HIGH UP IN THE TREES

Bouillon, chowder, bisque. Here's to the Beautiful Soup.

{Early one morning Louise went with her parents to see Beautiful Soup.}

Here, this glorious blue sky afternoon, a closer look at Beautiful Soup before it closes this Sunday at 4pm. Fifty-six works upon white walls hang, all of uniform size, be it 13 X 18 cm or 18 X 13 cm depending on artists’ preference for portrait or landscape, as part of Rona Green’s Soup-y gathering of invited paper-loving, inked-up artists at St Heliers Street Store + Gallery. It has been wonderful to be a part of this exhibition, and Louise and I look forward to soon collecting our folio of works from this great print exchange.

Thanks for having us, Rona.


{Back to the beginning. Rona's neat piles of artworks received. (Image credit: Rona Green)}

Beautiful Soup: A print folio exhibition curated by Rona Green
Wednesday 10th of October – Sunday 4th of November, 2012
St Heliers Street Store + Gallery, The Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford

(Should you be interested, we have several artists' proofs of our print, At dusk it glitters, for sale. Simply wing an email to [email protected] or leave message in the comments below.)

+ Beautiful Soup catalogue PDF download

See this and know me happy.

{The merriments and sport of the water called.}

Dear you,
 
See this and know me happy. For the time being, the Deaux Clare is a little yellow craft all my own, hired for summer’s duration. Each morning I set out for the day, be she clement or otherwise, liking nothing better than to find a quiet spot to let her gently bob. I drift. I lie on deck and read the clouds above. This, I tell you, this is my definition of happiness. This is contentment in Cannes. Find yours where you find it.
 
With nose freckling in the sun and heels rough,
X

+ Beautiful Soup, a print folio exhibition curated by Rona Green, of which we are a part of is on until the 4th of November, should you be hoping to see the works in person. The gallery is open Monday through Sunday, 8am to 4pm. Why not pop along and see.

+ And upon subject of art viewing, yesterday, my parents went along to view our Charms in Port Jackson Press Print Room window and took away with them these instagram memories. XO

A thing installed and happily so.

There are many things I like to do, too many to here list, but one of the things I especially like to do is to instal our work. Be it on gallery wall, in window case or display cabinet, or upon a tabletop spread. It affords terrific joy. It makes sense of all the quiet hours working. For things, things are made to be seen. You might create work for yourself, for your own enjoyment, but these labours they are made to be shared, like a book written to be cradled in palm and read. Setting up, the hours fly. The focus on tweaking, nudging, perfecting is happily all consuming if you allow it to be and even if you do not. Coaxing concertina folds to sit just so and arranging an assembly of Louise’s drawn birds on the wall on a spring day is something I’d no other way have.

Here is our yesterday afternoon.




















{A spring afternoon spent in the window.}

You can see our window compilation of paper work, our gathering of Charms particular to the gloaming until the very end of November in the window of the Port Jackson Press Print Room.

Should you be passing during open hours, be sure to Step inside and see the beautiful works of  Jazmina Cininas (Past and Present until the 13th November), and others.

Charms of the Gloaming
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
in the Little Window of Opportunity
Port Jackson Press Print Room, 61 Smith Street, Fitzroy

+ Beneath the screen of closed eyelids (Port-Said), a collaborative artists' book made with Louise, that marries coloured pencil workings and collage together. (A closer look at one of six artists' books on display in the window.)

Charms of the Gloaming.

{The cover of my artists' book, All that's bewitching by the water (Capri), exhibited recently as part of By This Unwinking Night at Latrobe Regional Gallery.}

As Louise and I spend the lion’s share of this Sunday putting the finishing touches to our work for our forthcoming window display at Port Jackson Press Print Room’s Little Window of Opportunity, I thought I’d take the chance to share a little of what we will be installing. One of the artists’ books we hope to fit in the window is All that's bewitching by the water (Capri) (2012). Space permitting, it will be exhibited alongside Sleeping during the day (2010) and With you my destiny I'd steal (Venezia) (2012). We have mapped out on the floor the window’s proportions and things are looking promising. The theatricality and primal brilliance of Stravinsky plays in the background as we adhere little tabs to the back of our artists' books and map out flying bird configurations on the carpet. Yes, we are looking very much forward to installing our paper works early in the week that peeps around the corner. And I'll be sure to post a few photos of the instal here and on instagram.








