THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET
The Show Room, Arts Centre Melbourne
Reviewed November 1, 2024
The Australian Ballet’s Bodytorque season is dedicated to nurturing emerging choreographers in a range of dance genres. It is a program that selects six young choreographers to invest and invent along their path to developing their own craft. They receive careful mentorship and their work is showcased in a series of public performances and danced by members of the company.The results are often striking, original and always interesting.
Each season is prompted by a "provocation" for the choreographers to work with. In 2024, the theme New World Record was offered. Each work handled this in strikingly divergent ways. The program was structured so that each choreographer was able to speak to their works and give background to their process. Phenomenal contemporary choreographer and Australian Ballet (AB) resident choreographer, Stephanie Lake, mentored each maker through the creation of the pieces. During performances Lake took on the role of compere and interviewer: digging into the decisions that go into creating a new work.
First on the program was Champing at the bit by AB dancer and freshly minted choreographer, Adam Elmes. Funny, posy and slightly terrifying, his work unpacked some of the more alarming aspects of dance culture and presented these as a kind of horse race/hunger games contest where only the most beautiful, alluring and tenacious survive. There were laugh-out-loud moments as dancers pranced, cavorted and posed while being shrieked at by a dance coach/teacher (Elmes himself assumed a blood curdling vocal quality as he yowled his encouragement/abuse from the auditorium). The movement language is fanciful, performatively sexy and very over-the-top. This was a great start.
In delicious contrast, Yuiko Masukawa’s work Standing on a Rising Wave is pure classicism. Accompanied by a terrific score by Alisdair Macindoe, the choreography is all dynamism and attack. Waves of movement create explosions of momentum. Crisp phrases resolve into elongated poses. The work reminds me of Balanchine and Forsythe – very technical and showy but with a gentler edge. The patterning of the piece has pairings, groups and everything happening simultaneously, but connected. There are relays and chains showing how one dancer is linked with the others. Masukawa uses her six dancers masterfully to fill the space and draw attention to their technical feats. Costuming is elegantly simple – various coloured tops and leotards paired with contrasting boy-leg dance shorts looked fresh and showed the dancers’ lines well. This is a very accomplished and exciting work.
Masukawa is an independent choreographer and winner of the 2023 Telstra Emerging Choreographer award. She has created works in a range of styles, showing her versatility and ability to make on a variety of dancers, from the experimental through to contemporary and classical ballet.
The next three works on the program were interesting explorations of quite original ideas. In his I'm so glad you made me, Benjamin Garrett explored AI in the relationship space, making a piece that is both intimate and alienating. This is especially the case given that in his two characters, we see a hesitant but compelled female approaching a human/not human object of desire who is simultaneously sensual and repellent. To explain this more fully, the object of desire is based on a Patricia Piccinini artwork that is composed of renditions of human sexual organs within the confines of a frame or art canvas. Both dancers have their own movement language that is quite separate but which melds at moments of connection. The energy in the piece is quite combative.
Jill Ogai has made a piece, Scratched Up, based on the notion of her three dancers being trapped inside a vinyl record, moving around the tracks of its grooves until the pattern is upended by the flipping of the record to side B. This is a quirky trope and Ogai creates a string of irregular non-patterns from something you would expect to be very predictable. Added to this, is the presence of composer Peter Wilson onstage. He plays his especially commissioned piece stationed at a piano on a moveable platform that is pushed about the space several times by the three dancers, thereby reconfiguring it. Costuming by fellow dancer Grace Carroll is effective. The tops, fashioned from what looks like shredded knitting, are very individual and textual.
Erin O’Rouke is a contemporary choreographer and former winner of the Telstra Emerging Choreographer award. For Bodytorque 2024, she has devised a work called TUG, revealing the push and pull of commencing the pursuit of a goal and finally achieving it. Four women in white strive to make their way from a start to a finish line, along a narrow white cat-walk. They push, then fall back, try other means of progressing, fail and strive again. The movement language is loose and driven by the beat of the score. There are also pulsing moments. The women channel rage through menacing facial expressions. The sense is that the race they are undertaking is Sisyphean and will never be finished.
To bring the program to a close, AB dancer Serena Graham takes us back into a furious fever of classical dance. Her Pangea Pax is a high energy take on the impossibility of a harmonious world. This is a rather wonderful piece that has seven dancers (interestingly four women and two men) representing each of the seven continents. They feud and war and seek supremacy; never able to act for the greater good of all. The work is set to the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony – suitably grand and momentous. No credit for costuming is given but the simple, colourful short togas looked dramatic and moved well. The dancers are brilliant as they display their craft and embody the various characters of the god-like continents. This piece looked to me as though it could have been an excerpt from a longer work. It is very "finished".
I loved this iteration of Bodytorque and relished experiencing these six very talented choreographers. It was amazing and a real privilege to be in such an intimate space and so close to the dancers – relishing each nuance of movement, face and costume.
- SUSAN BENDALL
(All photos are by Brodie James.)