• Clare Morehen and guest Keian Langdon in Nils Christe's Short Dialogues. Photo: David Kelly.
    Clare Morehen and guest Keian Langdon in Nils Christe's Short Dialogues. Photo: David Kelly.
  • Meng Ningning and Matthew Lawrence in George Balanchine's Serenade. Photo: David Kelly.
    Meng Ningning and Matthew Lawrence in George Balanchine's Serenade. Photo: David Kelly.
  • Clare Morehen and Emilio Pavan in Nicolo Fonte's Bolero.  Photo: David Kelly.
    Clare Morehen and Emilio Pavan in Nicolo Fonte's Bolero. Photo: David Kelly.
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Queensland Ballet: “Flourish” -
Optus Playhouse, 1 August -

Queensland Ballet’s (QB) use of a single descriptor as the title for their middle of year program is apt. Just as last year’s “Elegance” delivered sophistication and chic, “Flourish” made good on its promise of dash and élan, with no small measure of boldness and audacity thrown into the mix.

Two longer works bookended the program, with the breathtaking simplicity of the opening tableau of Balanchine’s Serenade a beautiful beginning. This striking neo-classical ballet of sweeping ocean-blue tulle skirts and glorious Tchaikovsky score is one of the most performed of his ballets, beginning as a lesson in stagecraft for fledgling students in 1934 and evolving continuously until just before Balanchine’s death in 1983.

Because of its corps de ballet of seventeen women, Serenade becomes a celebration of the feminine as well as an expression of music through movement, which continuously ebbs and flows with the score, punctuated by wonderfully dramatic moments.

The challenge for the dancers is to understand the style, keeping the balance between the crisp articulation of the steps and the requisite soft feminine quality of malleable upper bodies and soft “Balanchine” arms and hands.

Apart from some lack of uniformity, the dancers on the whole achieved this, with the movement very big, but light and precise. Meng Ningning and Matthew Lawrence along with Katherine Rooke and Emilio Pavan were all on top of the very introspective style, drawing the audience into their world. However, the standout performance came from Lina Kim who captivated with an exquisitely light and crystalline clear performance. (It was a pity however, about the poor quality of the Tchaikovsky recording, accustomed, as we have become, to live music.)

In stark contrast was Nicolo Fonte’s Bolero, the concluding work. Here, a contemporary movement vocabulary, which incorporates the ballet aesthetic with spiralling off balance extensions on pointe and complex partnering, works both with and against the pulsating rhythm of the Ravel score, to its rousing conclusion.

Ten dancers in blood red leotards and unitards move individually in and out of the space with fast, extended movement accented by moments of held stillness, finally joining together in couples as the work reaches its climax.

Here there was the occasional difficulty with both visual and musical unity, although Clare Morehen (with Emilio Pavan, as the principal couple) stood out with a new assuredness and power.

Visually the work dazzles. Irregularly spaced flat ‘pillars’ of corrugated metal, which conceal and reveal the dancers, rise singly as the work progresses, finally revealing a stage open to the wings, bare, except for a blue-lit cyclorama. The red of the costumes against the blue of the cyc and shimmering metal of the columns give the work an edgy brilliance, while the final image of a female dancer (Morehen) held high in the folds of a blood red drop makes a striking conclusion.

The Esmeralda Grand Pas de Deux with Teri Crilly and Guest Artist Dmitry Zagrebin was the classical jewel in the middle of the program. Crilly exuded a jaunty vivacity that was underpinned by an unfaltering steely technique. Zagrebin showed the provenance of his training (Bolshoi Ballet Academy) with a solo of dazzling turns and beaten jumps that sizzled with clarity and precision.

However, the undoubted highlight of the evening was Nils Christe’s Short Dialogues, created on, and subsequently gifted to QB in 2011. Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto underpins a breathtaking sense of relentless movement as three couples in turn emerge and withdraw into the black shadows upstage, in serial pas de deux of lifting, sweeping and entwining movements. Morehen and Keian Langdon (Guest Artist), reprising their roles, were the standout couple. However, Kim and Lawrence, and Ningning (also reprising) and Alexander Idaszak (Guest Artist) also mesmerised; the liquid quality of their movement captured by shafts of creamy light, which penetrated the smoky blackness.

- DENISE RICHARDSON


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