Queensland Ballet
Strings – A Triple Bill
Playhouse, QPAC
May 22
Strings is a contemporary ballet triple bill originally created for Ballett Zürich in 2015. Each of the works features a distinct choreographic style, set to an atmospheric string score. For the Queensland Ballet program Goyo Montero’s Chacona has replaced the original William Forsythe work, joining Edward Clug’s Chamber Minds and Christian Spuck’s The Seventh Blue in a program that, according to Artistic Director Ivan Gil-Ortega, supports his commitment to bringing bold, exciting, and important artists to Queensland Ballet. This triple bill, of a distinctly European flavour, therefore, showcases choreographers who, he believes, are both challenging and expanding the future of classical ballet by testing its limits.
Any misgivings that reality might not live up to the hype were dispelled early. Strings is a carefully curated program; a degustation meal of contemporary ballet with each work a tasty morsel – thematically and stylistically different but rooted clearly in the classical canon.
It was quite the perfect evening of dance – compelling from the outset, with both musical and emotional appeal. The works are each around 20 minutes long, separated by two intervals, and accompanied live by Camerata - Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra, along with pianists Roger Cui and Muyu Liu, both of QB. The musicians are integral to the performance, their on-stage interaction with the dancers providing the occasional light-hearted moment.
Edward Clug’s witty Chamber Minds opens the program. It has a grey box setting (Marko Japeli) with shimmering elastic-like lines stretched across and above the stage on curtain up that are later, individually or collectively raised, lowered, angled, or aligned through the side panels left and right. It’s a captivating start.
Clug is known for his minimalist, but deceptively complex movement that explores the interlocking and intertwining of performers’ limbs, and Chamber Minds is no exception. Here, to a score by Milko Lazar, he uses that construct to playfully satirise both human behaviour and ballet’s traditions. The dancers, arms and legs often stiffly angular, are sometimes pushed or pulled into different positions by one another creating moments of humour, as well as surprising beauty and a vulnerability that is distinctly human.
The Seventh Blue, choreographed by Christian Spuck takes inspiration from Schubert’s string quartet Death and the Maiden, interwoven with music by György Kurtág and textures of atmospheric whispering sounds. Camerata begins seated upstage centre, later moving downstage left.
This is a mesmerising but quite relentless work, where rather simple but articulate movements, casual entrances and exits, and a myriad of partnering combinations by seven couples, are used to evoke Schubert’s notion of mortality, and the inevitability of death for all of us. A lovely, repeated image supporting this notion has the men lowering their woman to the floor, apparently supposed to be mist covered and “grave-like”. Unfortunately, there was no mist evident in this performance, nevertheless, The Seventh Blue was my favourite of the program.
The final work, Goyo Montero’s Chacona, is to a version of Bach’s Chaconne, passed from solo violin to guitar, and finally piano, all played on stage. It opens with four parallel vertical lines of dancers from up to downstage that progressively merge and then separate, all strikingly lit by Nicolas Fischtel’s design.
The work has an almost marathon-like urgency, requiring both precision and stamina from the dancers. The clever use of rapid-fire canon throughout, often involving dynamic arm patterning, is visually especially striking, while in a tokenistic nod to classical ballet, some of the women are en pointe.
According to Montero, this is a work that needs to be danced on the edge – the dancers driven to the “tip of falling”, by the relentless intensity of the movement. This, in the main, they achieved and subsequent performances can only heighten.
Costumes in all three works are various leotard and tight or pant combinations in shades of blue or black, giving the dancers nowhere to hide. Nor do they need to. With all three works, casting is across the QB ranks, from Artist to Principal, and being ensemble pieces, every dancer counts. Commitment by all was palpable, however Lucy Green and Edison Manuel were most notable in The Seventh Blue, with Green also shining in Chamber Minds, along with the effervescent Sophie Zoricic.
This season only runs to Saturday. Whether a newcomer to ballet or a die-hard fan, it’s not to be missed.
– Denise Richardson