In June 2009 the international dance community mourned the death of modern choreographer Pina Bausch. Her work combined dance with theatrical methods of performance using an investigation of reality as its basis. Dancing Dreams (Tanztraume), screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year, is an uplifting exploration of the process behind performing her innovative and challenging work.

In 2007 directors Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann documented the year-long rehearsal period as a group of 40 teenagers recreated Bausch’s 1978 work Kontakthof. Against the backdrop of an industrial Wuppertal skyline, teachers Jo-Ann Endicott and Benedict Billiet help the students come out of their shells in order to intimately explore how people treat one another. The result is, as Billiet says, A Kontakthof not for adults, but for teenagers. The work is about difficult questions with no easy answers, and the dancers work hard to deliver those answers with certainty. All the feelings of tenderness and aggression that teenagers already experience are explored to maximum effect in the work. The results can be awkward (such as a shy striptease), or brutal (being slapped by bullies), but they are always truthful. Read the rest of this entry »

Ballet on film can sometimes appear flat and disappointing when it is the result of recording merely for posterity or archival purposes. It loses its shiny, reflective surfaces and even suffer the dreadfully wooden atmosphere of the worst type of amateur theatre production. Somewhere in the space between camera and stage, its immediacy can be lost in translation. Combine multiple cameras with the vision of a great cinematographer and the results are  often electrifying, capturing the emotion in motion that we bear witness to as audience members.

In Robert Altman’s film The Company (2003), a faux documentary that follows the lives of members of The Joffrey Ballet, the dance performances show the capacity of the film medium to do ballet justice.

The opening sequence is Tensile Involvement, a decidedly modern dance work that was first staged in New York in 1953. The piece features dancers interacting with a fantastically elaborate network of coloured ribbons amidst a science-fiction atmosphere. Choreographer Alwin Nikolais also composed the sound and designed costumes and sets. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past decade, more and more films have been transformed into musical theatre: Hairspray, Legally Blonde, The Full Monty, and even an off-Broadway version of the cult horror movie Evil Dead.

It’s less common, however, for a hit film to inspire a successful ballet, as did Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. The tragic story of an unfinished outsider, attempting to find a place within suburbia while unable to touch anything within it, was adapted by Matthew Bourne – most famous for his smash-hit all-male version of Swan Lake.

In a 2005 interview, Bourne explained how it took years to convince filmmakers to give permission for this re-telling of Edward’s story. Tim Burton then saw a number of Bourne’s works, and finally said: “Take it and do your thing with it.”

This ‘thing’ turned out to be a crowd-pleasing demonstration of Christmas cheese, dancing topiary, and a new ending that Edward’s original screenwriter approved as being better than the original. Of course, Edward’s tale comes with some particular choreographic challenges. (For your information: he lifts his partners with his arms, but never his razor-sharp hands.)

Visitors to the current Tim Burton extravaganza at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image will be reminded that it’s not only his animated musicals like The Nightmare Before Christmas or The Corpse Bride that contain dancing. Just think of the ghost-possessed calypso moves in Beetlejuice; the Joker merrily waltzing as Batman fights for his life in Batman; or even the Mad Hatter’s jig in his recent Alice In Wonderland. (Also for your information: it’s called the Futterwacken.) Read the rest of this entry »