{Page details from All that's bewitching by the water (Capri).}

Charms of the Gloaming
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Wednesday 24th of October – Friday 30th of November, 2012

December 7, 1906

Went to F— Duckponds. Flocks of Wigeon and Teal on the water. Taking advantage of a dip in the land managed to stalk them splendidly, and for quite a long time I lay among the long grass watching them through my field glasses. But during the day Wild Duck are not particularly lively or interesting birds. Occasionally one will paddle around lazily. But for the most part they show a great ennui and seem so sleepy and tired that one would almost think to be able to approach and feed them out of hand. But I moved one hand carelessly and the whole flock was up in a minute and whizzing across the river. Afterwards, at dusk, on returning to the ponds, they had come back; but now that the sun was down, those dozy, flapdoodle creatures of the afternoon were transformed into quacking, quarrelsome, blustering birds that squabbled and chivvied each other, every moment seizing the chance of a luxurious dip, flinging the ice-cold water off their backs with a shake of the tail that seemed to indicate the keenest-edged delight.
W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, Little Toller Books

Bring me your Honey buzzards, your Common swifts, your Eurasian sparrowhawks, and your Gyr falcons too. Your birds you see as dusk settles on the stage and prepares to darken to a night winged with wide sweep of owls. Quickly now, things are about to disappear into the darkness.

Assembled in the window, we have for you, paper birds drawn, collaged works, and artists’ books. These are our Charms of the Gloaming, our tiny scenes soon to change.

We are besotted with paper for its foldable, concealable, revealing nature, and our artists' books, prints, and other such works, use an armoury of play, humour, and perhaps the poetic too, to lure one closer. The words of Gogol whisper in the ear, “the longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes”. And thus, we leave our scenes open-ended, inviting you to ponder and perhaps find that things are not as they first appear.

Press your nose to the glass. Do.

+ Thank-you for your recent comments here in regards to my Swan Lake piece for Fjord Review and my collage for The World of Interiors.

Enchantment.

{Collage featured in It's the Dusty Hour, a zine made in collaboration with Louise and Hila.}

I was delighted to write this piece for Fjord Review about The Australian Ballet's 8th performance of Swan Lake, choreographed by Stephen Baynes. Thank-you for the challenge, Penelope.

Swan Lake
The Australian Ballet

It is circles I see, and always have, whenever I listen, and often I do, to Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. For me, one stimulates the other, and the composition upon every visit sets to the business of drawing its familiar beloved circles, from the large and sweeping to the tightly coiled. Melodic circles that anyone can hum or whistle, or with finger tap out on the table; such a union of the senses is what Swan Lake is for me. That is what I hear in the music, and see in the choreography, a melody and a romanticism impossible to resist or ignore.

In anticipation of Stephen Baynes’ Swan Lake, an Australian Ballet premiere, I listened often to a recording (split over two discs) by L’Symphonique de Montréal, conducted by Charles Dutoit. I watched on DVD the Royal Swedish Ballet with Nathalie Nordquist as Odette/Odile and Anders Nordström as her Prince Siegfried (with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, and Sir Peter Wright). And I watched an episode of  A year inside The Australian Ballet, "Dressing the Ballet" in which we follow senior artist Amy Harris through the costume department of the Australian Ballet to view the exquisite work of designer Hugh Colman and team. In this sixth episode of a planned ten behind-the-scenes appetisers, set amidst the brocade and tulle, we learn that the pearls upon the bodice of the Swans speak of the tears the parents of Odette have shed. Their tears have formed pearls, such is their anguish; their grief has formed a lake, in this ballet tale familiar to so many. Familiar and loved by so many, to see a production of Swan Lake is close to some kind of magical love affair. The preparation I have briefly spoken of here reads almost like the preparation one does to meet a loved one: the polishing of ourselves in order to best present a handsome, ravishing, knowledgeable picture. Swan Lake is a ballet loved by many, few would disagree, and to the ballet, we, the audience, bring with us all our memories and devotion.

Earlier in the year, I was invited to see a little of the 19th century styled costumes designed by Colman for the Australian Ballet’s then forthcoming production of Baynes’ Swan Lake. (Such stuff to whet the appetite! Delirious emersion!) There, with own eyes I saw, hanging in neatly ordered and labelled rows, white swan tutus awaiting only a dancer to bring to life their beauty and elegance, the moving dream that is the power of costume. Seeing the Black Swan’s tutu brings me closer to imagining how it might feel to perform Odile’s thirty-two fouettés. (Of interesting note: the black swan first appeared in 1941 ‘in a performance by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in New York. Today the black swan is an essential element of the story, though few realise how recent an addition she is.’[i] Previously she appeared in disguise, but not sporting black feathers.) Seeing the costumes made for the Queen, to be played by former Australian Ballet principal Lisa Bolte, I feel as though I have stepped into the year 1890, the year in which this new production is set. This is what one would wear in a Prussian court.

