Queensland Ballet
Bespoke
Talbot Theatre
31 July
Now in its eighth year, Queensland Ballet’s annual Bespoke program has again affirmed its commitment to new, challenging work with three world premieres, all highly collaborative, and including, after last year’s initiative, another First Nations work.
Nhamgan Ngali Nyin, we all see you, created by Bidjara woman Yolande Brown, opened the program. A former senior artist and choreographer with Bangarra Dance Theatre, (Dark Emu 2018, Imprint 2013), Brown now has a solid free-lance career as writer, director and choreographer. This is her first work for QB.
Nhamgan Ngali Nyin is a response to the world’s largest sand island, K’gari, visited by Brown and the QB dancers on the invitation of Fred Leone, a Butchulla man and one of the island’s cultural custodians. His encouragement to see the island through his eyes led to this visually rich work, which, according to Brown, also invites reflection on what it means to see and be seen by Country.
A large silk scrim billows overhead, undulating as it is raised, lowered, or dropped on one side to form a cyc. Evocatively lit (projections by Angharad Gladding), in turn evoking the earth, sky or water, it is a simple but spellbinding design element underpinning the work.
Guest artist (and Assistant Choreographer) Tyrel Dulvarie appears as a shapeshifter and guide, anchoring the work with mesmerisingly pliant movement. He leads the audience through this layered world, joined by the company dancers clad in simple, sand-coloured costumes (design Zoe Griffiths). Their grounded movement ebbs and flows – arcing, then settling – embodying the landscape’s shifting energies. The Bangarra influence is evident in the movement construct, although sometimes with a contemporary styled refinement. The work is beautifully supported by the evocative score of Leon Rodgers and Fred Leone, along with Glenn Hughes’ lighting design.
Amelia Waller, a former soloist with Queensland Ballet and now a teacher and choreographer with the QB Academy, crafted Curious Beings, the middle work of the program. Inspired by Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (and later the film adaptation) that delves into themes of identity, artificial creation, and what it means to be human, Waller fashions a world unmoored from conventional time and place. Exploring human behaviour through the eyes of beings without past experience or memory prompts the question, left unanswered here, about what truly shapes our actions and relationships.
In collaboration with Brisbane’s Dead Puppet Society, these beings are animated by both puppetry and movement, blurring the lines between both. Dancers from QB Young Artists Program feature. Three are scientists, dressed in dark blue, and blending into the blue lit space (design again by Hughes), as with remarkable dexterity, they manipulate a black puppet marked with a white, skeletal-like pattern. Upstage, the nine ensemble dancers precisely mirror the puppet’s eerily life-like movement, echoing the repetitive, percussive beat of the score, and capturing the movement’s quality of robotic detachment. Costumes by Griffiths are reflective of those seen in the movie – steam punk meeting fantasy – adding further context.
Canadian, Robert Binet has previously created works for companies including The National Ballet of Canada, The Royal Ballet, and New York City Ballet. His work, Newborn Giants, made an exquisite conclusion to the program. Created in collaboration with blind artist Devon Healey, whose richly poetic spoken text is woven with the Max Richter score, as well as the amplified sounds of the dancers’ breath and movement, it aims to bring the perceptions of blindness to the forefront of our collective senses.
Healey calls her practice Immersive Descriptive Audio (IDA), but Binet insists, it is not a description of performance, but itself a performance. Choreographic intentions and the dancers’ physical experience of the movement are intertwined by Healey with her own experience of the movement and her blindness to create a poetic text. The result is hypnotic.
On a deliberately underlit stage (design Ben Hughes) the work begins in silence, bar the amplified sound of the dancers’ breath and their footwork. A neo-classical aesthetic is created with the dancers in various cream leotard combinations, and the women on pointe. The movement also reflects this aesthetic, with some lovely moments from the cast of thirteen dancers – Neneka Yoshida spinning a needle-sharp pirouette series en manage, and Chiara Gonzalez with Vito Bernasconi, both a delight.
Healey’s lusciously articulated text adds another layer to the performance, echoing the movement and thereby underscoring the visual. But with our auditory senses stimulated, it is the hypnotic cadence of Healey’s voice that by the work’s end, is truly compelling.
Bespoke was originally intended to challenge audiences as well as dancers with the new and innovative – to invite discussion, argument even, and thereby invigorate and revitalise. Therefore, it is tremendous that Artistic Director Ivan Gil-Ortega is looking for more “boundary-pushing art-making” for Bespoke 2026, with invitations to creatives across all disciplines as well as choreographers to pitch their ideas. This broad reach promises much for next year’s program.
Denise Richardson