Dance diary. January 2020
…ble variety of dance that goes on beyond our major ballet and contemporary companies. Youth dance, community dance, dance for well-being, dance for older people, and more. It is indicative of the power that dance has to develop creativity, health and welfare, and a whole range of social issues. Scene from Eye to Eye in On course. QL2 Dance, 2019. Photo: © Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier New oral history recordings In January I had the pleasure of reco…
Let’s dance. Various Australian companies
…m that the Australian Ballet commissioned to cover the time while the main company was busy ‘taking Manhattan’. It is, on the surface, a commendable venture giving subscription audiences the opportunity to see the array of dance styles being created and performed across Australia—there’s more to dance than the Australian Ballet. But as a program I am not sure that it worked as well as we might have hoped. It turned out to be a bit of a mish-mash a…
iTMOi [in the mind of Igor]. Akram Khan Company
…company, is in celebration of Igor Stravinsky and the centenary of his ground breaking composition, The Rite of Spring. Khan sets out, somewhat ambitiously, to investigate Stravinsky’s transformative approach to musical composition. But iTMOi also had, at least in my mind, more than one reference to the Nijinsky ballet created to the Stravinsky score. One dancer, small and vulnerable, is ‘chosen’ to bear the torment of the other dancers when a wo…
Dance diary. February 2012
…no longer available]. Dimity Azoury. Photo by James Braund. Courtesy the Australian Ballet Jasmin Durham, who trained in Canberra with Lisa Clark, has been accepted into the Australian Ballet, and began her professional career in January. I recall watching her several years ago now in a student performance, and a scholarship competition and her talent was absolutely clear. She joins a number of other Canberra-trained dancers in the company includi…
Canberra dance. Coming in 2014
…not in the version choreographed by Frederick Ashton that we are used to seeing in Australia. The version being brought by West Australian Ballet is choreographed by Marc Ribaud, currently director of the Royal Swedish Ballet, and is set in 1950s rural France. Costumes are by Lexi De Silva whose previous credits include designs for Tim Harbour’s Halcyon and Sweedeedee. De Silva also worked alongside Hugh Colman as he created the designs for Stephe…
Wudjang—not the past. Bangarra Dance Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company
…efitting the confronting elements of the storyline, the music frequently sounded strident, but to my mind unnecessarily loud. Often it drowned out the words so it was not always easy to follow the story, especially when the English was highly idiomatic and the Yugambeh language was not understood by me (and I imagine most of the audience). If words are to prevail they have to be heard, and as far as the sections in Yugambeh language were concerned…
Dancing with Mozart. Royal New Zealand Ballet
…choreographic challenge has to take risks and no one can guarantee the outcome, but whoever commissions and whoever choreographs needs to know a company’s strengths and production values as starting points. A pick-up group of dancers may have been a better choice for this project. It gives me no pleasure to report that it is the least appropriate use of Mozart’s Requiem that I could imagine. How grateful we are then for some real choreography tha…
Natalie Weir on R & J
…w from some of the frustrations she encountered while working as an independent artist, was to have the capacity to commission music specifically for her works. R & J has a score by John Babbage, saxophonist with the Brisbane group Toplogy. Although the R & J regional tour uses recorded music, when the work premiered in Brisbane in 2011 Topology played onstage and having live musicians working in this way is part of Weir’s vision too. Her next wor…
R & J. Expressions Dance Company
…describing Natalie’s Weir’s R & J. Weir has worked with just six dancers (complemented in the opening scene only by a group of local dance students) to create three mini-stories inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Each story is short—the whole work lasts just 60 minutes with brief pauses in between each act—but each also delivers a powerful message. Act I is called ‘Passion’ and is set in a disco environment in the present day, hence the…
Unravel. The Training Ground
…to exploit that line and her ability to move her body to fill the space around her. Romeo and Juliet dance together in Unravel. The Training Ground, 2022. Photo: © ES Fotografi Film by Cowboy Hat Films was nicely incorporated on several occasions. Footage set the scene to explain the nature of two households, for example. The Montagues at one point appear in a modern office setting (Canberra’s Brindabella Business Park perhaps) where they are dire…