16 March 2010
By Kitty Walker
filed under Ballet V Fashion, The Silver Rose
As a general rule of thumb
The Australian Ballet does not take part in gigs off the main stage. So, when the team at
Harper’s Bazaar asked us to perform a sneak-peek excerpt from
The Silver Rose at Government House for the opening night of the
L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival we thought long and we thought hard about it.
The idea was that Edward Coutts Davidson wanted to recreate his Wonderland fashion spread from the April issue of Harper’s. To say yes would be a huge undertaking, but after working with Edward and the team at the end of last year we decided to break with tradition and take a bit of a gamble.
Twenty-six of our gorgeous dancers along with Dana Stephensen and Amy Harris (who were not performing but were our silverly-clad representatives at the media call) traipsed up St Kilda Road to the grounds of Government House. While those performing rehearsed in the ballroom, carefully plotting how best to avoid a grand battement in Premier John Brumby’s lap, Dana and Amy donned their Roger Kirk-designed costumes from The Silver Rose, and oh how we laughed when the photographers begged to know “Ladies! Who are you dressed by today?”
The girls made a pact to remain en pointe for the entire shoot in front of a swarm of fashion photographers when they caught a glimpse of the ridiculous height of the models resplendent in heels that could kill. Read the rest of this entry »
9 March 2010
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under The Silver Rose
Canberra-born Rachel Rawlins has been applauded worldwide for her devastatingly beautiful portrayals of iconic roles: Juliet, Odette, and Princess Aurora, to name just a few. In The Silver Rose Rachel takes to the stage as the Marschallin, a beautiful, strong and deeply complex character. We spoke to Rachel about travel, ballet and nighties.
What is your favourite art form other than ballet?
I appreciate and admire so many art forms. I think if I had to choose it would be music because, for me, without it there is no dance.
What makes you feel at home?
My family, friends, and Australia.
Who is your all time favourite choreographer, and why?
All the Australian ones I’ve worked with, of course! I love Cranko and Macmillan’s works. I also love Jiří Kylián’s works because they are so musical; he portrays emotion without narrative perfectly. He is also so clever with comedy, which is always so hard to get right.
What’s your favourite costume to wear on stage?
I like nighties, and they appear in so many ballets. Odette in Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake starts in a beautiful one; it’s so flattering and soft. In Graeme’s Nutcracker – The Story of Clara, Clara wears a simple night dress, and the kimono she wears for just a moment in the third act is exquisite. I like to dance in them because I feel comfortable and the fabric floats so elegantly. The costume department has made me so many exceptional costumes – the incredible detail and volume of what is created for the company is completely overwhelming. In The Silver Rose as the Marschallin I wear this dress which is like a shimmering golden Klimt painting. The costumes are so important to how I feel on the stage and I am so lucky that they are all so special. Read the rest of this entry »
22 February 2010
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under From the studio, The Silver Rose
In just four days the curtain will rise on The Silver Rose. With an all-Australian creative team, Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon took this quintessentially European story and tailored it for the ballet stage. We chatted to the master choreographers about how this extraordinarily lavish ballet got off the ground, and found its way home.
Where did the idea for The Silver Rose come from and was it a work you had been thinking about for a while?
Graeme: It’s something that had been in our minds for some time. Der Rosenkavalier was a particular favourite; Janet and I have always loved it musically. We loved the roles, and I have a thing for themes about age, love, loss, moving on and being left.
Ivan Liska, [director of the Bavarian State Ballet] asked us in 2004 to do a work. He wanted something for the family for the Christmas premiere season and The Silver Rose surfaced. Ironically Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier had premiered in the same theatre in Munich. That was something that linked the ballet and the opera.
Janet: It was very short notice. We didn’t think we would be able to do it because we were working on Hua Mulan, Graeme had just finished choreographing Grand, and we’d just taken Swan Lake to London with The Australian Ballet.
What was it about the characters that appealed to you in a ballet context?
Graeme: They’re all large – they all read big. You have the mature, pensive, distraught, self-obsessed, slightly older Marschallin; and by contrast the total innocence of the fresh young flower [Sophie] and the puppy-love of adolescent youth [Octavian], which is really nice for a dance character. Then there’s the Baron who is a sympathetic buffoon, whose love is really based around desire, sex and lust. You just knew the actions for these incredibly intricate relationships could be explored in solos, duos and quartets.
Janet: And underneath those four principals there are the soloists (who are the paparazzi), and the entourage of hair dresser, make-up artist and couturier introduce interesting subplots as well. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
18 December 2009
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under The Silver Rose
The Silver Rose tells the tale of the Marschallin, a celebrated actress who is facing the passing of time and the fading of her youth. The Marschallin’s lover Octavian finds himself unexpectedly enraptured by Sophie, a younger woman. While watching her lover drift into the arms of another, the Marschallin remains resilient but finds herself in the shadow of young love. Graeme Murphy choreographed the role of the Marschallin on Sherelle Charge for the Bavarian State Ballet. Now Sherelle is teaching principal ballerinas of The Australian Ballet the ways of this complex character.
The Marschallin is a beautiful, strong character. Do you think she might go down as one of those roles dancers dream to perform?
Absolutely. It’s a character that gives the ballerina a chance to delve deeply into her emotional side. What’s so enjoyable for the dancer performing the Marschallin is that she has this dual personality. She shows an external strength but, internally, she’s very fragile. She’s really struggling with her personal life and how she’s aging. It’s an issue you see every day in Hollywood, with women filling their face full of Botox and trying to do everything to stop themselves from getting old. Time is something that affects the Marschallin deeply, and not just physically. She’s had a history of many men and she’s realising this is finishing. It’s not her personal look that’s changing – it’s her whole life.
When the Marschallin is on stage, you get a real sense of her past. What kind of history did you create for her?
I think you craft a history for every role you perform on stage. But in The Silver Rose you really have the chance to see that she has a story to tell. In the initial scene she is having a nightmare about her past lovers. You can see that she was always very dependent on her youth and beauty. Read the rest of this entry »
16 September 2009
By Isabel Dunstan
filed under 2010, The Silver Rose
Set in Vienna in the early 1900s, Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose is a lavishly told story of romantic intrigue. Composer Carl Vine, a long-time collaborator of Murphy’s, revisited his personal orchestral collection to compile the score. The Silver Rose premiered in Munich in 2005 and next year Australian audiences will encounter the passionate work when The Australian Ballet performs it in four capital cities. We chatted to Carl Vine about how you go about creating a score for one of the world’s favourite choreographers.
The Silver Rose is made up of several individual scores. Can you explain the process you went through pulling them all together?
The scores in The Silver Rose were written over a period of 20 years, yet they show many common threads in style and content. Once I had thoroughly familiarised myself with the original scenario it was a matter of scanning through my back catalogue for full movements of works of suitable orchestral scale that had dramatic impact suitable for each section of action. Some transitions between sections didn’t work but others did, which I think was largely due to the convincing logic of the storyline, as well as this inherent stylistic consistency. That still left plenty of exciting juxtapositions and the simple task of choosing the most exciting ones for the final cut. Read the rest of this entry »
