Royal New Zealand Ballet is making available a range of videos of productions from the repertoire for free home viewing for a brief period during the covid-19 lockdown. The dress rehearsal of their 2015 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream screened last week. Comment by Jennifer Shennan This ballet was originally commissioned by director Ethan Stiefel in a promising initiative
12 April 2020. Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage I first saw Rain back in June 2011, almost 9 years ago now. Then it was danced by the Paris Opera Ballet. I was full of admiration for the work then, and for the way the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet performed, but I wondered what it would be like when danced
It was a thrill to hear that Michelle Ryan, currently director of Restless Dance Theatre in Adelaide, has received the Australia Council’s 2020 Award for Dance. The award, whose previous recipients have included Vicki van Hout, Phillip Adams, Stephen Page, Lucy Guerin and Garry Stewart, is to acknowledge an artist ‘who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution to Australian
My attention was first drawn to La Meri, an American dancer who specialised in ethnic dance from around the world, by my teacher Valrene Tweedie. When La Meri visited Australia and New Zealand in 1936, Tweedie had been inspired by her performances and mentioned them in an oral history interview I recorded for the National Library in 1988. Later, when
Friday 20 March 2020 (the day I began writing this) was the date I was to be sitting in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, watching Liam Scarlett’s production of Swan Lake. Instead, with the world closing down as a result of COVID-19, I am sitting at home in Canberra having just watched a DVD of a 2018 performance of
Just recently I was sent some images from a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream choreographed by Gray Veredon and performed in Gdansk, Poland, by the Ballet of the Baltic Opera Danzig. I recall with pleasure a visit in 2018 to La Mirande en Ardèche in the French Alps where Veredon lives. There he and I had several conversations about
12 & 13 March 2020. Circa Theatre, Wellingtonreviewed by Jennifer Shennan Choreographer/dancer Lucy Marinkovich and composer/saxophonist Lucien Johnson combined to produce Strasbourg 1518, a fusion of dance, music and story into theatre. Their take on that specific historic outbreak of dancing mania is given psychological and political context using tropes of religion, rationality, visual art and literature. The work does not
11 March 2020. Opera House WellingtonReviewed by Jennifer Shennan Lyon Opera Ballet’s Trois Grandes Fugues is a program of three separate works each set to Beethoven’s Die Grosse Fuge, opus 133. Any dance can offer access into its music. Might three distinct choreographies set to the same music enhance that experience threefold? Originally composed for string quartet this is dense
5–8 March 2020, TSB Arena, Wellington reviewed by Jennifer Shennan When you circle the date in your diary for a show choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan and his company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance), you expect a wild ride with infusions of Gaelic spirit, memory and vocabulary. There will be stunning movers, musicians onstage, a choreographed mosaic of themes that may
