Re-creating Two Feet: Meryl Tankard
The J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice is proud to collaborate with Dr. Maggie Tonkin to present Re-creating Two Feet: Meryl Tankard.
Acclaimed Australian choreographer Meryl Tankard created her tour de force solo work Two Feet in 1988. Composed of the two intertwined narratives of the great Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva, and Tankard’s fictionalized girlhood self Mepsie, the work is a Kunstler-drama of a ballerina’s development. Spessivtzeva, a renowned Giselle, was an obsessively perfectionist practitioner of her art, a tragic figure who had her first breakdown while touring Australia with the Ballets Russes in the 1930s, and who spent the last decades of her life in a mental hospital in the USA. Her story is paralleled with Mepsie’s hilarious, touching mission to become a ballerina, no matter what the cost.
For the 2019 Adelaide Festival of Arts, Tankard is re-creating this role for the virtuoso Russian ballerina and principal of the Royal Ballet, Natalia Osipova, widely acclaimed as the greatest contemporary Giselle. In an illuminating exploration of her creative process, Tankard will show a never before seen film* of her own performance of Two Feet, shot in the mid-1990s, and discuss the challenges of re-creating this deeply personal exploration of the obsessive nature of the artform for another dancer whose dance history is so different to her own.
Film 1 hour - Q&A 1 hour Drinks and nibbles are included in the ticket price.
*Editing of the film has been made possible through funding from the Jim Bettison and Helen James Award.
Pictured: Meryl Tankard in Two Feet. Photo Regis Lansac.
