Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) dance students will be finishing the year with a flourish in more ways than one. “Flourish” is the name of WAAPA’s final dance season for 2015 and features new works by Sue Healey, Rhiannon Newton and Sue Peacock, as well as a Petipa classic.
WAAPA students have recently returned from premiering Peacock’s work, Endless Possibility, at the World Dance Alliance in Singapore. Peacock explains that “… the title [of Endless Possibility] says it all… a bit similar to the way that any day can progress from the sublime to the ridiculous in an instant, with no apparent reason.”
From WAAPA alumnus, Rhiannon Newton, comes Circle Dance, a work that brings together students’ individual movement histories, desires and interests in a single, sustained group dance. “The idea for this work comes out of the last piece I made, says Newton. “For a while my work has been dealing with repetition, and more and more I have been focusing on repetition as a generative force that is constantly transforming and giving rise to new movements. I realised the circle is a formation that people have been doing this in for a really long time, and is perhaps where and how a lot of dance was once made, organically, without a director or choreographer. The students in second year are coming from all sorts of different backgrounds, there are six exchange students from the US and Taiwan, and I also remember my own second year at WAAPA being quite a defining and transformative time for my former small town-girl self. Given this I thought it would be really wonderful to produce a dance that is some sort of charting of how their individual differences and histories meet in a group dance.”
Sue Healey’s work will close the show. Experimenting with form and perception, Healey creates dance for diverse spaces; theatres, specific sites and the camera.
WAAPA’s classical dancers will perform Petipa’s Paquita, remounted by Andries Weidemann. Paquita is a two act ballet that tells the story of Paquita. Rescued by gypsies from a massacre as a child, years later, Paquita returns to her home in the Spanish valley town of Sargossa, while travelling and dancing with the gypsy band, and is subsequently reunited with her family.
“Flourish” plays the Geoff Gibbs Theatre 14-21 November. Bookings/more info: www.waapa.ecu.au