To all those who have accessed this website over 2023, especially those who have made comments on various posts, thank you for your interest. I look forward to your continued involvement in 2024. May the coming year be filled with great dance and may peace descend upon the world.
Below are my ‘top five’ productions for the year arranged chronologically according to the date (month only) of the performance I saw. I have this year chosen to select brand new works rather than restagings. This means I have left out a few amazing productions including A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Strictly Gershwin, both from Queensland Ballet, and both of which were just stunning. It is always difficult to choose just five works but I feel it is sometimes a good thing to have to adhere to some kind of restriction, so it’s new works only this year.
What remains (Melbourne. Bodytorque digital—a series from the Australian Ballet, February)
Tim Harbour’s What remains was an exceptional tribute to dancer Kevin Jackson on his retirement as a principal dancer with the Australian Ballet. In just a few minutes of film it showed Jackson’s exceptional technique and Harbour’s inventive choreography, while taking every advantage of an ‘off stage’ setting and a score from George Bokaris.
James Batchelor’s Shortcuts was an examination of how dance is transmitted from generation to generation—a beautifully conceived and outstandingly presented look at the theoretical idea of ‘embodied transmission’.
Alice Topp’s Paragon was a tribute to the dancers of the Australian Ballet, past and present, with great input from design and sound collaborators, and with exceptional, visually stunning choreography from Topp. It was an experience, too, to see some of the Australian Ballet’s dancers from past decades return to the stage and to be reminded of their contribution to the art form.
Cathy Marston’s examination of Miles Franklin’s novel, My brilliant career, was a masterly production in which every character was clearly drawn choreographically. Marston created a range of movements that gave an exceptional understanding of the nature of each person in the story. My brilliant career was part of a triple bill from Queensland Ballet.
Bespoke was a remarkable triple bill, the sixth in a series named Bespoke, showing the way artistic director, Li Cunxin, curates an evening of dance. With works from Remi Wortmeyer, Paul Boyd and Natalie Weir, the audience saw an amazing array of ideas and dance styles and approaches from humour to a serious examination of the process of life.
In November the Canberra Critics’ Circle announced its awards for 2023. This year five dance awards were presented:
Ruth Osborne, outgoing director of QL2 Dance, which Osborne has led since 1999. Osborne’s award recognised in particular her outstanding input into James Batchelor’s production Shortcuts to Familiar Places, which was presented at Canberra’s Playhouse in April 2023. My review of Shortcuts is at this link.
Natsuko Yonezwa and Itazura Co for the film Kiku. Kiku and its accompanying documentary explored dance and the ageing body through the experiences of six Canberra women. My review is at this link.
Australian Dance Party for Culture Cruise. Culture cruise gave those who joined the cruise an innovative experience over land and water, which fused the performing arts, fine dining and Canberra’s cultural institutions. Read my review at this link.
Gretel Burgess for A Stroke of Luck. A Stroke of Luck gave Gretel Burgess the opportunity to produce and direct her lived experience as a stroke survivor. Bill Stephens’ review is at this link.
Caitlin Schilg for her choreography for the Canberra Philharmonic Society Production of Cats. Caitlin Schilg drew on a diverse range of dance styles to create a series of brilliantly staged production numbers for the musical Cats. Read a review by Bill Stephens at this link.
Oral history interview with Alice Topp
In November I had the pleasure, and honour, of recording an oral history interview for the National Library of Australia with Alice Topp, outgoing resident choreographer with the Australian Ballet.
Alice was most forthcoming about her life and career to date and the interview contains some detailed material about her choreographic process and the establishment of Project Animo, her joint initiative with lighting designer Jon Buswell. The interview is currently undergoing accessioning but cataloguing details will be available in due course.
For more about Alice Topp on this website follow this link.
News from Queensland Ballet
Queensland Ballet has announced details of changes to its line-up of dancers for 2024 including the news that principal dancers Mia Heathcote and Victor Estévez will leave the company at the end of 2023 to join the Australian Ballet in 2024. Heathcote and Estévez have made a remarkable contribution to Queensland Ballet over the past several years. Each has given me much pleasure (Heathcote from as far back as 2013 before she even joined Queensland Ballet) and I hope they will be given every opportunity with the Australian Ballet.
In other news from Queensland Ballet, the company recently announced the establishment of the Van Norton Li Community Health Institute with the goal of sustaining and expanding its Dance Health programs across socioeconomic, age and geographic boundaries and all abilities. For more about the program, including information about the donors to this project, follow this link.
