The Australian Ballet: Bodytorque.DNA -
State Theatre, Melbourne, 17 June -
“Bodytorque” was a fresh and thoroughly enjoyable programme, brimming with ideas. It’s about time Melbourne audiences got to experience these talented young choreographers who are clearly passionate about their craft. “Bodytorque” featured the work of five choreographers, all (with the exception of Tim Harbour) largely new to Melbourne ballet audiences. Even if the pieces were not uniformly successfully realised, the evening was of a consistently high standard, with two definite highlights in Joshua Consandine’s I cannot know and Tim Harbour’s Extro.
Consandine’s I cannot know was undoubtedly impressive, both conceptually and in terms of execution. It is a piece which goes beyond the sheer physicality of movement to touch on the mystery of who we are. Everything contributes to this – the solitary girl (Dana Stephenson) wandering around in a field of stars, the cosmic backdrop, the glittering costumes contrasting with the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ dress of the girl, the spins and leaps of the choreography, suggestive of spinning particles or orbs. The cast was uniformly superb with the dancers managing to convey a sense of the ungraspable in their cool classical perfection and yet also reach out to the girl in all her awkward human vulnerability.
Extro, led with commitment by Leanne Stojmenov, is unashamedly abstract and relentlessly virtuosic. It is also unfailingly musical and displays Tim Harbour’s fluid choreographic language. His ability to move large groups of dancers with sustained interest is the mark of an accomplished choreographer, able to tackle complexity. On the dancers’ part it was a display of high-octane energy combined with the sheer joy of movement.
Richard Cilli’s Corpus Callosum is an excerpt from a proposed longer work on the human brain, this segment dealing specifically with the brain’s left hemisphere. Starting and ending in silence, the group of five dancers flows into multiple group lifts interrupted by walking and sudden disruptions, forming and reforming as one dancer after another breaks out of the whole to be reabsorbed. The context helps to make sense of this piece with its clinical feel and its accent very much on bodies making patterns rather than on people. The left brain rules!
Control by Richard House also plays with dancing to silence. It is an interesting concept to see if the musicality of the movement can compensate for the absence of sound and create its own silent music (incidentally one of Anna Pavlova’s ideas). While short segments can work it is difficult to see how anything lengthy could sustain the focus of an audience. The first part of Control is very much about control of self, of other, of movement. But as the duets progress, with partners substituting each other, the movements become looser, softer and progressively more abandoned. Fluorescent stripes of the lighting are very effective, as is the moment when the lights take in the auditorium, momentarily undermining the divide between audience and stage.
Alice Topp’s Same Vein is something different, relying heavily on Brendan Harwood’s very fine video projections of shapes morphing into and growing out of other shapes, from the abstract to amoeba-like forms, to the human body, and human and animal heads. A female dancer is finally revealed in silhouette holding antlers, which evoke a primitive rite. The opening is very promising as the heartbeat morphs into sensuous music and a duet. The choreography plays with intimacy and warmth rather than patterns. However the final duet for two men gets lost against the projections and struggles to support the development of the piece leaving it with no choreographic resolution.
Was DNA a part of the show? And was it important to know that that was the theme for the choreography? Both yes and no. The pieces stood on their own merit – possibly only Corpus Callosum (in any case an excerpt) benefitted from some context. But the theme clearly was an inspiration to the choreographers and challenged them into producing some accomplished and inspired work which compared very favourably with the recent “Chroma”.
The orchestra was excellent under the baton of Vanessa Scammell and there was some very interesting music used by the choreographers, not least works by Lentz and Górecki.
- Irina Kuzminsky