After the knock-out performance of Divergence, The Australian Ballet was invited back to So You Think You Can Dance to present a pas de deux from Nutcracker – The Story of Clara on the grand finale. Artistic Director David McAllister blogs about the experience.
Well, Sunday dawned and as can happen on a designated day off, I woke up early and filled with purpose to get domestic. With all of the appliances working for me (dishwasher, washing machine and vacuum with me attached) I was a whirlwind of Domestos, Windex and elbow grease to tidy up my Sydney flat. By 11:30am I had done a trip to the Supermarket (a Sunday morning ritual) and raced around the QVB and surrounding shops finding little gifts for Nutcracker opening night, and was on the train bound for Redfern and a day rubbing shoulders with the So You Think You Can Dance crew. Read the rest of this entry »
Principal ballerina Marilyn Jones photographed by Darryl Smythe in 1962. Ms Jones will return to The Australian Ballet’s stages to perform the role of Clara the Elder in Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara, playing in Sydney from 28 April – 18 May and Melbourne from 5-18 June
Principal Artist Yosvani Ramos talks about the particular pleasures of Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara
Being with English National Ballet for nine years, I did The Nutcracker every Christmas for almost a decade. It’s a big tradition in England, and even though I did two different productions in the course of those nine years, they were both pretty traditional. That’s why I’m so excited about performing in Graeme Murphy’s version. It’s completely different to any of the Nutcrackers I’ve danced before. Instead of dancing the standard Sugar Plum Prince, in this version I’m taking on the role of the Doctor/Solider/Lover. It’s fantastic, because the doctor is a very normal person, very human, but then you become the Soldier/Lover, which is much more balletic. There’s such a contrast.
Janet [Vernon] and Graeme really want the doctor to walk and act like a normal person. Funnily enough, I find this really hard because I’m used to walking on stage like a dancer – I will get it before the show!
The other thing that I love about Graeme’s production is the Australian flavour and of course the beautiful pas de deuxs. I’m suffering a bit at the moment because there’s some really tricky lifts, but rehearsals with Graeme and Janet have been great. They know what they want, and they know how to get it from you, but always in the nicest way so you want to give them your best. I’m really looking forward to the shows next week. It’s been hard rehearsing Nutcracker during the day and performing Firebird and other legends at night, but now Firebird has closed, I say bring on Nuts!
Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara opens in Sydney on 28 April and plays at the Opera House until 18 May. It then goes to Melbourne from 5-18 June
When George Balanchine was a child he would cry, “Mama, Mama, caviar, caviar!” But Russian caviar cost ten rubles a pound so poor George had to wait. Tanaquil Le Clercq, Balanchine’s former wife, remembers his favourite snack: the caviar sandwich. Take one-half of an untoasted Thomas’ English Muffin, cover it generously with sweet butter, say about a quarter of an inch, spread a layer of excellent black caviar over the butter, at least one inch thick, and cover with the other half of the muffin. “If you can’t afford lots of caviar,” he said, “better to forget the whole thing.”
Sir Frederick Ashton would often meet with Balanchine and Le Clercq in New York and share good food and fond stories. Tanaquil recorded Ashton’s favourite recipes, which varied from New York-style vichysoisse, to avocado and walnut sandwiches. Apparently he could have been famous for his beefsteak pudding if it had not been for ballet. To Sir Fred, choreography and cooking require a similar technical aesthetic. “A good ballet is only a good ballet,” he said, “when all the ingredients are right and, like a cake, unless there is enough baking powder it doesn’t rise.”
With Beyoncé Knowles’ smash hit Single Ladies drawing inspiration from the legendary Bob Fosse, there’s no better time to revisit one of the strangest autobiographies ever committed to film. Fosse’s All That Jazz follows the last days his barely-veiled stand-in, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), as he attempts to put on a major Broadway show while paying the price of cigarettes, amphetamines, and women.
