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.”
Such development of physically demanding new languages is a trademark of MacGregor’s oeuvre. Artistic Director David McAllister sees Wayne as an innovator of his time, one who “takes dance on a different journey even though he works in the ballet idiom”. The ’1929′ in the work’s title refers to the date of Ballets Russes pioneer Sergei Diaghilev‘s death. It will be interesting to see how McGregor combines choreography with music and design to rekindle his spirit.
During this rehearsal there is at times a struggle, a brief falling down – not of the mind but of the body. In these moments the intense music seems to represent an eternity. The dancers’ slender bodies remind me of strokes on an abstract painting, but unlike paint they have the kinetic freedom to manifest a crossing of physical boundaries. In other moving art forms, like film, we experience figures in motion and the illusion of people falling through space due to fancy stuntmen and digital FX. In ballet there is no illusion; the dancers before me are physical poets as much as they are performing athletes of the dance world.
Later the same afternoon Daniel Gaudiello, Remi Wörtmeyer and Ty King-Wall are in the studio. McGregor uses words and phrases like “hyper-extended”, “my rib cage is coming through my shoulder blades” and “bracing the leg” to define the extremity of movement required of these dancers. Their anatomical virtuosity, however, suggests they are trying to move their lungs out through their shoulders. They alter the hips so that their legs carve newly invented passageways through the air. The amount of sweat streaming off them would put most exercise-crazy men to shame. If they were wearing Hypercolor leotards I’d be seeing all sorts of crazy colours.
In both rehearsals for Dyad 1929 we see the elegance of classical ballet combined with a language of movement where the body symbolises evolution. It is fascinating to observe first-hand the toughness and purpose behind ballerinas’ divine costumes and sylph-like ‘music box’ grace. As phonograph inventor Thomas Edison famously quoted, “Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” By the end of the second rehearsal my legs are cramping rather badly on account of the peculiar way they are splayed across the floor. Some of us are only human after all.
Dyad 1929 premieres as part of Concord in Melbourne on 21 August and before opening in Sydney on 11 November
Image: Dana Stephensen in rehearsal for Wayne McGregor’s Dyad 1929. Photography Tegan Glenane
Rockin’