27 July, 2023. St. James Theatre, Wellington. reviewed by Jennifer Shennan
The opening work, Serenade, to Tchaikovsky, is an abstraction of femininity, a favoured topic of Balanchine’s. It was created, in 1934, for students at the School of American Ballet that fed his company, so the memory of several productions at New Zealand School of Dance here across the decades, with the aura of fresh innocence of students at the threshold of their careers, has been special. The work has also been performed a number of times by RNZBallet since the 1970s.
My interest in watching Serenade is always to follow the dancers’ eye and facial expression, which styles the production and invites our response to it. Despite the uniformity of torso movement and port de bras required, some dancers in this cast smiled broadly and looked directly at the audience, whereas others looked into the far or the middle distance, raising the question as to what the performers are thinking about, and how Balanchine himself might originally have styled the work. The twirling pirouettes of tulle skirts always works its special poetry, but the use of token male dancers to lift a female dancer aloft in the closing scene has always seemed anachronistic. Having said that I do know that many balletomanes adore this work, even rate it as their favourite, and I respect that. All the dancers performed with aplomb, but Mayu Tanigaito found a way to invest her abstract movements with a spiritual quality that puts her in a class of her own.
(Harry Haythorne, artistic director here 1982–1993, told me that when a member of Metropolitan Ballet in UK he sustained an injury that put him out of performing for some time. He used the rest period to study Laban’s dance notation, and became fluent enough to score Balanchine’s Serenade, the first notator to do so. Although many versions of the score have since been made, Harry’s was the first, so it is poignant to visit the Dance Notation Bureau in New York and sight the initials HH at the footer of each page of his score.)
The second work, Te Ao Mārama. choreographed by Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, opened with the renowned Ariana Tikau playing pūtõrino, that most distinctive of taonga pūoro (Maori traditional instruments). I would have thought this sound would reach acoustically into every corner of the theatre, since these instruments were traditionally played in open air. I must confess that amplification of it, plus the electric guitar and amplification from Shayne Carter on the opposite side of the stage, made for challenging acoustic contrast. The dance itself explored the theme of moving from Te Kore, the darkness, as though searching for fragments of what would in time grow into haka, traditional dance, into the world of light, Te Ao Mārama. This is an interesting notion, for a choreographer to make a dance about dancing, and the final haka was certainly performed with vigour and intent by the all-male cast. I found various lighting effects, including bright white beams that swept into the audience’s eyes several times, as though to dazzle them, both unpleasant and distracting.
I did welcome the reminders of various incorporations of Maori dance influence into the repertoire of RNZB over their seven decades. Poul Gnatt in 1953 choreographed Satan’s Wedding, which a reviewer at the time (DJCM in The Auckland Star) noted reminded him of the power of haka, which was quite a thrill for Poul to hear. In 1990s Matz Skoog’s and Sue Paterson’s project that combined RNZB with Split Enz music, and Te Matārae ī Orehu on the same program, Ihi FreNZy, made very strong impression—especially when, by way of epilogue, both companies of dancers combined in a rousing haka. By the time that tour ended, Shannon Dawson, one of the strongest character dancers the Company has ever known, seemed to have changed his ethnicity. I doubt if another pākehā has ever performed haka so convincingly. My standout memory though, across all the years, is from Gray Veredon’s Tell me a Tale, set in mid 19th century, in which Warren Douglas led a haka of rage against the young colonial boy (played by Kim Broad), his father (played by Jon Trimmer) and mother (played by Kerry-Anne Gilberd). The boy had dared to fall in love with (Warren’s) sister and that provoked a taparahi never to be forgotten. We could all now haka in rage and sorrow that Warren was taken so young, and we lost a phenomenal dance talent when he lost his life.
The third work, Requiem for a Rose, is choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, to Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. There is a depth, beauty and mystery in this piece that resonates, not only as a flower of romance, but with what the rose has meant as symbol of life and love, to different peoples and cultures in history, across stories, poems and paintings—originally from Persia, China, India, South America, and then worldwide. Twelve dancers, male and female, wear rich red circular skirts that seem almost fragrant when illuminated by Jon Buswell’s outstanding lighting design. They dance a series of four duets and a quartet, all very well cast, and beautifully set to the music. The 13th dancer, Kirby Selchow, wearing the barest of leotards and no skirt, carrying a red rose in her mouth throughout, powerfully sustains the essence and mystery at the heart of this enigmatic and beautiful work.
