It is Monday morning and I am sitting in on rehearsals for Wayne McGregor‘s Dyad 1929. The experience is like watching creatures learn how to walk on another planet. I have always been fascinated with dance en pointe, that uncompromising rising of the feet in contrast with the soft pink satin and delicate ribbons of the shoes. Kinetics and gravity appear to be ungoverned by the laws of physics and there is a noticeable absence of real-world referents. Most of the time.
The dancers are still workshopping their roles so the main stylistic difference between them is in the way they learn new steps. Dana Stephensen tears through the air like she is turning from cat to human. Juliet Burnett possesses the steely supremacy of a soloist. And Lana Jones is mesmerising to watch as she relates McGregor’s unique style to her own body with intense focus. As Stephenson sees it, McGregor is very helpful with this process. “He is good at articulating both through his own demonstrations and physically helping us to isolate our bodies in the correct order to achieve the movements. At times it feels like a new language because the movement is so textural.” (more…)
Touring is an important part of ballet education, not just for the dancers, but for young audiences too. 
A cowboy fires his gun at the ground near another’s feet and demands: “Dance!” It’s a cliché that might be familiar more thanks to the Bugs Bunny cartoons that parodied it than the old westerns that inspired it. In the realm of folktales, however, being forced to dance is more likely to be the result of a magic spell than the threat of gunplay.
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