After a long wait, Xanthe Geeves, the winner of the Emerging Female Classical Choreographer initiative, finally premiered her new ballet at a season of BodyTorque at Transit Studios in Melbourne last week.
Geeves was picked for the award in 2020. Then the pandemic got in the way. The prize was a residency at the Sydney Opera House, with four professional dancers with whom she could workshop her ideas, and the inclusion of her work in the Australian Ballet's annual season of new choreography. Two years later, she finally received her time in the spotlight.
Her ballet was Pura Vida, a Costa Rican phrase meaning "pure life", "a way of living life to the fullest, regardless of how difficult things might be", as she explains in her program notes. Certainly a concept to embrace in our time. Danced by two couples (the women on pointe) in black and gold costumes which hinted at the baroque origins of the music – Boccherini's buoyant Musica Notturna delle strade de Madrid (which some may remember from the film Master and Commander) – Pura Vida was crisp, technically challenging and infused with joie de vivre.
Geeves shared a program with five other fledgling choreographers, all from within the Australian Ballet's ranks. With most of the works accompanied live on stage by a quintet of various instruments, the essential relationship between the dance and the music was very much part of the pleasure of the program. Four of the musical scores were by local contemporary composers.
Angel/Alien, by Mason Lovegrove, for six dancers, conjured an air of mystery through both its atmospheric mix of strings and glockenspiel and randomly organised movement. In Time, by Jill Ogai, was manifestly an exploration of the "relationship between music and movement" with sweeping, circular arms that were reminiscent, to this viewer, of the hands and arms of a clock.
It was impressive to see the choreographers using quite large numbers of dancers. One Person Watching, by Timothy Coleman, had a cast of seventeen. It was inspired by a love poem by Andre Breton and the music was by Sydney composer May Lyon.
Serena Graham's choreography, along with Geeves's, was the most classical on the program. Her In Excelsius, for 10 dancers, was inspired by the concept of energy – as it applies in science as well as dance. Created to a movement from Ravel's String Quartet in F Major, this has the potential to be expanded to a larger work.
Kids These Days took us clubbing and was an explosion of youthful anger and rebellion, choreographed by Benjamin Garrett to music by local composer Alison Cole.
The Australian Ballet's artistic director David Hallberg opened the evening with a short speech in which he noted that fledgling choreographers, when placing their raw, new, tender creations in front of an audience, expose themselves to a "certain vulnerability". "I've never had the guts to do it," he remarked. This BodyTorque program gives new creators a highly professional and supportive platform in which to grow their wings.
– KAREN VAN ULZEN
The Emerging Female Classical Choreographer initiative was a partnership between Dance Australia, the Sydney Opera House and The Australian Ballet, and generously supported by DanceSurance and Grishko.
All photos above by Edith Knowler.