The fourth work, Logos, choreographed by Alice Topp, is to a very effective commissioned score by Ludovico Einaudi. The opening duet, by Mayu Tanigaito and Levi Teachout—and the closing duet, by Ana Gallardo Lobaina and Matthew Slattery, are equally exquisite though in very different ways. (In later solo sections Teachout seemed to have found an astonishing quality of torso movement that evokes the likes of choreography we have seen from Douglas Wright dancers—which made him a standout in a cast of already strong dancers.) There are a number of quotations oddly laid out in the program notes, but I guess that matters not as simply following and absorbing the dance as it progresses from a dark and troubled beginning to a clearer lighter place was all the guidance we needed. Topp and Buswell collaborated brilliantly in the design for this work. Its apotheosis is a theatrical coup, and one that will stay with all who see it, even as it suggests what some might see as a disturbing harbinger for the planet. A powerful work of theatre with much to admire.
There is an exhibition in the theatre foyer to mark this as the 70th year of the Company. There are many wonderful images that remind us of a rich and varied repertoire across the decades. A National Film Unit documentary, with footage from 1959–1962 performances, is screening within the exhibition, and is a treasure. My favourite vignette in this film has always been of Jacqui Oswald Trimmer dancing in Do-Wack-a-Do, composed by the legendary Dorothea Franchi. Jacqui would have won a role in The Great Gatsby if she had used this as her audition piece. Gloria Young, Sara Neil, Anne Rowse, Patricia Rianne, Terence James, Carol Draper, Christine Smith, Valerie Whyman, Kirsten Ralov and Fredbjörn Björnsson all make striking cameo appearances in the film, and the alumnae gathering for celebrations will have great fun in following them all.
There is much to savour in the storyboards, but one statement cannot go unchallenged. Friends of the New Zealand Ballet was formed by Poul Gnatt in 1953 (not some decades later as stated). Without those subs from Friends in the 1950s, this company would simply not have made it round the country. Poul used to drive the truck with scenery and costumes from town to town to town—pick up every hitch-hiker he spied, and by the time the hikers climbed down from the truck at the end of the ride they were subscribed members of Friends of the Ballet. Poul used the money to buy petrol to drive the truck to the next town. It’s an important story—because when Poul a decade later returned to his native Denmark he taught colleagues at Royal Danish Ballet that they too should set up a Friends—which they named Ballet Appreciation Club. It has survived to this day with a staggering number of audience education and outreach activities. If they remember that Poul showed them how a Friends outfit can work, we should surely remember that too.
13 May 2023. Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
‘Paragon’ is a noun that means ‘a model of perfection and excellence’. The Australian Ballet’s resident choreographer, Alice Topp, set out in her latest production, named Paragon, to demonstrate something of the excellence and perfection (or attempts at perfection perhaps since perfection is something that we can only hope to achieve), which has characterised the past 60+ years since the Australian Ballet gave its first performance in 1962.
Following the overture to Christopher Gordon’s very danceable score, Paragon began with three performers on stage, one holding a swathe of white translucent fabric onto which were projected images of dancers from earlier Australian Ballet days. Once the white cloth was removed, the use of images from earlier eras was projected largely onto vertical panels positioned upstage, and continued as a significant feature of the work. The outstanding audio-visual editing was by Ario Dean Cook.
But links to the past were also featured as several former Australian Ballet dancers worked among and with current dancers. David McAllister and Paul Knobloch appeared with current dancers in a powerful section called ‘Quake’, for example. Then some of the most moving scenes were ‘Saudade’ (meaning ‘Yearning’) with Fiona Tonkin and Adam Bull, ‘Home’ with Lucinda Dunn and Joseph Caley, and ‘Sehnsucht Couple’ with Madeleine Eastoe and Marcus Morelli (with Sehnsucht also meaning ‘Yearning’ or ‘Desire’). In each of these the choreography was filled with unusual lifts, extraordinary extensions of the legs, bounding jumps and jetes, and other twists and turns of the body, often in an uncompromisingly upside down position or across the floor. And every dancer, retired or not, performed with more than admirable strength and exactitude, perhaps even bordering on perfection.
