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.
How much character direction do you give the dancers?
Graeme: A lot. Janet is fabulous about getting to the essence of the character, always within the realm of staying true to the choreography. Dancers need that, and so rarely get it.
Janet: There are so many layers to being a person in a ballet on stage. It’s very easy to fall back on cliché – ‘this is the gesture you’d do if you’re sad or happy’, but it has to be natural and as though you are doing it for the first time. We throw things at them, give them options, and they find ways within themselves. The ultimate prize is if they give something back. We don’t want a version of what we’ve said; we want them to open up.
Graeme: Much of The Silver Rose verges on slapstick. It’s a great opportunity to introduce comedy, a much-maligned and often unused aspect of dance. Comedy used to be a bigger part of ballet than it is now. And it’s quite nice in a work like this to have the comic-tragic aspect. Janet and I have always had this theory that if the rehearsal room is filled with laughter and hard work you avoid injuries, pitfalls, depression, insecurities. And you get the full range of the performers’ artistry.
Did you approach the Strauss estate about using his music?
Janet: Ivan did approach the estate and they said there was no way we could use the music.
Graeme: We knew the estate would never allow us to use the music in any way. The Strauss family is notoriously protective of their heritage, but I had absolutely no regrets in not using it. The whole work is such a perfect opera that to fiddle with it in any way would have been absolutely wrong. The best thing that ever happened was that I said, “I think Carl Vine could do it” and because all we were keeping was the original scenario from the von Hofmannsthal story it was important to find a score that was totally different, totally refreshing. Carl was so generous; he gave us his complete body of work and said he would help find the narrative within his compositions.
How and when did designer Roger Kirk come on board?
Graeme: That was interesting, because I was bereft of Kristian Fredrikson. We were in Munich when Kristian died (2005). He hadn’t been available because he was doing The Sleeping Beauty. He was doing a lot and he wasn’t that well. But Roger had been doing such beautiful things and I was very aware of him. It was ironic and wonderful because I had a great need to find somebody else to do the grand works, and people with that knowledge are so rare – people who can give you the full design, décor and costume. We’d worked together in the ‘80s then went our separate ways. This was beautiful because it brought us back together. It was like finding an old friend. And I feel at last I have found a soul mate.
Did your choreography for The Silver Rose allow for the European style?
Graeme: I don’t think so. I was pretty fresh out of Swan Lake and was still doing work with Sydney Dance Company so it was that Murphy-esque thing of wedding a certain classical technique and with contemporary aspects, which is incredibly hard to do. A dancer has to be slightly schizoid to get both styles sitting comfortably. The Bavarian State Ballet is a big company, with a lot of former Eastern Bloc dancers, so the standard is quite extraordinary. But we are just amazed working here with The Australian Ballet. They’ve done so many Murphy-type works, things other companies and dancers find so difficult, which they’ve just nailed.
Janet: We always said The Australian Ballet would do this work beautifully, and in a way we feel it’s come home.
This is an excerpt from The Silver Rose programme by Jane Albert. Jane Albert was deputy arts editor of The Australian newspaper and is a freelance writer.
The Silver Rose opens on Friday 26 February.
Grand…
The Sydney Dance Company performance of Grand in 2005 was grand, indeed.