Robin Grove (1941-2012)
…mela Baker, Elaine Kemp, Margaret Crowder, Victoria Gibaljo, Mary Long and Denise Saunders. Two scenes from Apollon Musagète (left, courtesy National Library of Australia; right, courtesy Elisabeth Grove). Photos: Walter Stringer j The work was reprised at least once at the Guild studio theatre by the Victorian Ballet Company in September 1967. It was part of a program of four ballets with the other three comprising The Little Mermaid (Rex Reid)…
New Zealand School of Dance. Performance Season
….3, op.130; C.Saint-Saens, String Quartet no 1, op.112 This short work was commissioned for students of the Canadian National Ballet School for a festival in 2017. Four dancers in smart red contoured leotards moved with an attractive energy, conveying a playful mood of youthful enthusiasm. MIguel Herrera was particularly immersed in the humour of the style. Time Weaver Music: Philip Glass, Metamorphosis This hypnotic and seemingly infinite, arrang…
Solace. Royal New Zealand Ballet
…as become simply about people’. Two people stood out in the cast I saw—Branden Reiners and Kate Kadow. Their duet, one of several in Infra, was filled with emotion as a result of the magnificent contact they made with each other. The connection they created was not simply a result of the physicality they developed through McGregor’s choreography but in other ways as well, including through their constant and engaging eye contact. But eventually Re…
Dance diary. February 2020
…y being conducted by the National Library of Australia. Douglas Gautier spent a considerable amount of time in Hong Kong and had many connections with arts organisation in the region. The interview is not yet available online. My January interview with Chrissa Keramidas is now online, although it currently lacks a timed summary. Coming soon! As well, an interview with Lisa Pavane, recorded a few years ago, was recently made available online. It do…
Australia Dancing. Vale
…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 Many of the entries are now out of date and some contain incorrect inform…
Dance diary. September 2020
…ted recently in Poland. See below. https://vimeo.com/451939866 Alan Brissenden (1932–2020) The dance community is mourning the death of Dr Alan Brissenden, esteemed dance writer and outstanding academic from the University of Adelaide. Alan wrote about dance for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers from the 1950s onwards and was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Australian Dance Awards in 2013. As I looked back through my posts for the t…
Out of Earshot. KAGE
…t of what makes us human. The work began quite gently with just the soft sound of hands tapping on bodies—dancer Elle Evangelista and drummer Myele Manzanza began this exploration of making and feeling sound on and through the body. But once Manzanza, moved from this gentle opening and began to use his mobile drum kit (it was set up on a low platform on wheels), gentle gave way to loud. Manzanza was spectacular to watch because he made music not j…
Russell Kerr lecture, February 2019
…ast seventeen dancers holding bicycles and lined up in front of a theatre identified by Lochhead (a Christchurch resident) as Christchurch’s Theatre Royal. It has a large poster advertising the Covent Garden Russian Ballet across its entrance and to the side of the line-up is the tobacconist and hairdresser shop seen in the featured image above. Ismailoff, Volkova, Tupine, and Tchinarova are wearing the same clothes in both images. There is no dou…
New Zealand Dance Highlights 2021
…received the inaugural Bill Sheat Memorial Award for a dancer prepared to commit to New Zealand identity in their career). Later in the year Loughlan Prior achieved what is arguably his finest choreography—Transfigured Night, beautifully themed to the Schoenberg score, performed by New Zealand String Quartet in a NZChamber Music national tour, in an impressive staging where musicians and dancers again shared the stage space. The calibre of choreo…
Intersecting journeys. Two films by Sue Healey
…Film and Sound Archive began with Meeting Place in which eight youth dance companies teamed up and shared common practices. Working in four teams each made up of dancers from two of the eight companies, they met in four different locations to connect and collaborate. Dancers from Melbourne’s Yellow Wheel teamed up with those from Austi Dance & Physical Theatre in Austinmer, New South Wales. They met where the Yarra River meets Merri Creek. Then th…