A scene that I found fascinating was ‘Vogue’, which made reference to the Australian Ballet’s commissioning of designers. In the background we saw projected images of various designs on paper for past Australian Ballet productions, while onstage every dancer wore something contemporary and quite ‘vogue-ish’, often a jacket worn over a sparse costume, mostly of bikini-like proportions. Costumes for Paragon were by Aleisa Jelbart, with set and lighting by Jon Buswell.
Yes, there was a strong feeling of nostalgia as the work progressed, which perhaps came to a head in the final section when Kirsty Martin and Steven Heathcote led the finale. But Paragon also gave the audience a remarkable look at Topp as a choreographer. It showed her working with a vocabulary that is clearly one of contemporary ballet, pushing boundaries, and thinking outside the square when it comes to what ballet can present in a narrative sense. Within it all was a beautiful tribute to the history of the Australian Ballet.
Paragon was part of the Australian Ballet’s double bill called Identity. THE HUM by Daniel Riley was the other work on the program. See below for a list of those retired performers who contributed to Paragon.
Retired dancers appearing in Paragon: Simon Dow, Lucinda Dunn, Madeleine Eastoe, Steven Heathcote, Paul Knobloch, Sarah Lehmann (Peace), Kirsty Martin, David McAllister, Marilyn Rowe, Leanne Stojmenov, Jessica Thompson and Fiona Tonkin.
Unintentionally, this month’s dance diary has a focus on retirements, resignations, the act of moving on and other activities associated with change. Dance is a moving art form.
Adam Bull retires
Adam Bull, principal with the Australian Ballet since 2008, has announced his retirement from the company at the end of June 2023. Bull has danced major roles in classical and contemporary works across the range of the Australian Ballet’s repertoire including works by Kenneth MacMillan, George Balanchine, Graeme Murphy, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor. Jiri Kylian, David McAllister, Alice Topp and others. His final performance will be in Melbourne in June in Topp’s new work Paragon, part of the 2023 triple bill Identity.
I have admired Bull’s performances whenever I have seen him, including in roles that have occasionally had not so much dancing in them. His performance as the figure of Death in Graeme Murphy’s Romeo and Juliet stands out for example. Then, still clear in my mind is his performance with Lana Jones in Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial, which did require a lot of dancing, as did his role in Alice Topp’s Aurum! And perhaps not so well known, since it only ever had eight performances in Brisbane, was his role of the Prince in Graeme Murphy’s The Happy Prince.
His artistry has crossed boundaries and his presence will be missed. Who knows when and where we might see him again?
I was a little taken aback I have to say to learn that Jacob Nash, designer for Bangarra for more than ten years, is moving on. I have admired Nash’s contribution to Bangarra in many situations and in my discussion of Stephen Page’s 2015 film Spear I wrote of Nash’s contribution, ‘As in his sets for Bangarra’s live shows, Nash has brought to the film an understanding of the power of minimalism in design.’ But I also remember very clearly seeing an installation in an exhibition, Ecocentrix. Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts, in London in 2013, in which his contribution was not especially minimal. Nash’s work on this occasion was multi-layered and quite mysterious in its impact. Below on the left is an image of that installation, while on the right is his set design for the 2016 work Miyangan. I look forward to seeing more of Nash’s art wherever he continues to practice.
(left) Jacob Nash, Installation for Ecocentrix. Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts, London 2013. Courtesy Helen Gilbert; (right) Jacob Nash’s set for Miyangan, Bangarra Dance Theatre 2016. Photo: Michelle Potter
Artistic director of West Australian Ballet, Aurelian Scannella, will leave the company at the end of 2023. Scannella has been with West Australian Ballet for ten years and has been responsible for introducing many new works as well as staging the classics. Taking his place in 2024, for what is listed as a temporary appointment, will be David McAllister currently on a temporary appointment as artistic director with Royal New Zealand Ballet in Wellington following the retirement of former director Patricia Barker.
More on Don Quixote
After watching the streaming of the 2023 staging of Don Quixote I was inspired to go back to watch again the film made in 1972. But I also went back to two oral history interviews I recorded for the National Library of Australia: one with Lucette Aldous in 1999, and one with Gailene Stock in 2012. Both Aldous and Stock talk about their experiences during the making of the film—Aldous at some length, Stock about a particular incident relating to Nureyev. Both interviews are available online and, with each one, the section of the interview relating to the film is easily accessible by keying ‘Don Quixote’ into the search box at the beginning of each interview (after accepting the conditions of the licence agreement). Happy listening. It’s worth it!
