Principal Flautist Libby Pring has been playing the flute for the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra (the Australian Ballet’s Sydney orchestra) for 20 years. She spoke to Jessica Thompson about how playing music for ballet keeps her on her toes.

How does playing for ballet differ from playing for opera?
With opera we can hear the singers, and so although we do rely on the conductor we also rely on our ears and listen to what the singer’s doing. With ballet we rely very much on the conductor because we can’t actually see the dancers, and we really have to play according to the tempo the dancers want or that they can cope with. You have to trust the conductor and be ready for something like a sudden change of tempo – if a dancer takes off!

So the tempo can vary depending on who’s dancing?
Yes, very much. Nicolette [Fraillon, Music Director and Chief Conductor] always warns us “this is the faster team” or “this is a slower team”. If it’s a bit slower one night then a bit faster the next you just know it’s a different set of dancers.

Do you ever get tired of playing second fiddle, so to speak, to the dancing?
No, not really. We enjoy the ballet repertoire. It’s different from the opera repertoire in that it really is its own music – we’re not accompanying a singer. It’s more similar to the symphonic repertoire in a way. 
You should play with some sense of inspiration; I think that’s very important for us and also very important for the dancers – if they hear an orchestra really enjoying what they’re doing I’m sure that helps them feel inspired. Read the rest of this entry »

Simon Milne is a film director, painter and long-time lover of dance. In the early ‘80s he directed a video clip for New Wave legends Duran Duran – beloved choreographer Graeme Murphy lent a hand. Simon took time to blog about his experience:

Russell Mulcahy (who went on to direct the Highlander films) had a long association with Duran Duran and was scheduled to direct the Union of the Snake video. In August 1983 he was in Sydney having discussions about his first feature film, Razorback. Duran Duran was there at the same time, putting the finishing touches to their third album. Union of the Snake was to be the first single released from that eagerly awaited album.

Russell conceived the video along with the band and their two managers. It was to be the first of a trilogy involving a lost document and subterranean worlds (the influence of Indiana Jones and Mad Max was still strong at the time). Russell met with Graeme Murphy, talked about the concept and the subterranean world, and engaged with him on the project.

At the last minute Russell had to pull out due to pre-production commitments on Razorback. I had a call from EMI, Duran Duran’s record company. Would I fly to Australia and direct a video that was scheduled to start shooting later that week?

I knew the band well – I had filmed them in concert and assisted Russell on their Rio video the previous year. I jumped on a plane and four days later I was filming the clip.

I met Graeme Murphy on the set and he had been well-briefed. “Lots of jumps, leaps, quick moves,” he had been told, and he delivered beautifully. The lizard-like creature was one of Russell’s ideas, and echoes of it can be seen in the later video for Wild Boys.

I was struck by those same echoes as I watched the character of Kostchei in Graeme Murphy’s recent production of Firebird for The Australian Ballet. Good ideas get worked and re-worked, I guess.

I have always enjoyed dance, but it was a Balanchine/Robbins double bill many years ago at Covent Garden that opened my eyes up to its unique possibilities. I also love Degas’ work – especially the paintings involving movement (the horse and ballet pictures). My hobby is oil painting which allows me to explore my own love of dance.

You can see Simon Milne’s paintings online at his website, and more at RedBubble.

The day that Michael Jackson died, Germaine Greer, writing in the Guardian, compared him to Nijinsky and Nureyev, pointing not just to his skill, but also to his extraordinary innovation as a choreographer, which had impacted the dance world forever.

Already since his death, the demand for impersonators has skyrocketed, but they’re not the only ones to have been imitating Jackson over the years. Mimicry of his style can be found from Bollywood films and Filipino prisons, to Saturday Night Live skits and Justin Timberlake’s entire oeuvre.

But a less obvious – and perhaps more powerful – influence is the one he’s had on choreographers and dancers over the past 30 years; it seems impossible to imagine a dancer who might not be, in some way, inspired by Jackson’s originality and innovation.

Many of us grew up dancing to Jackson in the backyard. From the early disco beat of Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough to the tough street punch of Beat It and Bad, we learnt to move by mimicking what we saw him do on Rage or Video Hits.

We practised the Moonwalk of course, but he put his signature on many other remarkable moves too: the awesome toe stand, the syncopated shoulder pop, the gravity-defying lean of Smooth Criminal (we didn’t know that he wore special shoes for that). And later on there were the global dance moves he reappropriated and made entirely his own in Black and White.

He was a master of the synchronised group dance, such as the zombie monster mash of Thriller, or 1992’s elaborate Egyptian-themed clip for Remember the Time.

But it’s when he’s dancing on his own, as shown here at the Motown 25th Anniversary Special from 1983, that his innovative style and innate talent for interpretation is most powerful.

Music Director Nicolette Fraillon had long been fascinated by how Graeme Murphy managed to take Nutcracker, music so quintessentially Russian, with such strongly embedded associations, and turn it into an uniquely Australian story. She finally had a chance to quiz him about what he did.

Nicolette: You’ve tackled two of the big Tchaikovsky ballets so far. Is there a particular affinity for Tchaikovsky?
Graeme: I really just lucked out. I would have liked to have done the trifecta and add The Sleeping Beauty to the mix but doing two is just a joy. From a point of view of music, it’s like the dream come true – those two works, for me, spell out dance; spell out movement.

Nutcracker, as we know, was written to a very specific brief. So how do you then approach something that – brilliant though it is – was quite a proscription work from a music point of view?
It’s strange, because with Swan Lake I thought the story was very much something that was written into the score, likewise with Nutcracker. But Nutcracker is sort of a no-story. There isn’t a real development of character. It’s quite abstract; almost like the journey through adolescence, which is the Hoffmann concept. So I really didn’t feel daunted too much by Nutcracker because it’s thin. I know it makes sense in terms of how it was conceived, but to me it makes no sense in terms of story.

It’s true that Tchaikovsky was heading towards abstract ballet and the study of the psychological where a story wasn’t important. But there are the really strong associations of things like the Sugar Plum Fairy; those fairytale elements – was it easy to let all of that go, or do you think about the public who expect a certain kind of Nutcracker?
It’s always terrifying, and Nutcracker more than any other work because there’s a whole audience who are wedded to a type of Nutcracker, which is children, escapism, a candy-cane world, that incredible ethnic journey. I did get a bit of hate mail out of Nutcracker.
Read the rest of this entry »