Monthly Archives: January 2010

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

27 January 2010

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Peggy’s call

By Isabel Dunstan

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

25 January 2010

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Women in ballet

By Annie Carroll

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. (more…)

20 January 2010

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Ask Colin: turnout

By Colin Peasley

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

18 January 2010

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When ballet stepped into the sun

By Anna Sutton

Ballet V Fashion, Ballets Russes, Costume

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.

15 January 2010

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The Silver Rose is bloom: a Q&A with designer Roger Kirk

By Lorelei Vashti

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!’ (more…)

13 January 2010

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