Rudolf Nureyev as Basilio in Don Quixote. 1972. Still from the film.
Lynn Seymour (1939-2023)
Canadian-born dancer, Lynn Seymour, has died in London aged 83. Seymour had an extensive career as a principal dancer with several major ballet companies. There are a number of obituaries available online and here is a link to the one I admire most, written by Jane Pritchard for The Guardian.
None of the obituaries that I have read mentions Seymour’s appearances in Australia and New Zealand during a Royal Ballet tour in 1958 and 1959 but she made her debut as Odette/Odile in Swan Lake during that tour and garnered mostly excellent reviews. My previous discussions of Seymour on this website, which relate to that tour, were written early in 2017 and have been somewhat controversial. But they continue to be accessed six years later. See this link, which also contains a link back to the controversy.
Lynn Seymour, program image and autograph. The Royal Ballet Australasian Tour, 1958
26 November 2022 (matinee). Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
After watching Kunstkamer earlier this year, I felt such positivity about the future direction of the Australian Ballet under the direction of David Hallberg. I wrote, ‘Kunstkamer is a complete change for the Australian Ballet. It is a magnificent, brilliantly conceived, exceptionally performed work giving audiences (and perhaps even the dancers) a whole new look at what dance can achieve, and maybe even what we can expect for the next several years under Hallberg?’ After Instruments of dance I am not so sure about those expectations. I found Instruments of dance, which consisted of three works by choreographers working across the world today, decidedly underwhelming, and as my companion succinctly put it, ’Things can only get better.’
The program opened with Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian tear, which I first saw in London in 2018. Then I found it a cold work. This time it certainly wasn’t cold, in fact it was the opposite. After the opening emotion-filled duet, it showed anger, aggression and even a sense of hatred and ill feeling between the nine members of the all-male cast. It was a comment by McGregor, to my mind anyway, on aspects of sexuality. But what bothered me on this occasion was the choreography, which was often full of McGregor’s body-bending movement, but at other times seemed really static with dancers simply standing with arms in geometric shapes. Somehow it didn’t come together as a unified whole and I remain convinced that Obsidian tear is not one of McGregor’s outstanding works, despite some extraordinary and heart-wrenching moments.
The middle work on the program, Annealing, came from Alice Topp, whose brilliant Aurum remains fixed in my mind four years after I saw it first. Annealing means, we are told, ‘ the process of heating metal or glass to a temperature below its melting point in order to make it softer’. It began with a startling duet, which was followed by an equally startling group section. The duet was dressed simply and elegantly but the costumes for the group section that followed were extravagantly designed, to put it mildly, with all dancers wearing gold clothing that concealed most of the working body. This of course limited the kind of movement that could be executed and in this group section Topp often focused on unison movements of the arms and hands, and bends of the upper body. This looked fine when unison was strongly executed but it was really a dance for costumes more than anything.
Justin Peck’s Everywhere we go closed the program. It had, perhaps not surprisingly, a strong American look given that Peck is currently artistic director of New York City Ballet and was a dancer with the company for many years. It had a distinct show bizz feel, which I would enjoy (perhaps) if I went to see a musical but it was frustrating to say the least when in the repertoire of a ballet company. It was repetitious and in fact the audience clapped and cheered at one point thinking that the work had come to an end. But it hadn’t and it continued in its repetitious manner for several more minutes. In addition to many fast turning steps (a little a la Balanchine), Peck used lines of dancers whose numbers grew and diminished constantly and also often used what to my mind were quite ugly poses in which the dancers lent forward with curved backs that somehow mirrored the statically held, curved arms that accompanied the leaning. Then there was all that grinning out to the audience. No thanks.
As a subscriber (I am not regarded as a legitimate reviewer apparently and so do not enjoy any reviewer privileges), I paid $236 to see this show. It is a big price to pay for a program that delivered little that I could admire and enjoy. I am hoping I will see something better next year.
David Hallberg has put together an interesting selection of works for the Australian Ballet’s 2023 season. Perhaps most interesting, or perhaps surprisingly unexpected, is a double bill called Identity, which will be seen in Sydney in May and Melbourne in June. Identity will feature two new works, The Hum from Daniel Riley and Paragon from Alice Topp. Topp is currently resident choreographer with the company while Riley is artistic director of the Adelaide-based Australian Dance Theatre. The pairing of works from Riley and Topp promises to bring a certain diversity with the two choreographers coming from quite different dance and ethnic backgrounds. Paragon aims to pay tribute to the heritage of the Australian Ballet while The Hum will be a collaboration between the Australian Ballet and Australian Dance Theatre and will feature Indigenous artists as key artistic collaborators. Both works aim to explore the concept of identity whether it is that of Australia, of community. or of art.
