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 »

When you think of interpretive dance, you may associate it with flinging one’s body waywardly around a room or office workers busting out at parties. Just because one feels like one is a cascading wave out at sea, however, doesn’t mean the wave’s about to crash for the audience. It is an art form that requires particular techniques and artistic interpretations to make it effective. When Kate Bush dances in a grassy meadow in Wuthering Heights, she grabs our soul.

Isadora Duncan was a huge influence on interpretive dance. In Duncan technique, the dancer’s feeling originates in the soul. Its ‘locomotive movements’ are based on universal human actions but the apparent freedom of the style is harnessed by rigorous technique. She was greatly influenced by the fluid, natural forms of ancient Greek art and these were often embodied in the style of her dances. While Duncan set out to break away from the formal structures of ballet, she influenced many practitioners, including Frederick Ashton, the founding choreographer of the Royal Ballet, who created a tribute to her in 1975. Read the rest of this entry »

When you hear the term synchronised swimming you may very well think of plastic women doing water aerobics in a swimming pool. They wear silly pegs on their noses and are crowned with evangelical smiles. But at the start of the 20th century, the sport was known as Water Ballet, named after the beautiful underwater dance sequences  that Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman performed in glass tanks at variety theatre shows throughout the UK and the USA.

Kellerman was successful across a number of fields, including swimming, fashion, film (where she often starred as a mermaid), and sport. One of the highlights of her career was replacing Anna Pavlova in The Big Show of 1916 at New York’s hippodrome. She was everything a modern woman should be – self-possessed, independent and active.

Kellermann is also credited with popularising the one piece swimsuit for women, after she was arrested for indecency in 1907. Her crime? Flaunting her bare legs on Revere Beach in Boston. Oh, the scandal!

Her biography is told to great effect in the 1952 MGM musical, The Million Dollar Mermaid, starring actor Esther Williams  (herself a champion swimmer). It belonged to a sub-genre called aquatic musicals whose spectacularly elaborate underwater production numbers paved the way for the fantasy film genre. The Million Dollar Mermaid’s splashy, hyperreal aquacades were choreographed by Busby Berkeley and featured Williams rising out of a  cascading waterfall amidst a backdrop of gold lamé-suited mermaids, all spinning and spiraling like tangoing starfish to create a kaleidoscope of human pattern and movement. Production values included vast plumes of coloured smoke, fearless trapeze acts, and bathing beauties shooshing down waterslides lined with flag-waving and skimpily clad modern day gods.  In another memorable scene, Esther plays a pearl-like mermaid in a white tutu who treats us to a cross between an underwater pole dance and a classical ballet  before retreating to the clandestine chamber of a giant clam shell.