A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Royal New Zealand Ballet
…do in 1953. A mix of Oberon and Puck, that man. All this amounts to RNZB being the best little ballet company on Earth. (The best big company, for my money, is Hamburg Ballet. What’s yours?) Only the St.James theatre wine-bar seems not to know how to uncork bureaucracy and pour a glass of bubbly for the happy punters. Another job for Puck perhaps? Jennifer Shennan, 28 November 2016 Featured image: Tonia Looker as Titania and Harry Skinner as Bott…
Cuatro. Sydney Dance Company Digital Season 2020
…nd I loved the way Clerici played his cello with his whole body and seemed completely lost in the sound. But what was wonderful about watching the four dances as if they were one work was that, for me anyway, an emotional underpinning emerged. The work began in that enclosed space with Yap sometimes touching the walls as if to highlight an inability to extract herself from the space. It moved to the possibility of emerging with the softer backclot…
Dance diary. March 2012
…ovely clip available on YouTube from Welch’s newest work Tapestry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHnRqwaCH-8 The Ballets russes tribute programs continue I read with interest Ismene Brown’s review of a recent English National Ballet season. Site news With Graeme Murphy’s Romeo and Juliet playing a season in Brisbane during March interest has been revived in the posts and comments on this site relating to that production. In addition, Brisbane fo…
Rafael Bonachela’s dancers
…any. It would also make Bonachela one of the very few truly outstanding dance leaders. Film clip from Stella Motion Pictures, with thanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGJkJNO3dvU © Michelle Potter, 12 April 2010…
Sir Jon Trimmer in open conversation with Garry Trinder
…nal recognition and reputation, as well as its royal charter. The sagas of company politics, funding and management highs and lows over the years were referred to in the briefest of terms, as also the devastating challenge of the fire that destroyed almost all the company’s resources in 1967. The abiding impression one gains is of the resilience and determination to somehow hold on to the reins—with Poul Gnatt, Beatrice Ashton, Richard Campion, Ru…
Dance diary. December 2016
…eaching? And hats off to the scientist who (I assume) wanted to be able to understand what he was seeing. Why go to a performance otherwise? Press for December 2016 ‘A modern take on traditional thrills.’ Review of Circus 1903. The Canberra Times, 6 December 2016, p. 18. Online version ‘In step with youth.’ Feature on Ruth Osborne and her award of a 2017 Churchill Fellowship. The Canberra Times—Panorama, 17 December 2016, p. 11. Online version ‘Ri…
Swan Lake—Loch na hEala. Michael Keegan-Dolan
…ando Gibbons’ madrigal, The Silver Swan, is one of the Poems in the London Underground now. The seventh Autumn has come upon me since my Allan slipped down and away, leaving us mute, so shocked at his leaving. Unreal. Not real. Did he not love us enough to fight and slay the dreaded Count Leukaemia von Rothbart and stay with us in the happy nest of our home? What was he thinking to go away and leave the garden unweeded, the lawn all unmown, the or…
Nina Verchinina: some Australian connections
…work.’ In her PhD thesis, ‘Reconstructing the creative life of Australian composer Margaret Sutherland: the evidence of primary source documents’, Cherie Watters-Cowan notes the development of the collaboration between Verchinina and Sutherland. Although it is a point she does not develop in any great depth, Watters-Cowan indicates that the music was written around May 1940 and originally as a solo for Verchinina. Sutherland later transposed the…
Dance diary. February 2015
…trio of women, and manage to inject a good dose of humour and smart social comment without it being overblown or too exaggerated. They performed to a collage of bird sounds, the clip clop of horses and a variety of songs interspersed with narrative. Bouquets. Harry Haythorne Recently, while expanding on my obituary for Harry Haythorne for another purpose, I came across an article Haythorne had written in 2001 for a special Australian edition of th…
Strasbourg 1518. Borderline Arts Ensemble
…th performances were cancelled minutes before curtain-up, and confusion around how that was communicated by management could have come straight from the choreographic libretto itself. Eventually it transpired it was a covid-19 health-related issue though no one in authority would say so when it mattered, as the audience continued to assemble in the foyer. That weekend was also the first anniversary of the brutal mass attack on Christchurch mosques…