Li Cunxin to retire

20 June 2023

Li Cunxin, artistic director of Queensland Ballet for the past 11 years, today announced that, due to ill health, he will retire at the end of the 2023 season. At the same time, his wife Mary Li, also with health concerns, will retire from her role as ballet mistress and principal repetiteur with the company.

Li’s contribution to the growth of Queensland Ballet has been quite exceptional. His input has included a doubling of the number of dancers in the company, which now stands at 48 artists; the development of a young artists’ scheme with the Jette Parker Young Artists Program; the growth of an Academy situated at Kelvin Grove State College; the development of the Thomas Dixon Centre as home to Queensland Ballet with the inclusion of a very accessible small theatre; the expansion of company activities to the Gold Coast; and the growth of philanthropy, touring and community activities.

His choice of repertoire has been of exceptional significance too. I have admired in particular his triple bill programs, which always give audiences a varied understanding of the range of styles and subjects that ballet can encompass. Li’s Choice in 2022 was outstanding and I described it as ‘an absolute cracker of a triple bill [showing] Li as a great director’. He has encouraged the work of Australian. choreographers, both established and emerging, and has also staged works from a range of overseas-based choreographers whose productions have not often (if ever in some cases) been seen in Australia. It is hard to forget, for example, A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Liam Scarlett, which was created in conjunction with Royal New Zealand Ballet while that company was under the direction of Ethan Stiefel, and which will tour to Canberra in October.

Yanela Pinera as Titania, Queensland Ballet 2016 — Yanela Piñera as Titania in *A Midsummer Night’s Dream*, Queensland Ballet 2016. Photo: © David Kelly

But perhaps more than anything, Li (and his staff of teachers and coaches) has developed the performance standard of the company to a new level of excellence. His dancers perform with such a love of dance and such a desire to give to the audience. They show a strong and visible engagement with all aspects of a production and it is simply heartwarming to watch them.

Speaking of his retirement Li said:

I am tremendously proud of the company I see before me today. Queensland Ballet stands proudly on the world stage in performance, pathways and participation. I will never be far away but as I take this time and the organisation continues to thrive, I know I am leaving the company in a strong position. While I am very proud of the company’s growth, the major projects we have undertaken and the dreams we have fulfilled, I’m mostly proud of the fact that Queensland Ballet is completely set up for success. Our foundations are stronger than ever and I’m proud to be a part of that legacy.

Queensland Ballet will begin a search for a new director shortly.

Personal recollections
I have many fond memories of Li in various of his roles from performer to artistic director. In particular I am pleased that I had the opportunity to record an oral history interview with him for the National Library of Australia in 2019 (TRC 6989 currently needing written permission to access). Vivid in my mind too is LI’s astonishing leap onto the stage in the opening moments of Jiří Kylián’s Sinfonietta with the Australian Ballet in 1997. ‘A soaring entrance,’ I wrote in Dance Australia, followed by the words ‘enthralling jumps and superbly controlled arms’. But perhaps my strongest recollection goes back to c. 1996 when Maina Gielgud was artistic director of the Australian Ballet and was extraordinarily generous in allowing me to watch company classes. I recall on several occasions Li would stay in the studio after class was officially over and practise manège after manège of spectacular grand allegro steps. He would always finish right in front of me, kneeling, and with a flourish of the arms to second position—always a showman.

Li will never retire from being a dancer at heart and I wish him and his wife every happiness in the future.

For more about LI on this website follow this link.

Michelle Potter, 20 June 2023

Featured image: Portrait of Li Cunxin following his award of Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2020. Photo: © David Kelly

The New Zealand Dance Company and New Zealand Army Band, 'Rotunda'. Photo: John McDermott

Rotunda. The New Zealand Dance Company and New Zealand Army Band

In many a park in New Zealand … the same in Australia I’m sure … sits an octagonal band rotunda … shades of Vauxhall Gardens and the public pleasures of outdoor music played by local brass bands or other ensembles. These days children play in a rotunda, not much good for hide’n’seek since the sides are open, but its roof will shelter you if there’s a sudden downpour on your picnic.

Mostly rotundas are quiet sentinels to an earlier era of music-making. In peacetime, well and good, but, in wartime, brass bands are readily associated with the many concerts and farewells involved when the armed forces are on the move. Drum roll. Slow March. The Last Post. You know it well.

2015 is the year commemorating Word War I and the scar on the Anzac nation that the Gallipoli landing represents, 25 April 1915. It’s also 70 years since the end of World War II, 40 years since the end of the Vietnam War, one minute since the latest slaughter somewhere in the name of power, wealth or religion … and so it goes … every year marking some anniversary of the human propensity to conflict, to fight, rather than, as Shakespeare pithily put it … ‘to dance out the answer’.