I will also be interested to see Swan Lake, which will be shown in Melbourne in September, Adelaide and Brisbane in October, and Sydney in December. Hallberg will be working from the 1977 production by Anne Woolliams and is aiming to bring new insights into what I thought, way back when it was first shown, was a magnificent production which, with various rearrangements of parts of the storyline, gave audiences a very logical understanding of the narrative. This time, however, it will have new designs, some additional choreography by Lucas Jervies, and some filmic influences.
The work of George Balanchine will be on show with Jewels as will that of Frederick Ashton with a double bill of The Dream and Marguerite and Armand. Jewels, which will be seen in Sydney in May and Melbourne in July, will have costumes and sets by the original designers Barbara Karinska for costumes and Peter Harvey for set. This is a shame really as there have been some stunning new designs for Jewels and I am reminded of a remark made in France that the original designs were ‘fussy and outmoded’. But the work itself is stunning with its three separate sections, each representing a different precious stone. On seeing a performance of Jewels by New York City Ballet in 2010 I wrote:
‘Emeralds’ is at once moody and mysterious, romantic and sombre, and sometimes like a whisper in a forest glade. ‘Rubies’ is all sass and neon. ‘Diamonds’ is pure and clean, a dance in an arctic cave filled with cool yet intricate ice carvings.
Australian audiences saw Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand during a Royal Ballet tour in 2002 when we had the good fortune to see the leading role of Marguerite danced by Sylvie Guillem partnered by Jonathan Cope, and later in the season by Massimo Murru. Since then I have seen stunning performances by Alessandra Ferri partnered by Federico Bonelli and by Zenaida Yanowsky partnered by Roberto Bolle. A line up of stars for sure, so it will be interesting to see who in the Australian Ballet will take on the roles.
Ashton’s The Dream was performed by the Australian Ballet in 2015. Read my review at this link. The Ashton program will be staged in November and only in Sydney.
The 2023 season will also feature a production of Don Quixote adapted for stage from the 1973 film, which starred Rudolf Nureyev, Lucette Aldous and Robert Helpmann.
Lucette Aldous and Robert Helpmann in rehearsal for the film, Don Quixote. The Australian Ballet, 1972. Photo: Don Edwards
Don Quixote will play in Melbourne in March and Sydney in April.
In addition, and as part of the Australian Ballet’s 2023 program, the Tokyo Ballet will visit Melbourne in July bringing their staging of Giselle.
The current corona virus situation has given us many opportunities to see streamed productions from many of the world’s best companies. Some have been thrilling, and have been works, or have involved casts, that I am unlikely to see outside this streaming arrangement. One or two, however, have left me wondering.
The Australian Ballet’s decision to stream its 1986 production of Giselle was an odd one I thought. In the thirty-four years since 1986 much has changed in terms of filming techniques and in what we expect from dancers. I was underwhelmed in particular by the poor quality of the footage and I was not a fan of the characterisations of the leading characters, except perhaps by that of Paul de Masson as Hilarion. Techniques are stronger now as well.
It was also touted as Maina Gielgud’s production, which it no doubt was even it was staged by Colin Peasley. But Gielgud had been director of the company for just a few years in 1986 and, having seen more recent productions that have involved her input, most recently in 2018 but also in 2015, her production has grown in so many ways. Could we not have had something closer to 2020? The 1986 recording was a poor choice.
Then there was Smuin Ballet’s staging of Stanton Welch’s Indigo. I have often wondered about Indigo made originally for Houston Ballet in 1999. Its title seemed curious: how do you make a ballet about a colour? Well of course the title referred to the colour of the costumes, although that is also something of a curiosity to my mind. That aside, I was really disappointed by Welch’s choreography. It was filled with jerky staccato movements and I longed for a bit of lyrical relief. It also seemed to sit awkwardly, I thought, on the physiques of the Smuin dancers. But at least now I have seen it and needn’t muse about the title any more.
