The Australian Ballet: “20:21” -
State Theatre, Arts Centre, Melbourne, 27 August -
Invigorating and energised, the current Australian Ballet triple bill “20:21” is a wonderful storm of precision, athleticism, and a display of dancers working their craft to its limits in homage to the modern and post-modern.
Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements was first up and the earliest of the works. Choreographed in 1972, it feels like a distillation of Balanchine's “leotard” oeuvre, an assemblage of much that makes up his choreographic signature. Angular, quirky and cheeky, the ballet charges along without pause. This work is loaded with patterning and formations and relies on a crisp exactness of execution. The company more than rose to the challenge in its first staging by them. Stylistically, Symphony in Three Movements references various dance styles through classical technique, occasionally assuming oriental phrases, other times feeling jazzy but always bounded by a strong classicism. The Stravinsky score is challenging and frenetic and pulls in every direction, adding to the energy and drive of the dancing. This was the only ballet on the program that was accompanied by Orchestra Victoria.
Twyler Tharp's 1986 work In the Upper Room closed the program. Another New York sensibility, another legend of twentieth century dance and another abstract work - but what a contrast. Driving through and driven by a looping, swirling Philip Glass score, this is another work that is mega-charged with energy and attack. It has been likened to the Boston Marathon in its demand for stamina and its references to athletic as well as purely balletic moves but perhaps more accurately suggests the far-ranging physicality of the dancers' craft.
The dance features two “crews”, not necessarily in battle but strikingly contrasting in movement style, intruding and taking over from one another, swarming and yielding. One crew (the stompers) executes its physical prowess through limbering, bouncing, loose interpretations of boxing, aerobics and “old school” exercise regimes. Dressed in loose pants and shirts, the stompers blitz the stage in sneakered feet. The crew of ballet dancers is strong and dynamic, slick and commanding. The ballet dancers break through the stompers, execute sequences and vacate the space for further waves of action to move in. The two groups co-exist in various formations, each creating its own micro patterning within the overall texture.
As the ballet propels forward, dancers from both groups shed layers of loose clothing as if all along they have been working up to something even more gruelling. Rhythmically In the Upper Room is complex and the dance works by winding and unwinding phrases and sections and dividing up the counts. This gives a sense of familiarity to movement and pattern but at the same time destabilises it. Lighting and a haze effect work well to give the impression of the dance bursting out from nowhere.
Bridging these two works was Filigree and Shadow, a new piece by Australian Ballet resident choreographer, Tim Harbour. Not to be outdone by the masters, it delivered its own strain of high- energy abstraction and worked beautifully in this program. The opening night audience adored every minute. Like Balanchine and Tharp, Harbour gestures to various dance styles in this work and I noticed movements reminiscent of jazz and commercial dance with a bit of a street feel while being firmly anchored in a contemporary ballet modality. It is intense and compressed like a tightly held spring. The use of a male-weighted cast further emphasises a play with gravity that draws the movement earthward.
In the making process, speech cadences were used to inform the complex and uneven rhythms of the dance phrases rather than the score. Harbour applied the digitised score by German composers 48nord only sparingly in the rehearsal process. There is a feeling of embattlement in the piece perhaps provoked by the coexistence rather than symbiosis of score and choreography and this adds to its power.
Pointing back to the second half of the twentieth century and ever forward, the choice of works for this program was brilliant. I loved the full-bore mass onslaught of dance, music and physicality that was delivered with such assurance and precision.
- SUSAN BENDALL
Above - Filigree and Shadow. Photo: Jeff Busby.
Below: click on thumbnails for captions and credits.