His Majesty’s Theatre
May 12, 2012
“Diamonds” is the West Australian Ballet’s celebration of the company’s 60th anniversary. Saturday night’s performance offered one absolute jewel, a couple of small gems and wonderful playing by WASO conducted by Wolfgang Heinz in a program of six short works of predominately male dancing, great staging and lighting and some disappointments.
Previously performed in the Quarry and the Regal Theatre in 2008, choreographer Petr Zuska's lightweight spoof on classical ballet Maria's Dream seems a rather contentious choice to open a program marking the 60th anniversary of Australia’s oldest ballet company. Despite this, and an audience who took a while to grasp that they were allowed to laugh, the dancers gave it their all. The men (Sergey Pevnev, David Mack, Benjamin Marrett and Mark Dennis) relished their opportunities as, bare-chested and wearing white tulle skirts, they displayed great comic skills and some dazzling, acrobatic moves and beautifully honed classical techniques to the strains of Saint-Saens’ Dying Swan and Pugni’s Pas de Quatre. Maria (Jennifer Provins) seemed a little tentative and almost as nonplussed as the audience. As a finale, the men dropped their tulle skirts and bourréed bare-bottomed across the stage.
Fishy, which followed, was choreographed by Ivan Cavallari in 1998 for Stuttgart Ballet to a Peter Schindler score for saxophone and organ. It is an intriguing short work with a lone swimmer (Milos Mutavdzic) reeling in a netted sea-creature (Brooke Widdison-Jacobs). He explores his catch as they intertwine in an intricately woven pas de deux but fails to understand that she cannot survive out of the water. A beautifully understated performance by Mutavdzic, and Widdison-Jacobs’ exceptional long, classic lines, helped make this work pleasurable viewing.
Closing the first half was Jeu de cartes, a “poker game in three deals” set to Stravinsky’s 1936 score and originally choreographed by Balanchine in 1937. This Cranko version was testing as the dancers matched the difficult choreography of 1965 with the more exacting demands of 2012 technique.
In the five Hearts’ solos, Yann Laine, Daryl Brandwood, Joel Small, Dane Holland and Michael Braun provided some excitingly fast pirouettes and excellent dancing. The cast all worked hard to try to breathe new life into this work. Andre Santos made a great Joker and he tackled the fiendish choreography splendidly, but the clown makeup and auburn wig, and later tutu and coronet, didn’t assist him.
A powerful performance by David Mack in Barry Moreland’s sublime Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune choreographed in 1985 to Debussy’s blissful music opened the second half and was the real jewel of the evening. Lit brilliantly by Kenneth Rayner with an exquisite design by Barry Moreland and Nina Thomson, the work cleverly honours the past and Nijinsky’s 1912 original, yet has a contemporary aesthetic. Moreland integrates Nijinsky’s stylized shapes and angular two-dimensional poses and creates a “live” Grecian frieze as the beautiful nymphs, (Claire Hill, Victoria Maughan and Alessandra D’Arbe), glide across the stage. This work was in a class of its own.
Michel Fokine’s Dying Swan to Saint-Saens’ music was created for Anna Pavlova in 1905 and restaged by Margaret Illmann for this program. The words of the Tennyson poem The Dying Swan which inspired the original were projected onto a front scrim which added context and dimension to the work as the music and choreography had already featured in Maria’s Dream. Fiona Evans brought restraint to the role with smooth, tight bourrées and fluid arm movements, although she could develop more use of the upper back. In this iconic solo Evans created a touching fragility and vulnerability in her performance.
The final work, Poème de l’extase, was originally created by John Cranko for Margot Fonteyn in 1970 when Fonteyn was fifty-one. The lush Núñez designs, inspired by Gustav Klimt’s Art Nouveau paintings in Vienna, also provide gestures Cranko incorporated into his choreography. Yu Takayama was elegant as The Lady in a full-length glittering gown against richly ornamental curtaining and decorative borders and screens. A graceful, white-clad Sergey Pevnev as her young lover ably supported her. The Lady’s imagined lovers from her past (Milos Mutavdzic, Daryl Brandwood, Matthew Lehmann, Benjamin Marrett) wrapped in billowing coloured cloaks and appearing naked without them, dance alone and with The Lady, managing the extremely tricky choreography and partnering well. This unrestrained work is not one of Cranko’s finest.
Despite some sparkling moments, “Diamonds” as a program doesn’t quite crystallize. And in a State awash with mineral wealth, it doesn’t adequately mine the rich history and fascinating journey taken by the company over sixty years.
- MARGARET MERCER