Australian activity in New Zealand
It is interesting to note that two Australian choreographers are to have their work performed in the coming months by Royal New Zealand Ballet, which will shortly return to full-scale performing. Alice Topp’s Aurum will be part of a mixed bill program called Venus Rising. The program is due to take place in August/September and will also feature works by Twyla Tharp, Andrea Schermoly, and Sarah Foster-Sproull.
See these links for my reviews of Aurum: Melbourne (2018), Sydney (2019). In both cases Aurum was part of a triple bill called Verve.
Later, in October through to December, Danielle Rowe, former principal with the Australian Ballet and now making a name for herself as a choreographer, will present her new Sleeping Beauty, also for Royal New Zealand Ballet.
Australian Dance Awards
The closing date for nominations for the 2019 and 2020 Australian Dance Awards has been extended. These two sets of awards cover work presented in 2018 and 2019. The closing date is now 20 July. For further information and to nominate follow this link.
Aurum, choreographed by Alice Topp, a resident choreographer with the Australian Ballet, was first seen in Melbourne in 2018. It was followed by a 2019 season in Sydney, a scene from which is the featured image for this post. Also in 2019 it had a showing in New York at the Joyce Theater. In fact the Joyce was in part responsible for the creation of Aurum. Aurum was enabled with the support of a Rudolf Nureyev Prize for New Dance, awarded by the Joyce. Major funding came from the Rudolf Nureyev Dance Foundation. Aurum went on to win a Helpmann Award in 2019.
Now Topp will stage her work for Royal New Zealand Ballet as part of that company’s Venus Rising program opening in May 2020. She has recently been rehearsing the work in RNZB studios in Wellington.
I can still feel the excitement of seeing Aurum for the first time in 2018 when it was part of the Australian Ballet’s Verve program. My review from that season is at this link.
Dance Australia critics’ survey
Below are my choices in the annual Dance Australia critics’ survey. See the February/March 2020 issue of Dance Australia for the choices made by other critics across Australia. The survey is always interesting reading.
Highlight of the year West Side Story’s return to Australian stages looking as fabulous as it did back in the 1960s. A true dance musical in which choreographer Jerome Robbins tells the story brilliantly through dance and gesture.
Most significant dance event Sydney Dance Company’s 50th anniversary. Those who have led, and are leading the company—Suzanne Musitz, Jaap Flier, Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon, and currently Rafael Bonachela—have given Australian audiences a varied contemporary repertoire with exposure to the work of some remarkable Australian choreographers and composers, as well as the work of some of the best contemporary artists from overseas.
Most interesting Australian independent group or artist Canberra’s Australian Dance Party, which has started to develop a strong presence and unique style and has given Canberra a much needed local, professional company. The 2019 production From the vault showed the company’s strong collaborative aesthetic with an exceptional live soundscape and lighting to add to the work’s appeal.
Most interesting Australian group or artist Bangarra Dance Theatre. Over thirty years the company has gone from strength to strength and can only be admired for the way in which Stephen Page and his associates tell Indigenous stories with such pride and passion.
Most outstanding choreography Melanie Lane’s thrilling but somewhat eccentric WOOF as restaged by Sydney Dance Company. It was relentless in its exploration of group behaviour and reminded me a little of a modern day Rite of Spring
Best new work Dangerous Liaisons by Liam Scarlett for Queensland Ballet. Scarlett has an innate ability to compress detail without losing the basic elements of the narrative and to capture mood and character through movement. It was beautifully performed by Queensland Ballet and demonstrated excellence in its collaborative elements.
Most outstanding dancer(s) Kohei Iwamato from Queensland Ballet especially for his dancing in Dangerous Liaisons as Azolan, valet to the Vicomte de Valmont. His dancing was light, fluid, and technically exact and he made every nuance of Scarlett’s choreography clearly visible
Tyrel Dulvarie in Bangarra’s revival of Unaipon in which he danced the role of David Unaipon. His presence on stage was imposing throughout and his technical ability shone, especially in the section where he danced as Tolkami (the West Wind).
Dancer(s) to watch Ryan Stone, dancer with Alison Plevey’s Canberra-based Australian Dance Party (ADP). His performance in ADP’s From the vault was exceptional for its fluidity and use of space and gained him a Dance Award from the Canberra Critics’ Circle.
Yuumi Yamada of the Australian Ballet whose dancing in Stephen Baynes Constant Variants and as the Daughter in Stanton Welch’s Sylvia showed her as an enticing dancer with much to offer as she develops further.
