It took 13 years for the Australian Ballet (AB) to makes its New York City return, but the company arranged a one-week season as part of the 50th-anniversary – and it returned in style. Right after New York City Ballet closed its spring season, the AB moved into the elegant 2700-seat David H. Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater) at Lincoln Center – an ideal dance venue. It is more spacious and modern than City Center, where the company performed in 1999, and creates a better audience connection than the more vast Metropolitan Opera House, where the company presented Giselle and Spartacus in 1990.
The New York performances opened on Tuesday June 12 with a mixed bill, performed twice, and continued (after a day off on Thursday) with four performances of Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake. There were plenty of eager and curious ballet-goers queuing up for the AB. The Saturday evening Swan Lake attracted quite a full house, which responded with great enthusiasm to Murphy’s very different take on the familiar ballet.
David McAllister rightly wanted to show New York to repertory that was distinctly the AB’s own. The choices of Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 and Stephen Page’s Warumuk—in the dark night – both recent works created on the AB’s dancers – gave the opening program a sense of occasion. To launch the evening, which was (perhaps needlessly) given the overall title “Infinity,” McAllister assembled Luminous, a nearly hour-long sampler of five excerpts, interspersed with historical video footage. One could understand the intention – to celebrate how far the company has come over 50 years, and to provide a sampling of touchstone repertory works. But some of the narration was ponderous and over-emphatic about how unlikely it was for ballet to take root in a nation so focused on sun, sand and sport.
Once the video segments focused on the actual history of the company – and each of its artistic directors - things livened up. Three classical pas de deux – La Favorita (for which little information, and no date, was given) and familiar highlights from Giselle and Don Quixote – were unevenly danced, but Amber Scott and Adam Bull lent gravitas and eloquence to the simple (if not terribly original) fluidity of an excerpt from Stephen Baynes’ Molto Vivace, receiving an enthusiastic ovation. The pas de deux and 9th movement of Stanton Welch’s Divergence, looked over-emphatic out of context, with the hectic ensemble resembling wind-up dolls.
McGregor’s Dyad 1929 is a handsomely presented but irritatingly open-ended work. The dozen dancers performed it with zest and precision, but his spastic contortions and slippery partnering don’t fill space or add up to anything beyond their incessant quirkiness. The costumes are unflattering, and rather than reach a conclusion, the ballet ends arbitrarily.
Stephen Page’s very recent Bangarra-AB collaboration contained much primal beauty and effective imagery, even if its pace was plodding. The two troupes’ combined forces blended very effectively and the pliant, grounded movement and striking designs made a distinctive, evocative impact.
New York has seen a steady stream of Swan Lakes of late, but not even Matthew Bourne’s celebrated version dispensed with the central white/black dual roles portrayed by a single dancer. Murphy, of course, jettisoned this concept, replacing Odile with Odette’s rival for her new husband’s love, the manipulative Baroness. He certainly had the courage of his convictions (and the aid of a superlative designer) in taking Swan Lake into new territory, but his movement invention is often lacking in musical insight and classical expansiveness. Too many lifts and tricky maneuvers call attention to themselves. I saw the first of two alternating casts. Madeleine Eastoe, Kevin Jackson and Lucinda Dunn gave very committed performances; Eastoe’s vulnerability and despair in Act Two were poignantly palpable. (Scott, Bull and Lana Jones headed the other cast.)
Among New York’s daily dance critics, New York Times’ Alastair Macaulay found McGregor’s work “the best of the ballets of his I have seen,” praising a solo for Daniel Gaudiello, but felt that Page’s work “took ideas from aboriginal culture and turned them into standard primitive formulas.” In the Financial Times, Apollinaire Scherr wrote, “The dancers lacked rapport with the music – a New York essential, given Balanchine. In these showy excerpts, they seemed both stolid and vague.”
Robert Johnson, in the Newark Star-Ledger, found the dancers “attractive and impressively schooled,” but was less than enthusiastic about the mixed repertory, and wrote of Murphy’s work: “Lyricism is entirely absent, however, with profiled figures clenched and drooping from the waist when they should breathe, expand and float. The duets are larded with acrobatic stunts.” Leigh Witchel of the New York Post, reviewing Swan Lake, wrote, “The presence of the swans feels more like an obligation than a metaphor, and when Murphy riffs on the traditional version by putting its steps to different music, it only reminds us how much more inventive and poetic the original is.” Macaulay wrote, “I can’t help feeling that this Swan Lake, new in 2002, is an exercise in opportunism. It cashes in on the Diana story, which is fair game, but it also cashes in on Tchaikovsky’s score without ever opening its heart to the production.”
- SUSAN REITER
Read coryphee Dana Stephenson's first hand account of being on tour in New York! Coming soon!