27 January 2010
By Jessica Thomson
filed under Flashback
Just months after colour television burst onto the scene in 1975, The Australian Ballet joined forces with ABC TV and invited British choreographer Gillian Lynne to create a ballet especially for television.
“I’ve been very secretive about this show in England,” Lynne told The Age in 1976, a few weeks before the ballet screened in May. “It is such a good idea, but I didn’t want it to be pinched by some other television company.”
Lynne – now synonymous with juggernauts Cats and The Phantom of the Opera – could hardly have chosen more appropriate subject matter for the new medium. Fool on the Hill wove together the colourful characters and psychedelic landscapes of Beatles songs, which were especially arranged and orchestrated for the ballet by John Lanchbery.
The synopsis (according to the programme for the stage version, which Lynne staged for the company in 1976) was as follows: “The Fool sits on his hill lonely and remote, unable to communicate with life and especially with people. His alter ego materialises to jolt the Fool out of his lethargy and tumbles him off the hill and into a series of adventures.”
The Fool (Kelvin Coe – who at one point even dons tap shoes in rather a Gene Kelly moment) travels from Strawberry Fields to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds via Blue Jay Way, meeting characters including Michelle (Ai-Gul Gaisina), Eleanor Rigby (Marilyn Jones), Lucy (tiny Lucette Aldous, of course) and Sergeant Pepper (Robert Helpmann – a natural fit) along the way. This who’s-who of Australian dance were supported by an ensemble of plasticine porters, rocking horses and a rising sun – to name a few.
* Synopsis from the program from www.australiadancing.org
Jessica Thomson is a performing arts writer and has written for many publications including Dance Australia.
Image: Artists of The Australian Ballet in Fools on a Hill’. Photography by Jeff Busby
25 January 2010
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under Coppélia, Peggy
Swanilda, the leading lady in the fairytale favourite Coppélia, is traditionally a breakthrough role for a dancer on the rise. She’s fierce, funny, and does ‘the robot’ pretty convincingly. When Swanilda’s fiancé Franz falls in love with a mysterious dancing doll, she doesn’t let him off lightly. Behind closed doors, Swanilda stealthily changes places with the doll and, with stiff, jerky movements, fools everyone. Coppélia was Dame Peggy van Praagh’s all-time favourite ballet and in The Australian Ballet’s 1990 souvenir programme, she explained where her love of performing Swanilda began.
“Ever since the early forties, Coppélia seems to have been a part of my life. I did not expect to dance Swanilda when I first joined the Sadler’s Wells (now Royal) Ballet in 1941. I was not even the understudy for this role. In June 1942, London was subjected to severe air raids. One of the company’s ballerinas, Mary Honer, was at the Café de Paris when it received a direct hit. She was lucky to escape serious injury but suffered severe shock and was unable to dance for several weeks.
“Dame Ninette de Valois, the company’s artistic director, telephoned to inform me that I was to dance Swanilda in Oxford in four days’ time and that I should come immediately to rehearse the role. Robert Helpmann, who was to partner me as Franz, could attend but one rehearsal of the pas de deux. The rest of the company was on tour and I was unable to rehearse with them. So on an evening in June 1942 it was a very nervous Swanilda that took the stage. Later I grew to enjoy the role which I danced many times before I left the company in 1946 to become Ballet Mistress of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet.”
The Australian Ballet will perform Coppélia in Melbourne and Sydney. Subscription packages are still available in both cities
Image: Peggy van Praagh as Swanilda in Coppelia
20 January 2010
By Annie Carroll
filed under From the studio
Unlike so many evolving art forms, the roots of classical ballet technique remain deep and unwavering. As writing, music, and the visual arts have moved forward with each social progression, classical ballet can at times seem a significant yet somewhat static reminder of the past. However ballet and dance offer a greater opportunity to perceive the progress of women than any other art form. Ever since August Bournonville created the otherworldly Sylph in La Sylphide (1836), audiences have imagined the ballerina as a gauzy and delicate fantasy. Much like the carefully disarranged gardens of the Romantic era, she appeared in sweet disorder. What muscles she had were somehow hidden within a veil. How could someone so slight possess such graceful strength? In almost every classical and romantic ballet, it is the ballerina who needs the ‘prince’ to rescue her, to redeem her, to set her free. From Aurora’s need for an awakening kiss, to Manon’s desperate last few clutches at her lover, it is the vulnerability of women that links these enduring ballets.