Thoinot Arbeau’s dance manual, Orchesographie from France, 1589, offers a fascinating glimpse of martial arts overlapping with dance practices of the time, and remains accessible today in a Dover edition, with an appendix of Laban notation. Another important book on the topic, Keeping Together in Time, by William H. McNeill has rightly been described as a tour de force of imagination and scholarship.

There are several classics of what one might call ‘war dances’ choreographed in the 20th century—the indelible masterpiece by Kurt Jooss, The Green Table, Jiří Kylián’s extraordinary Soldiers’ Mass (which will be restaged by the Royal New Zealand Ballet mid-2015), and Jose Limon’s heartfelt Missa Brevis to Kodaly’s mass. Each of them contains witness to war that translates into a prayer for peace. Nijinsky, in his last performance, ‘danced the war’ and we all know what happened to him after that.

The New Zealand Dance Company has joined forces with the New Zealand Army Band, in the production of Rotunda, a full-length work which has recently toured New Zealand, had earlier been performed in Europe, and will shortly tour to Australia. The Army Band plays a range of New Zealand compositions and the incorporation of its players into the heart of the staged work is memorable. The result is impressive, highly unusual, spectacular, powerful and poignant by turns.

'Rotunda'. The New Zealand Dance Company (1). Photo: Caroline Bindon — *Rotunda*. The New Zealand Dance Company, 2015. Photo: © Caroline Bindon

For the cast of four male and four female dancers, the choreographic focus is on the young … boys playing shoot-outs with twigs from the apple tree, bang bang you’re dead, but not too much later they are on a battlefield, shooting and being shot with real guns now. One of them stays down, bang bang you’re dead alright. But your mate can’t believe that, so lifts you and carries you to dance. It is a painfully exquisite duo that would bring you back to life, but if course, it can’t.

Another duo between a young woman in a poppy-red dress, full of all the reasons youth have to live, dances with her dazed, glazed shell-shocked young man but he cannot be persuaded to thaw from the horrors of what he has seen. ‘Incurably insane’ is what the medical records called them. [Trudi Schoop, dancer and cabaret artist in Switzerland during World War II, turned after the war to a career in dance therapy, stating that she would thereafter work with catatonic schizophrenics, who were just that, whereas the men who had manufactured the war were the criminally insane].

'Rotunda.' The New Zealand Dance Company, 2015. Photo: Caroline Bindon — *Rotunda*. The New Zealand Dance Company, 2015. Photo: © Caroline Bindon

In choreographing a commemoration of ‘the’ war (as in ‘The War to End All Wars’), one wishes neither to celebrate triumphs (they are few) nor record casualties (they are many), but rather to remember, lest we forget.

The stage set and lighting of the performance are inspired. A white silk banner flies high and swoops low, caught and tossed in the updraught of a circle of fans placed on the stage. A dancer engages with it before it is swept away and up. Image of a soul, a spirit, a person, gone. But not forgotten.

'Rotunda', the New Zealand Dance Company, 2015. Photo: Celia Walmsley — *Rotunda*. The New Zealand Dance Company, 2015. Photo: © Celia Walmsley

Jennifer Shennan, Wellington, April 2015

Australian schedule for Rotunda:

Adelaide: Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre. Friday 1 May, 7.30pm; Saturday 2 May, 2pm & 7.30pm
Melbourne: The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne. Thursday 7 May, 8pm; Friday 8 May, 8pm; Saturday 9 May, 2pm & 8pm
Parramatta: Riverside Theatre, Parramatta. Wednesday 13 May, 8pm; Thursday 14 May, 8pm; Friday 15 May, 8pm; Saturday 16 May, 2pm & 8pm
Geelong: The Playhouse Theatre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre. Thursday 21 May, 8pm; Friday 22 May, 8pm; Saturday 23 May, 1pm

Publications mentioned in the text:

Arbeau, Thoinot. Orchesographie, edited by Julia Sutton, translated by Mary Stewart Evans (Dover: New York, 1967)
McNeill, William H. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995)

Featured image: The New Zealand Dance Company and New Zealand Army Band, promotional shot for Rotunda. Photo: John McDermott

Chroma, Art to Sky, Petite Mort & Sechs Tänze. The Australian Ballet

10 May 2014 (matinee), Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House

What an inspiring performance the Australian Ballet gave of Wayne McGregor’s Chroma. Not an easy ballet to bring off, but all the diverse features that make McGregor’s choreography so eminently watchable were there. Limbs extending through space, off-centre partnering, moves that were in turn twisted, contorted, angular and sometimes smooth and undulating. And all were all set cleanly and articulately against John Pawson’s stripped back, white box space with its rectangular ‘window’ of changing colours. McGregor is a master at exploiting the balletic body to produce astonishingly shaped movements—movements of the twenty-first century perhaps? What I especially like is that his choreography make us see how perfectly amazing the balletic vocabulary can be.

