(Collages created especially for Behind Ballet's Styling Ballet Imperial)
This weekend, G and I invite you to Sticky Institute and the State Library of Victoria's Tonerpalooza: a festival of zines. We'll be there, in the Queen's Hall on Sunday, from midday until 4pm, with a host of our zines, and we hope to see you there too.
We'll be unveiling two brand new zines made especially for Tonerpalooza. One, a pocked sized dark night by me, Nuit Noir, which features a Pied Heron (Ardea picata); a Black-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus); an Australian Magpie (Cracticus tibicen); a White-winged Chough (Corcorax melanorhamphos); and a Pied Currawong (Strepera graculina).
The other, The Suggestion of Opulence, which features all things blue and shiny for Balanchine's Ballet Imperial. This brand new zine includes all ten digital collages, which were created especially for The Australian Ballet's Behind Ballet blog. We had so much fun working on these collages in celebration of winter ballet and Imperial Russia, and I cannot wait to see Imperial Suite with my own eyes.
And speaking of dance (as you perhaps wait in the wings for your turn to see Bodytorque.DNA or Imperial Suite) you can read Gracia's written response to The Australian Ballet's Chroma (especially for Fjord Review).
....the programme concludes with two works by my own champion of truthfulness and humanity, Jiří Kylián’s Petite Mort (1991) and Sechs Tänze (1986), which reference his first love: circus acrobats. The symbolically charged, theatrical Mozart double act takes us full circle, covering “aggression, sexuality, energy, silence, cultivated senselessness and vulnerability”. Poured into the two works (18-minutes and 15-minutes long respectively) is the push-pull of emotional affections. As one is dragged or tied by a length of their own skirt, in Sechs Tänze, another has their limbs dissected, followed by rapid-fire movements that either quickly assume the position of a corpse or roll into darkness. If one must be garroted, this is how it should be done. There is the familiar slap of a hand against flesh, in Petitie Mort, and the rewarding sexually charged swoosh of a foil cutting through negative space. Six men and six (fencing) foils as willful as if of flesh and bone, six women and six black crinolines on wheels and also seemingly with a mind of their own, and one cloud of floating black fabric, we see outlines traced by foil’s tip and shapes from nature drawn when one body partners with another. All is held in perfect balance, and it wears the fine corseting of Joke Visser. Though five years separate these two works, bookended they read as one exploration that swings, or in the case of the black crinolines, wheels from the poetic to the physical.