Boos! The Australian Government’s apparent disinterest in the arts and in the country’s collecting institutions. The removal of funding for Ausdance National, for example, resulted in the cancellation of the Australian Dance Awards, while the efficiency dividend placed on collecting institutions, which has been in place for years now, means that items that tell of our dance history lie unprocessed and uncatalogued, and hence are unusable by the public for years.
Standing ovation I’m standing up and cheering for the incredible 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.
In January I had the pleasure of recording two new oral history interviews for the National Library of Australia’s oral history program. The first was with Chrissa Keramidas, former dancer with the Australian Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Sydney Dance Company. Keramidas recently returned as a guest artist in the Australian Ballet’s recent revival of Nutcracker. The story of Clara. The second was with Emeritus Professor Susan Street, AO, dance educator over many years including with Queensland University of Technology and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.
News from James Batchelor
James Batchelor’s Redshift, originally commissioned by Chunky Move in 2017, will have another showing in Paris in February as part of the Artdanthé Festival. Redshift is another work emerging from Batchelor’s research following his taking part in an expedition to Heard and McDonald Islands in the sub-Antarctic in 2016. Artdanthé takes place at the Théâtre de Vanves and Batchelor’s works have been shown there on previous occasions.
Batchelor is also about to start work on a new piece, Cosmic Ballroom, which will premiere in December 2020 at another international festival, December Dance, in Bruges, Belgium. Below are some of Batchelor’s thoughts about this new work.
Set in a 19th Century Ballroom in Belgium, Cosmic Ballroom will playfully reimagine social dances and the aesthetic relationship they have to the space and time they exist within. We will work with movement as a plastic and expressive language that is formed through social encounters: the passing of thoughts, feelings and uncertainties from body to body. It will ponder the public and private and the personal and interpersonal as tonal zones that radiate and contaminate. How might movement be like a virus in this context? How might space-times be playfully spilling across and infecting one another from the baroque ballroom to the post-industrial club space?
Batchelor will collaborate with an team of Australian, Italian and UK artists on this work.
13 April 2019 (matinee) Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
I saw this program, a contemporary triple bill with works by Stephen Baynes, Alice Topp and Tim Harbour, last year, 2018, in Melbourne. My review is at this link. This time my thoughts remain basically the same. I liked or disliked each of the works for the same reasons as before, although in most cases the casting was different and Aurum probably didn’t have the power I felt it had at the performance I saw in 2018.
With regard to casting, I saw Ako Kondo and Andrew Killian in the leading roles in Baynes’ Constant Variants both times, and both times they handled themselves with the aplomb and expertise we have come to expect from these two principal dancers. But on this second viewing I especially enjoyed Yuumi Yamada with her beautiful smile and joyous execution of the steps, and an equally inspiring Lucien Xu.
I was also transfixed by the dancing of Joseph Romancewicz, as I was when I noticed him in small parts in The Merry Widow and Spartacus. On this occasion Romancewicz had a role in Topp’s Aurum and, with fewer people on the stage this time compared with those previous occasions, it was easier to see some of what I admire. Mostly it is that power to engage with those around him—this time with his partner in a group section of about eight dancers (if I remember rightly). Not once did he move without thinking and showing that he was dancing with someone. But I also noticed more clearly this time that he moves with beautiful fluidity throughout his whole body.
It was also a pleasure to see Dimity Azoury in the final movement of Aurum, which she danced with Andrew Killian.
The standout dancer for me in Harbour’s Filigree and Shadow was Marcus Morelli. I always enjoy the enthusiasm with which he takes on every role and the way he injects such a strong personal note into those roles.
But I guess what interested me particularly this time was the shape of movement throughout. Baynes’ use of classical movement showed how expansive and diverse the classical vocabulary is. It allows all the spectacular qualities that we see in contemporary vocabulary but as well brings to the surface a fluidity, a smoothness, and something that is filled with curving, as well as straight lines. The body is the medium.
Topp and Harbour seemed to want more than anything to make shapes, new shapes that we haven’t seen anywhere else before. Often they were spectacular shapes, particularly hard-edged in Harbour’s case. But while some were interesting, others seemed as though the choreographer was trying too hard to be different, and even at times trying to put a step to every note of music. The body is not so much the medium but the show place for shapes.
Constant Variants remains the work I want to come back to again and again. Verve is, nevertheless, a wonderful program that gives us much to think about.