I particularly admired Vivienne Wong’s performance throughout the work and also a powerful trio from Brett Chynoweth, Rudy Hawkes and Andrew Killian—fast, assertive dancing from them all. But it was a duet from Lana Jones and Daniel Gaudiello that stole the show for me. McGregor’s choreography suits Jones with her strong, unassailable technique and Gaudiello has such a way of adding his own signature to everything he does while still remaining true to the intentions of the choreographer.

Artists of the Australian Ballet in 'Chroma', 2014. courtesy the Australian Ballet — Artists of the Australian Ballet in Wayne McGregor’s *Chroma*, 2014. Photo courtesy of the Australian Ballet

Stephen Baynes’ new work, Art to Sky, began with some lovely, lingering choreography, beautifully performed by Leanne Stojmenov and Gaudiello again. It was romantic, softly falling from step to step. The corps de ballet also had some memorable choreography in the opening sections, surprising at times and always pure and fresh. But after that there were a few too many somersaults, cartwheels and legs in the air, not to mention twee sections of humour that didn’t quite work. It is a little problematic too that one of George Balanchine’s most exquisite ballets (in my mind anyway) is Mozartiana danced to the same music, Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana, that Baynes chose for Art to Sky. Balanchine has a habit of lingering in the mind, making it hard to accept anything else to the music he uses.

Hugh Colman’s shadowy, upstage portal that comprised the set, lit by Rachel Burke to give a hint of the mysterious, were strong additions to the look of Art to Sky. Colman, Burke and Baynes work well together as collaborators and bring a sense of visual cohesion to each other’s work.

The program concluded with Jiří Kylián’s companion pieces, Petite Mort and Sechs Tänze and it was a treat to see some more Kylián back onstage with the Australian Ballet. It was interesting to have Kylián on the same program as McGregor, as also happened last year with Bella Figura and Dyad. Kylián, too, pushes the dance vocabulary and gives us a surprising array of movement, but he adds a degree of humanity and humour to his works that McGregor passes over (at least in Chroma, although perhaps not to the same extent in others of his works).

This mixed bill was a relief from the full-length ballets that we are told draw the best houses. To me the house looked pretty much full for what was a diverse and well danced program. I’d like more in this vein.

Michelle Potter, 11 May 2014

Featured image: Natasha Kusen and Andrew Killian in a study for Petite Mort. The Australian Ballet 2014. Photo: © Paul Scala

Natasha Kusen and Andrew Killian in 'Petite Mort'. Photo Paul Scala. Courtesy the Australian Ballet

Darkness is hiding black horses, Glacial decoy, Doux mensonges. Paris Opera Ballet

2 November 2013, Palais Garnier, Paris

Triple bill programs can be mixed experiences. The Paris Opera Ballet’s recent program, with works by Saburo Teshigawara, Trisha Brown and Jiří Kylián, was a case in point: three choreographers from three very different backgrounds dealing in very different ways with the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, the spaces in which dance takes place.

The newly created work, Darkness is hiding black horses, by Japanese choreographer Teshigawara opened the program. Made for just three dancers, a female and two males, it was the most difficult to make sense of as it appeared to have no choreographic structure beyond a quite simple floor pattern of straight lines of movement. The dancers very rarely interacted with each other and the movement itself also seemed to have no obvious structure with the dancers moving in a kind of slinky, bendy fashion as if collapsing into and around themselves. An interview with Teshigawara in the printed program noted that the choreographer was interested in surrealism and the act of automatic writing as favoured by some artists of Dadaist bent. Darkness looked a little like a form of automatic choreography.

To tell the truth I have no idea what the work was meant to be about although publicity kept using words like black, obscurity and the like. It was performed in a kind of black box space and little puffs of smoke kept escaping into the air from jets on the floor of the stage. It was mystifying and I think presumptuous. And as for the black horses…?

Trisha Brown’s Glacial Decoy, a work she made in 1979, was welcome relief. Its exploration of the space beyond centre stage, including wing space, was lively and playful and her beautifully exuberant use of dancers picking up phrases from one another was a delight. Robert Rauschenberg’s background projections of his own black and white photographs, mostly of assorted suburban and industrial subjects, seemed to echo the choreography as they slipped across the stage from left to right in groups of four with the far right image constantly disappearing and being replaced by another on the far left.

The dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet handled Brown’s loose limbed, swinging movement and idiosyncratic gestures with style although with perhaps a little too much classicism, a feature of the performance that was more noticeable than it might have been given that Brown’s New York company was performing its own program concurrently at the Théâtre de la Ville.

But it was Jiří Kylián’s exquisite Doux mensonges that was the highlight of the evening. It is a beautifully coherent combination of dance (for four dancers only), film (shot under the stage of the Palais Garnier), song (from the group Les Arts florissants), lighting (Michael Simon) and a fabulous, hanging pinky-orange cloud-like structure that turns, folds and unfolds slowly to display varying facets of its composition (also by Michael Simon).

Doux mensonges was created in 1999 for the Paris Opera Ballet and its title might be translated as Sweet lies, although I prefer Sweet deceits. Kylián has explained that his inspiration for the piece is the duality of our personal world, the world that we show to others and allow them to share and the world that we prefer to keep hidden from others. This is best seen in the work when, after performing onstage, the dancers sometimes disappear from the stage via a trapdoor only to be seen below the stage on film (projected back up onto the stage) where a less pleasant and sometimes quite violent side, perhaps a more honest side, of their relationship is shown.

Choreographically Doux mensonges consists largely of duets, on this occasion between Eleonora Abbagnato with Vincent Chaillet and Alice Renavand with Stéphane Bullion. With its focus sometimes on extended legs and arms stretched fully to the side in lifts, it reminded me a little of the duets from Stepping Stones. But I loved the opening duet executed on the edges of a trapdoor and a later moment when in one lift the woman held her legs straight down in a 5th position and executed a series of quivering beats as she was carried across the stage.

There were so many moments of sheer inventiveness, visually, kinaesthetically and musically. Doux mensonges for me is a work of breathtaking, expressionistic beauty. It is hard to think of anything that equals it.

Michelle Potter, 6 November 2013

'Glacial decoy' Trisha Brown Dance Company Photo © Julietta Cervantes 2009 — Trisha Brown Dance Company in *Glacial decoy*, 2009. Photo: © Julietta Cervantes

Unfortunately I have been unable to convince the Paris Opera Ballet of my bona fides as a writer. The press office has ignored my requests for access to images, which is a shame because Teshigawara’s costumes in particular need to be seen rather than described. C’est la vie I guess. The image above of Glacial decoy is of the Trisha Brown Dance Company and comes from their media site.

The Australian Ballet in 2014

The Australian Ballet recently announced its season for 2014. The inclusion of Stanton Welch’s production of La Bayadère, made for Houston Ballet in 2010, seems to have caused the biggest stir in the press with reports that live snakes and a snake wrangler will make an appearance. Reptiles and their handlers aside, it is certainly a step in an interesting direction to have a new work from Welch (new to Australia anyway) on the program given that he has continued to hold the post of a resident choreographer while also being artistic director of Houston Ballet since 2003.

Although I was not overly impressed with Welch’s recent Rite of Spring, I look forward to seeing this full-length Bayadère and hope that he has tightened up the story a little. ‘La Bayadère is a recurring problem’, as American Dance Magazine noted not so long ago.

But for me the most interesting program on the 2014 list is a mixed bill entitled Chroma. It includes Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, an exciting work made on the Royal Ballet in 2006. I loved its minimalism and its collaborative aesthetic when I saw it a couple of years ago. The Chroma program also includes two short pieces by Jiří Kylián, Petite Mort and Sechs Tänze.

The Australian Ballet showed these two Kylián pieces in 2005 and who can forget those wonderfully fluid duets from Petite Mort, not to mention the fencing foils that the men manipulate in the opening sequences, or those roll-along, black ballgowns! It’s hard to forget Sechs Tänze too, a curiously playful work in which the dancers wear costumes designed by Kylián, which he calls ‘Mozartian underwear’. This program also includes a new work by Stephen Baynes.

A second mixed bill entitled Imperial Suite consists of George Balanchine’s Ballet Imperial and Serge Lifar’s Suite en blanc. The season also includes Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon, which we have seen so many times in Australia, and Peter Wright’s The Nutcracker.

I am looking forward to an exciting season in 2014 although I’d rather something other than Manon as a third evening length work.

Michelle Potter, 6 September 2013

Here is a is a link to a Houston Ballet preview of Welch’s Bayadère. Watch out for a variation from the Kingdom of the Shades scene danced by Nozomi Iijima. It comes towards the end of the four minute preview.

Featured image: Natasha Kusen and Andrew Killian in Petite Mort. Photo: Paul Scala. Courtesy the Australian Ballet