The Australian Ballet : Bodytorque.Technique

The Australian Ballet :  "Bodytorque.Technique" -
Sydney Theatre, 31 October -

Dance devotees look forward to “Bodytorque,” the Australian Ballet’s (AB) annual choreographic season showcasing up-and-coming (mostly in-house) dance creators. It is here you hope to see the beginnings of new choreographic voices, often shaped and coloured by first-time collaborations with dancers and designers.

Technique is this year’s theme. As the AB’s artistic director David McAllister points out in the program notes, for centuries technique has inspired choreographers to find “new and innovative ways to stretch the dancer’s ability and create new works based on the classical dance form.”

He is right. Over the past 150 years technique and innovation have produced extraordinarily exciting and stimulating styles from the somewhat sadomasochistic and convoluted tie between creator and dancer. Think Filippo Taglioni, Marius Petipa, George Balanchine and more recently William Forsythe, Eduoard Lock, Wayne McGregor and David Dawson.

The "Bodytorque.Technique" program's choreographers show no such innovation. They do, however, show craftsmanship. The six creators all know how to join the dots, rehearse the dots and present the dots. But no-one took the dots further finding “new and innovative ways to stretch the dancer’s ability.” It was all disappointingly derivative.

“Does technique really divide us, define us or just refine us?” asks Alice Topp in Tinted Windows. A good dinner table topic, but nowhere to be seen in her overly romantic, skillfully swooping, double duet reminiscent of Kenneth Macmillan’s Manon. Halania Hills attempts the abstract with Mode.L, but Frederick Ashton did it over sixty years ago in Symphonic Variations. The saving grace of Ty King-Wall’s The Art of War – a confusion of choreographic, musical and structural ideas – is the integrity and consummate presence of Chengwu Guo. Ben Stuart-Carberry’s Polymorphia offers some intriguing juxtapositions, beautiful port de bras and lighting plays reminiscent of a tranquilised Marco Goecke.

Richard House’s Finding the Calm is unusual and courageous. Here is a personal vision delivered through stylistic tableaux showing a recognisable and intuitive design skill with imagery, narrative development and structure. Although using familiar design devices (raising and lowering lighting rigs), his sometimes strange decisions were, by and large, successful.

Maturity will out. Joshua Consandine’s In-Finite, is a work of humour, skill and structure. Though not innovative, it is good. Designer Cate Consandine’s three long, glassy pendants set the piece in its own space where we see five dancers interpreting five facets of an individual: deliberating, debating, struggling and co-operating – the process of building technique. Here, finally, we see a relationship between the choreographer and his dancers, mutually delivering and playing with the ideas of the work.

I love classical ballet form. I have seen and done a lot of it. Now that we are well into a new century, I do not believe that classical choreography can continue sequencing and structuring dots to pretty tunes. Practitioners must take risks, push for new ways to explore and present this timeless technique. That no longer means higher legs and more acrobatic lifts. It means individually reflective, provocative and sensitive responses to the world around us. I look forward to seeing new seasons of "Bodytorque" take up this real challenge and foster and mentor this approach in up-and-coming creators.

- Emma Sandall