It'll come as no surprise when I tell you that I still have my head buried working on the handcolouring and binding element of five (of the ten) editions of A Flight of Twelve Southern Hemisphere Birds, and as the launch at the library draws nearer, I grow more excited and nervous. I hope those of you nearby can come along to the launch and see with your own eyes the parrots and swifts I've been labouring over.
In my focus, I've yet to share with you Gracia's two brilliant written responses to The Australian Ballet's two-act ballet La Sylphide performed alongside the one-act Paquita, and Alexei Ratmansky's world premiere of the dreamy Cinderella. First things first, here, Gracia takes you to a woodland glade:
La Sylphide (1836), with Paquita (1847) (for Fjord Review)
Seeing this work recently performed by The Australian Ballet as a double bill with Marius Petipa’s Paquita
serving as an irresistible 19th-century classicism appetiser, is like
discovering a much sort after time machine. Both works feel so of their
time that to see them is to feel transported to a theatre in the 1800s.
This sensation comes from the choreography, from the way it uses the
body, what it asks of the body, and from the emphasis upon the rapid
feet movements in La Sylphide, a two act ballet synonymous with
putting the dancers en pointe without the aid of overhead wires and
‘flying machines’. In La Sylphide we see memory of the first sylph Marie Taglioni,
who, as Artistic Director David McAllister explained “used her
incredible ability to balance on her toes for the first time in this
work. The illusion of barely touching the floor, hovering on the tips of
her toes, gave Taglioni a weightlessness that removed her from the
earthly realm and enabled her to inhabit the role of the woodland fairy
she portrayed. What Taglioni began has now evolved into a technique
employed by every ballerina.”
In seeing these two works, though particularly La Sylphide,
I am keenly aware that a ballet can be both timeless and of its time.
This for me is part of its beauty. It is beautifully of its time. It
shows us clearly what ballet was at that exact period. And in showing us
what ballet was in 1836, it shows us evolution of technique and style.
This production of La Sylphide has been handed down by Danish
ballet masters since its 1836 debut appearance thereby making it a
close-to authentic and pure work, and whilst not the same version as
performed by Taglioni, in Erik Bruhn’s choreography after Bournonville I
like to imagine we are seeing close to what audiences saw centuries
ago.
In Paquita it is easy to imagine the audience in
rapturous applause as legs fly so high they could detach, and hands give
impression of pushing against the resistance of water, for this work,
now more commonly performed as the one-act marriage scene between
Paquita and the French nobleman whose life she has saved, is a work
chiefly about impressive technique over narrative. Revised by Petipa,
our Paquita remains our Spanish gypsy who discovers that she is of noble
blood and thus able to marry her beloved Lucien, but what holds is the
detailed classicism and Spanish-styled épaulement that seeks to convey
aristocratic elegance. It is this that most evokes the period and thus
delights. Audiences on the two nights’ I attended, and the full dress
rehearsal too, delighted in those keenly awaited 32 fouettés executed to
timed perfection as much, I can only imagine, as they did many, many
performances ago.
Both timeless and of its time. The landscape paintings of Théodore Gericault and John Constable,
for example, embody the Romantic sensibility and as such show us today
how they viewed the world. Nature is dramatic, and there is a terrific
sense of melancholic reverie. Romanticism, in rejection of
Enlightenment’s values placed upon reason and order, is, as Charles
Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “a way of feeling”. And it is this “way of
feeling” twinned with Bournonville’s lightness and beauty that sees us
transported to liminal space between reality and dream, from farmhouse
to cauldron-side and later woodland glade all by second act of La Sylphide.
Nature is a great muse, and just like those dramatic paintings, it is
not always the good hero who wins. There is heartache at the core of
Romanticism, and one of the air and one of the earth cannot live
together. And there is the grotesque, too, in Madge, the old
fortuneteller serving as dramatic counter to ethereal and ultimately
unattainable sylphs. Having cursed James as she is thrown out from the
farmhouse for declaring that it will be his rival Gurn who will marry
his intended Effie, there can be little doubt how this will end. James
will end up with neither the supernatural sylph whom he is enamored of
nor his fiancée Effie. A man divided between two loves, between two
worlds, it is this very state of unrest and duality that we so closely
associate with the Romantic period. For me this ballet is about the sad
duality between the body and the soul, between reality and the unknown
realm of dreams and ideas, and what it means to be human.
