionary as I was researching for the interview and I discovered it is ‘a circus act in which an acrobat lying on his back juggles barrels or fellow acrobats with his feet’. It is named after a 19th century circus performer, Richard Risley Carlisle. Post-interview, watching Josie in a one-on-one trapeze session with her coach, her words about loving the feeling of flying were made visible. Exhilarating!
Simon Reynolds gave up his childhood dream of an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics after seeing a performance by Cirque du Soleil. Now he aspires to a contract with this company at the end of his training. At NICA he specialises in contortion hand stands, tumbling tight wire and the group act, teeterboard. I have to say he is somewhat outstanding on trampoline as well. Watching him execute a series of mid-air twists and turns as he moved the length of a very long trampoline in a NICA rehearsal space was breathtaking.
A typical day for these two young people is long and arduous but neither can think of anything they’d rather be doing. Both are full of praise for those who coach them, who bring to NICA the skills that they have honed in circus companies from around the world, including China, Russia and Argentina. Both are utterly determined to make a career in circus. Both are also in rehearsal for their 2012 mid-year show Lucy and the lost boy and agree that it is the performance side of their training that spurs them on to perfect their technical skills.
Jacob’s Pillow
My reflections on a visit to Jacob’s Pillow in 2007 elicited a response from Norton Owen, director of preservation at the Pillow. He mentioned, amongst other things, a DVD called Never stand still. It chronicles life at the Pillow and includes material relating to Gideon Obarzanek. The words of the title, ‘Never stand still’, are in fact those of Obarzanek, which he used in an interview for the DVD and which were then taken up and used as the title. Below is a promotional clip for the DVD.
Gailene Stock
In April I had the huge pleasure of recording an interview with Gailene Stock, currently director of the Royal Ballet School, London. I was inspired to suggest that an interview with Stock be made for the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore Collection after visiting her in London last year to talk to her about her recollections of working with designer Kristian Fredrikson. There was such a positive work ethic at the Royal Ballet School that I felt there had to be the hand of a strong and committed person behind it all. And there is—a director who cares deeply about what she is doing. And of course Stock had an impressive career in Australia as a performer, teacher and director before taking up her current position in London. Here is the link to the National Library’s catalogue record, although a summary of the interview is not yet available. [Update: The full interview is now available online. Follow this link]
Gailene Stock. Courtesy the Royal Ballet School
Site news
This site now has a search facility located with the tag cloud page.
Having spent the past few days mulling over the latest issue of the New York-based dance journal, Dance Chronicle, which has as its lead article a piece entitled ‘Where are all the women choreographers in ballet’ and whose first sentence is ‘And women artistic directors, we might add’, it was something of a surprise to discover that the English National Ballet has appointed Tamara Rojo as its new artistic director. Ismene Brown’s take on the situation is available on the Arts Desk site. The comments are already interesting.
As for Dance Chronicle, I was immediately reminded of Linda Nochlin’s seminal article ‘Why have there been no great women artists’ written some four decades ago. The Dance Chronicle question deserves comment from an Australian perspective I think, which I am planning.