Fosse happily mocks himself and his choreographic trademarks like splayed fingers, staccato movements, and an obsession with sexuality – especially during one hilariously smutty number. Other performances, however, are integrated casually into Gideon’s life story: sparring with his daughter as they improvise, or arguing with his ex-wife during her rehearsals.
Gideon’s inner landscape is depicted through a Felliniesque backstage, where he flirts with a cryptic blonde named Angelique (Jessica Lange) – who seems to be the Angel of Death. The fantasy sequences increase as Gideon’s health fails, reaching a spectacular peak as he directs his own hospital song-and-dance hallucinations during open heart surgery.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, All That Jazz is both audacious and indulgent, self-aggrandising and self-loathing in equal measure. Fosse once said that “I’ll have to be dead to find out if I’m any good.” Perhaps that’s why he sent out a fictional doppelganger to take the bullet for him.
The Australian Ballet’s Head of Millinery, Vicki Car, investigates the curious case of the Nutcracker costumes
After weeks of sorting, cleaning, re-making, repairing, stretching up, padding down and what feels like endless, endless re-labelling, Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker has gone. Packed into touring crates and headed for Sydney.
It’s been quite an undertaking. A lot of what made Kristian Fredrikson’s designs so beautifully rich and detailed were the little bits and pieces that he had collected over the years on his travels. He would bring in a piece of antique jet or lace and it would find its way onto a coat or a hat.
Maura Edmond trawls YouTube for the best ballet-themed music videos
Pointe. It’s perhaps the only thing Beyonce can’t do. But if pop stars can’t do ballet, then how do you represent the classic music video themes of innocence, lost innocence, and repressed female hysteria ? The answer, hire professionals:
Hot off the presses, The Presets’ If I Know You looks like a musical directed by Gus Van Sant (or Greg Araki or Larry Clark). An awkward adolescent suburbanite pirouettes and jetes across the streets of LA, collecting kindred spirits for a tribal beach party.
While not strictly ‘music videos’, post-punk cult favourites The Fall worked with a who’s-who of avant-garde 80s London to produce some of the strangest pop-ballet collaborations. Hail the New Puritan (1985-1986) was an experimental documentary by British video artist Charles Atlas, featuring Mark E. Smith and wife Brix, performance artist Leigh Bowery, and this cheeky Michael Clark ballet.
Directed by 80s music video pioneer David Mallet, Queen’s I Want To Break Free opens with a cross-dressing parody of Coronation Street, with Freddie Mercury as a bored (moustached) housewife vacuuming the carpet in a vinyl mini skirt. It ends with Freddie playing Vaslav Nijinsky (sans moustache) in a performance of Afternoon of a Faun with the Royal Ballet. Seventy years after the premiere of Faun it seemed Nijinsky was still scandalising audiences; the clip was banned on MTV until shortly before Freddie’s death in 1991.
Maura Edmond is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, writing her thesis on music videos
Sergei Diaghilev’s direct influence on contemporary dance is undeniable – but there are also echoes of Diaghilev’s style, ambition, influences, and ego in some of today’s most intriguing artists.
Andy Warhol
Diaghilev refused to be constrained to the world of ballet, just as Andy Warhol’s career began in advertising, moved into painting, and soon involved almost every art practice imaginable. Both men acted as large-scale creative masterminds, though Diaghilev was known by the classier ‘impresario’ instead; it’s easy to see Diaghilev’s choreographer, Mikhail Fokine, as occupying the same difficult position as Paul Morrissey, the director who actually directed films labelled with titles like Andy Warhol’s Blood for Dracula. There’s a reason Warhol’s space was nicknamed ‘The Factory’, after all, and while Warhol and Diaghilev possessed a powerful vision, it was other artists who often fulfilled it.
Behind Ballet is the blog of The Australian
Ballet. Looking at dance through the prism of
fashion, music, art and literature, we unravel
the stories behind our productions and mine
ballet’s juicy past to find the new in the old and
the old in the new.
