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Bangarra Dance Theatre
Playhouse, The Arts Centre, Melbourne
September 16, 2011
For the past 20 years, Bangarra's artistic director Stephen Page has led the company from strength to strength, creating powerful dance theatre while encouraging the emergence of other choreographic voices.
One of those choreographers is Elma Kris, creator of About, the first piece in this program. An embodiment of the four winds of the Torres Strait Islands, Kris' ancestral home, the work fuses modern dance moves with occasional glimpses of traditional shapes or gestures.
Unfortunately, the movement lacks dynamic variation and choreographic complexity, and despite assured dancing and an attractive set design (by Jacob Nash), the ancestral stories are lost beneath the glossy surface.
Page’s latest work, ID, is an accomplished, occasionally shocking exploration of what makes up the identity of indigenous Australians today.
It begins with a filmed sequence of an older aboriginal woman and the dancers, who step out of the video and onto the stage. A solo by Daniel Riley McKinley is particularly striking, with sharply isolated wrist to head gestures contrasted against expansive, elastic moves.
Graphic images of a corpse being dismembered and death in custody remind us of the grisly past and present of relations with white Australia, though the violence is balanced by the beauty of totemic dance featuring a fabulously lit set of hollow gum trees.
Snaking through time under the steady gaze of a painted elder, family and culture continue on, represented by the traditional tap-step of the hunched dancers.
ID barely diverges from Page's established style, but it’s no less enjoyable for that.
Originally published in The Age newspaper
Kevin Jackson and Madeleine Eastoe, photo by Jeff Busby
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Romeo & Juliet
Performed by The Australian Ballet
State Theatre, the Arts Centre, Melbourne
September 13, until September 24, 2011
There’s been a huge weight of expectation surrounding this new, full-length Graeme Murphy ballet. His Swan Lake and Nutcracker challenged conventions and won hearts. Now, Murphy tackles Romeo and Juliet, retaining the bones of Shakespeare’s tragic tale and much of the Prokofiev score, but bravely shedding any concrete allusions to time and place.
Storytelling is Murphy’s great strength. Propelled by exceptional performances from the dancers, his choreography embodies the violent delights of young love and the pitiful sight of its untimely end. Through skittish runs en pointe we notice Juliet’s youth, while Romeo’s swooping arabesque turns illustrate his prodigious burst of passion. In the title roles Madeleine Eastoe and Kevin Jackson are terrific, growing naturally from cheeky innocence to their distraught and decisive final moments.
The trajectory of their relationship is flawlessly developed in their pas de deux. From tentative beginnings to intimate embraces, delicately intertwining arm motifs and challenging balances and lifts, Murphy combines virtuosity with structural depth and pathos.
The playfully bawdy physicality of Daniel Gaudiello’s Mercutio and the intensely protective ferocity of Andrew Kylian as Tybalt counterbalance the romantic tenderness, with supporting roles also brilliantly devised and enacted.
Gerard Manion’s attractive sets switch rapidly between exotic locations, beginning with a sword fight in fair Verona and moving on to an Indian bazaar, a Buddhist temple and finally a bed of yellow skulls in the Sahara desert. The unstable setting points to the universal themes of the story, arguably a fantastically visionary contrivance or a clunky colonialist folly. Either way, the time-space shifts seem outrageously oblique in an otherwise linear narrative.
Other dramatic devices read with greater success. Freeze frames allow important characters to stand out in crowded scenes. Adam Bull is the embodiment of death in the newly invented Prince of Darkness role, skulking around the mortals, haunting their steps and influencing their fate.
Akira Isogawa’s divine costumes are equally as fascinating as Murphy’s choreography, both are endowed with beautiful detail and flair. Outfits and action are particularly well matched in the Capulet ballroom, a glamorous and spiky affair, with stiffly splayed fingers and gowns in icy tones.
Damien Cooper’s lighting makes the most of the richly designed space, while Jason Lam’s digital projections add another layer of depth and transformation.
Although this lavish exploration of death-marked love brings out the best in the Australian Ballet, its roving scenes are a gamble that do not always pay off.
First published in The Age newspaper
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