Hurtle forward to 2009 to The Australian Ballet’s recent Concord season, in which Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929 proved that in modern choreography, the depiction of masculinity and femininity in dance is almost a fluid concept. Defined muscles draw shapes at speed. The gender boundaries blur and the stage thrives with the power of the human body. And in Sydney Dance Company’s latest work Mercury by Kenneth Kvarnstrom, the women are independent travellers, secure in their fate without the sworn love of a man. The modern, tangled relationships between man and woman are portrayed and tender emotions are conjured underneath the stage lights. All of this while the women twist, manipulate, and lift the men with inimitable power and poise. The sheer absence of fragility in the women is undeniable; the fleeting sylph, from whom all ballerinas were born, has left the theatre. Mercury and Dyad 1929 are the newest avatars in the evolution of women’s role on the dance stage. There is no sign of Giselle in Kylian’s Petite Mort, not a flutter of Odette in Forsythe’s In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated. Ballerinas have evolved into lithe and fierce creatures. Perhaps this evolution could be said to have begun with a certain hedonistic Russian by the name of George Balanchine. Read the rest of this entry »
18 January 2010
By Colin Peasley
filed under Ask Colin
I am 14 years old and a very keen ballet dancer. Over the last year I have really worked a lot on strengthening and improving different elements of my dancing. I have been fairly successful and have seen a very big improvement in myself as a dancer. One thing that I have had trouble with, though, is my turnout. Could you offer me any advice on how to achieve better turnout?
Beth
Dear Beth,
Turnout is governed by individual anatomy. Your range of turnout can be improved but only by a small amount. I suggest you see a dance physiotherapist and have your range of turnout checked and ask for an exercise regime to help you improve it. Please remember, though, that although turnout is essential for a classical ballet technique, how you utilise it is more important than how much you have.
Best wishes,
Colin
You can email your ballet questions to Colin at hello@behindballet.com
Image: Lucinda Dunn. Photography Jim McFarlane
15 January 2010
By Anna Sutton
filed under Ballets Russes, Costume, Fashion
When the Ballets Russes boarded Le Train Bleu (The Blue Train) in 1924, the quintessentially modern Coco Chanel was the perfect choice as costumier. Her simple, spirited designs provided a carefree invocation of seaside, active chic at a time when sportswear was a relatively new category of clothing. Le Train’s cast of wayfaring sporting champions (including a golfer inspired by the Princes of Wales) and ladies of leisure spun a seaside pantomime out of a gymnastic-classical ballet tightrope. Their costumes – black tank bathing tops, striped wool jerseys, culottes and muted tunic dresses accessorised with bathing caps like nubile petals – reflected the spirit of a libertarian age. The influence of Coco Chanel’s designs in her penultimate production for Russes are echoed today in Chanel’s 2010 Resort collection.
Le Train Bleu takes place amidst the French Riviera circa 1920s, an era where populist visions of a modernist utopia gave rise to the cult of the body beautiful. Choreographer Bronislava Nijinska satirised this shift towards shallower lifestyles using Chanel’s sporting ensembles as a fashion conduit. Indeed legend has it that Coco was credited with making suntans fashionable in Europe, following a run-in with the sun while yachting on the Riviera.
Le Train was a definitively Russes collaboration, with Jean Cocteau as librettist and Pablo Picasso fulfilling the rather specific role of curtain painter. Jean Cocteau envisaged the ballet as a series of vignettes filled with all the things you might see on the front of a postcard sent from France circa 1924 (jets falling out of the sky, maillots, chorus lines, movie cameras). When I think of Le Train Bleu I imagine rosy women and men with shoulders like boulders racing seaside together, trying to catch the first wave of salacious gossip as it crashes and breaks onto the shore…
In 2009 Karl Lagerfield kept the Ballet-Fashion dream alive by designing the costume for English National Ballet’s Elena Glurdjidze’s performance of The Dying Swan.
13 January 2010
By Lorelei Vashti
filed under Costume, The Silver Rose
The Silver Rose, 2010’s highly-anticipated curtain-raiser, is a lavish ballet that exudes opulence and style. We spoke to Tony award-winning set and costume designer Roger Kirk, whose previous work includes musicals and opera such as Dusty, The Boy from Oz and Opera Australia’s Manon, about what it’s like to bring the ballet home to Melbourne.
Is this the first time you’ve worked with Graeme Murphy?
No, I did a ballet with Graeme for The Australian Ballet called Meander, but that was about 20 years ago. So it had been a while.
What is the background to your involvement in The Silver Rose?
I’d actually just done a production of the opera Der Rosenkavalier for the Wellington Festival a few years earlier, so I was already familiar with the story. Graeme came over and explained that he wanted to set this ballet at the turn of the century, so he already had that sort of image of what he wanted to do. And after a little bit of discussion I threw a few ideas at him, and that’s sort of how it kicked it off.
What was your main inspiration for the set design?
About six months before Graeme approached me to do the ballet, I had been to Hungary and I’d stayed at the Four Seasons Gresham Palace Hotel in Budapest. It was an Art Nouveau palace that had been converted into a hotel. The entrance foyer had this glass roof over it and I went: ‘Wow! This is a fabulous set!’ And so when Graeme said ‘Art Nouveau’, I said, ‘That’s my inspiration!’ Read the rest of this entry »
11 January 2010
By Martyn Pedler
filed under Film
Welcome to the next in our series of ‘Divertissements‘, in which pop-culture critic Martyn Pedler explore ballet’s strange cameo role in film and TV.
French-born, Melbourne-raised director Philippe Mora is responsible for many of Australia’s infamous cult movies of the 1970s and 1980s. But did you know he’s responsible for one of the most memorable ballet sequences ever to appear on film?