Click here to read the whole piece.
And now, let us join Cinderella in a surrealist landscape:
Alexei Ratmansky's Cinderella (for Fjord Review)
Tick,
tock. Tick, tock. Sergei Prokofiev’s beautifully eerie time keeping
score. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A row of conical hedges transform with
one rotation into metronomes. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A dancer’s leg
strikes twelve, over and over. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. A leg can swing
like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth from a central point. A body
has become a clock, proving Salvador Dali true: "every portrait can be
transformed into living room furniture", and thus Mae West’s lips
become a sofa on which to sit. The body can become an object and an
object can become a body. Time and transformation are the threads that
bind this new production of The Australian Ballet’s Cinderella together. True to the score, Alexei Ratmansky’s choreography coupled with Jérôme Kaplan’s costume and set design
revels in this glorious sense of time being measured, and the optical
illusion of surrealism whose transformative powers delight in catching
you in their illusion, thus making this fairytale complete.
The passing of time, it is in the orbit of the planets that spin clockwise and anticlockwise. There flies Mars, Neptune, and Venus! It is in the apparent suspension of time that sees dancers appear weightless. Indeed, as the Celestial Bodies fly Cinderella through the solar system, she appears to defy gravity. So at ease, her suspended form calls to mind Dali’s The Sleep (1937). The very marking of time, it is the chase the orchestra perform with alacrity and apparent delight. One moment an almost demonic gallop, the next a lyrical sweep to rival the swirl of costume. It is a score perhaps not as well known as Romeo and Juliet (but it should be) and it is one that has a beautiful quality of measuring, keeping, and altering time from the moment it commences. You begin to almost see the notes leaping up from the orchestra pit and taking over the theatre. Ratmansky’s Cinderella evokes the overwhelming sensation that this is what ballet sounds like and what Prokofiev’s music looks like.
Cinderella
is a beautiful collision of opposites. The grotesque plays opposite the
romance of the fairytale with the happy ending we are assured of from
the outset, with or without the transportation conjuring feats performed
by mice and pumpkins. There can be little doubt that to bite into one
of the stepsisters or the stepmother would be fatal: "sugary on the
outside and venomous inside." Comedy plays opposite heartache, and
real time plays opposite suspended time. It combines the timeless with
the ephemeral, and the classic with the modern with all the ease of a
Georgio de Chirico painting. With its ambiguous spatiality and the power
to free objects from their normal contexts, the surrealist’s landscape
of the unknown seems an ideal landscape in which to place Cinderella.
If you are going to explore the dream, longing (both romantic and
familial), and by that reasoning, the fairytale, who better to have as
guide than the surrealists? Celebrating the laws of chance and a sense
of different layers has the effect of hand in glove that one wonders why
you’ve not earlier seen Cinderella in surreal setting such as
this. From René Magritte we have the frame within a frame within a frame
of the staging that works so cleverly to alter the audience’s sense of
space and time. And we also have the suggestion of conflict between the
hidden and the visible that runs through much of Magritte’s work echoed
at the close of act II when the Prince cannot 'see' Cinderella for her
rags. There but not there, I doubt I have ever been more moved by an
act’s close, such is this production’s understanding of the power of
drama and story telling. The story told through lengthy mime—gone. In
its place, a body to speak, and speak it does in the lead up to midnight
replete with its twelve chimes. In hearing the orchestra play the Waltz-Coda at the end of act II, I am generally confused as to just who is moving: the characters on stage or the whole theatre? Come Midnight
hedges-cum-metronomes glide, encircle and ensnare, and Cinderella and
the Prince run circles, and the audience, too—we are moving aren’t we? I
am reminded of Prokofiev’s own words in describing the sense of
confused, fused fantastical movement when at a young age he saw
Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at the Bolshoi Theatre: "...but when they, that is the cast in Sleeping Beauty,
where moving along in a boat whilst the stage set moved toward them,
your gaze, after having being glued to the spectacle for a time,
involuntarily shifted and you looked around and it seemed that the
theatre was also moving until finally you couldn’t tell whether it was
the stage or the theatre or your own head that was moving."
Rereading these words, I cannot wait for The Australian Ballet's 2014 season.
