{Featuring Eugene von Guérard's painting, Lake Bullen Merri 1858, and a photograph of Igor Yousskevitch in costume for Les Cent Baisers by Max Dupain, Home 1937.}
{Featuring Eugene von Guérard's painting, The Basin Banks near Camperdown 1857, and a photograph of Serge Lifar in costume for Icare, c. 1930s.}
{Featuring Eugene von Guérard's painting, Spring in the valley of the Mitta Mitta with the Bogong Ranges 1866, and a photograph of Henri Matisse and Léonide Massine, collaborators on Le Chant du Rossignol, 1920.}
Just as Alice made her way down, down the rabbit hole or stepped through the looking glass familiar from childhood reads, yesterday I found an equivalent portal to otherness. One unassumingly quiet windy Tuesday afternoon, Louise and I were blown into The Australian Ballet’s costume department by way of the concrete footbridge that can be found at the rear of the Arts Centre Melbourne. The sensation was every bit as curious as I imagine it was for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in pursuit of her fast-paced white rabbit. Something akin to when, in either the bath or pool, you pop your head underwater and find all changes. Sounds alter, and things new appear and distort. All in the time span it takes to hold your nose and submerge your head. One quick transformation, if ever there was. One moment and you are somewhere else, some place that feels as far apart as the two poles North and South. Oh! the geography you’ve managed to sidestep simply by dipping your head under the water’s surface. Lewis Carroll always springs to mind when I think of stepping, leaping, falling, dipping, stumbling from one reality into the next, and to head into the giant hub that houses The Australian Ballet feels just like that. One moment I was outside on the windy street with Louise, the next, we were peeping at another alien world, at the 19th century styled costumes designed by Hugh Colman for The Australian Ballet’s forthcoming production of Stephen Baynes’ Swan Lake. The lightning speed transformation from windy outside urban land to the ordered peopled warren that is the busy, coloured and light costume department was a delicious whirl, a fairground ride. Over there, the neatly labelled hangers, row after row; behind, up high, the ribbon rolls in colours grouped. To outside eyes, it reads as one sweet buzzing confection that frames the costumes in various stages of fitted readiness for each dancer. The giant space is teeming with so many things to take in and store, I felt like a bright-eyed mouse, mouth agape. (Now if this treat, this invitation to view the costumes up close does not shake me from my own creative despondency nothing will.) In the dyeing room with its tantalising labels of the colours particular to each costume for each ballet, we spy the wings of a bird soon to the stage to take. Mouse-tail in hand, the majesty of this behind the scenes look is not lost on either of us. All these people, all these things, these workings, these cogs whirling at furious pace, all part of one big industry of activity that meshes together to make a performance that will beguile, challenge, and captivate its audience. From the world of costumes made for a dancer’s body and stage lights to illuminate the detailing, we are lead along a corridor that enables you to peer through the glass at the dancers in rehearsals and classes in the many studios. Here, I tuck my tail into my pocket lest it trail on the ground and trip someone up, but I cannot do anything about my eyes that are wide in awe. This experience has left a great everything-is-possible impression upon me and I am so thankful I had the chance one afternoon to steal a look at this other world.
...I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.
(Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
Thank-you , thank-you, thank-you for the invitation to view the costumes, Kate, and for showing us around. We had a wonderful time and eagerly await seeing Swan Lake (and those costumes take flight) in September.
+ In the woods there is enchantment: Swan Lake
+ Swan Lake photo gallery
+ Introduction to the Ballet: The dancers of The Australian Ballet will demonstrate their daily
training in class on stage. Then, accompanied by an orchestra, the
company will perform a fully staged performance of Graeme Murphy’s Beyond Twelve.
+ Curiouser and curiouser: Lewis Carroll’s original drawings for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
+ Thank-you for your recent zine orders of Whose Lights Were Now Seen Glittering and It's the Dusty Hour through our online store. It is nice to send this zine out to you. (The above trio of collaborative collages with Louise all feature in the zine, Whose Lights Were Now Seen Glittering.)