Mora’s films often exhibited a theatrical flair. His first feature film, for example, was the “Bretchian musical” Trouble in Molopolis, filmed during the height of London bohemia. Later, he made The Return of Captain Invincible, starring an alcoholic superhero who sings and dances while resisting temptation.
When Mora got his hands on the second sequel of horror franchise The Howling, however, he transformed it into a uniquely Australian satire. (There’s even a cameo by Dame Edna Everage.) Howling III: The Marsupials’ 1987 ballet scene goes like this:
Olga, a ballerina defecting from Russia (played by Dagmar Bláhová), is in her dressing room at Sydney’s Opera House. She says: “I don’t think I should dance tonight. I feel … strange.” Later, rehearsing on stage, she pirouettes – and with each rotation, she sprouts more hair, her face elongating into a snout, until she’s a fully-fledged werewolf in a pretty red dress. Her fellow dancers start screaming, but the male lead, oblivious, jumps into her waiting maw.
It’s a scene that even the New York Times review had to grudgingly describe as “spiffy”.
8 January 2010
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under From the studio, Music
In the late 1940s, mathematician Rudolf Benesh caught his wife, Joan, a dancer with Sadler’s Wells, struggling to remember and record her steps. Later at work in his office, he jotted down a few lines meant to represent someone sitting at a desk, then fetched a colleague and asked for a second opinion. Soon an entire system of written symbols was created to represent all ballet’s possible movement.
Those who practice this system are known as choreologists. There are only a handful of them in the world, but The Australian Ballet has been at the forefront of documenting ballet since its inception. Our current Choreologist, Mark Kay, took time to chat about his work.
What is choreology?
Well, that’s a big question. Everyone thinks I write the ballets – which is not correct at all. Choreology is a form of notation where you write all the steps down and it’s something I picked up at The Australian Ballet School. I went through an injury spate and so I took this on. I was encouraged by the staff there because they thought I had the potential. I went to London, did a choreology course and my dancing career came to an abrupt halt early in my life. But I got this job and have been doing choreology ever since.
For the dance companies who don’t have a choreologist, how do they record dance?
Video. A lot of people think that video is the most reliable form of recording dance. I mean, it has its advantages, but it has its disadvantages as well. For example, if you focus on only a few dancers, there’ll be people dancing on the other parts of the stage and you won’t be able to see what they’re doing. The major classical ballet companies in the world have a choreologist. Then there’s The Royal Ballet and they have two or three on staff. Read the rest of this entry »
6 January 2010
By Vicki Car
filed under Costume, Swan Lake
I have discovered that swans use a lot of glitter. And a very particular sort of glitter at that: very, very fine bright white glitter that sticks to everything and can be found in all sorts of interesting places at the end of the day.
We refurbished Swan Lake recently for the Perth season and although the show is in quite good condition, there’s no getting away from the fact that it has been on tour every year since it was made in 2002. The headdresses are very stylised, with two pieces of thermoplastic shaped to represent a wing and a tail. The girls pin them into their hair either side of their French rolls and originally they were painted with white opalescent paint and finished off with glitter at the base of each piece. It was only when we resprayed one did we realise how brown they were! I guess it’s down to the stage lighting that we had no idea; during the performances they looked beautiful. Close up however the poor swans were looking a little worse for wear, not quite as sparkly as they had been and rather like they had been swimming in a murky pond.
Kate my fearless and trusty assistant had no idea what l was letting her in for when we talked about bringing them up to scratch. For days we were lost in a haze of glitter, spray paint and PVA glue like drag queens at the Mardi Gras. But finally they were done, resprayed, reglittered and packed into their boxes for their journey to Perth.
Ready, as Betty Pounder used to say on opening nights, to “Sparkle, Darlings”.
Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake is available to purchase on DVD from The Australian Ballet Shop
4 January 2010
By Colin Peasley
filed under Ask Colin
Dear Colin
It is my dream to join The Australian Ballet, but my Mum says that I should have some plans for when my dance career finishes. My question is how long is the average dancer’s career and what do dancers do when they retire? Also is it possible to study while dancing professionally?
Lenore
Bravo Mum!
I believe that education is the most important detail that should be considered when planning a professional career in dance. All full-time schools now insist on students gaining an academic education at the same time they study dance.
Dance is physical, so the duration of a career is dependent on the physical well-being of the individual. Just as all sports people come to a time when their body will no longer react the way they need it to, the same applies to dancers. This is usually around the late thirties. However, this is not the main reason to have a good education. The reasons people cannot or do not continue to dance are varied and it is only sensible to be prepared.
A large number of the dancers in The Australian Ballet are in the midst of or just completing further education courses. So yes it is possible, in fact it is actively encouraged by our management. This broadens the dancers’ opportunities when they do decide to leave. Ex-Australian Ballet dancers have become lawyers, health professionals, IT technicians, travel consultants, actors, designers and a few are even dance teachers!
Best,
Colin