To then see those very costumes on stage worn by Lucinda Dunn as Odette and Ty King-Wall as the Prince, the night was as magical as long I’d hoped, with their final intimate pas de deux a beautiful pull at the heart strings. At glorious end, I am left full of gathered and marvellous impressions that I scarcely know where to begin.

Hearing the orchestra play, I am reminded of a journal entry in W.N.P Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man:

January 30, 1915
I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra and its various components like a beautiful bird.[ii]

Where I hear circles described by music’s tempo—sometimes tightly revolving, sometimes wide in lyrical sweep—for Barbellion, a bird in flight. Perhaps this ability to transform from one thing to another ensures a certain timelessness. A little musical metamorphosis, much like Odette’s own painful transformation. We all bring different things to Swan Lake. Some identify with the anguish of the Prince (which in Baynes’ choreography, the Prince’s suffering is deeply etched and adds to the narrative), others are held transfixed by the beauty of sorrow. For some, it is the choreography replete with its multiple turns of the body, back and forth, changing direction, changing pace. And everybody, it seems, loves those cygnets in perfect unison. We give ourselves up freely to sink into the beautiful tragedy of it all, with its promise and hope at the tail, and its fantastical lake so inky and becoming. And what a lake it is we are treated to in this recent production. It is mesmerising stuff, this wild, untameable nature that has held in its spell Byron, Wagner, Shelley, Wordsworth et al. This lake serves almost as another character in the tale. It shimmers and is ever present. It is more than mere background fodder. Choreography, costumes, set design: this Swan Lake is connected to and pulled by water. We are not flying through the air and light. Real and human aches are explored.

I had been forewarned of a particular brief though no less fantastical and powerful moment that occurs twice in the production. No more about this was I told. Wait and see; you’ll know it. Indeed I did. A subtle yet effective use of projection by designer and director Domenico Bartolo (of the design group 21.19), the brevity of this projected symbolism ensured it struck the right chord: a visual punch that adds but never distracts.

As principal artist Amber Scott explains in “Becoming Odette”, ‘in the current company, no one has danced the full four acts of the classical Swan Lake; everyone is making a debut this season.”[iii] In Baynes’ Swan Lake, the narrative arcs that Odette and Prince Siegfried wend are of greatest importance. Characters are fleshed out and extended, and new meaning and import given. Of the choreography, Scott continues, ‘…because it is so pure, you have to have this really uncluttered technique. Every little nuance and ruffle of your feathers, there’s a lot of really fine detail that needs to be clarified and personalised as well.’[iv] As Baynes’ himself expresses in his Choreographer’s Note, this new production is traditional. ‘Apart from [act II] and the Black Swan Pas de Deux, all the other choreography for the other three acts is my own. In act II I have adhered mostly to the Kirov version, although I have made several alterations, including the choreography for the Lead Swans, which is essentially my own.’[v]

I leave you with this quote from W.N.P. Barbellion after spending an evening listening to Tchaikovsky: ‘Came away thoroughly delighted. Wanted to say to everyone “Bally good, ain’t it?” and then we would all shake hands and go home whistling.’[vi] It sums up, in part, how I felt as I left the State Theatre. Exhilarated. Entranced. Connected. Capable of whistling.
 
Referenced in the words above:
Behind Ballet; Episode 6, “Dressing the Ballet” in the series A Year Inside The Australian Ballet, produced by The Apiary for The Australian Ballet. 
"A Dip in Waters of Another World”, a look at the costumes for The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake choreographed by Stephen Baynes earlier in the year.
Behind Ballet; "Becoming Odette", produced by The Apiary for The Australian Ballet.
 
Notes:
[i] Karen van Ulzen, “Black Swan of Trespass: In the European imagination, the black swan was first an impossibility, then an oddity”, The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake programme, 2012.
[ii] W.N.P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man (United Kingdom: Little Toller Books, 2010), 167.
[iii] Amber Scott interview, “Becoming Odette”, for The Australian Ballet blog, Behind Ballet, 2012.
[iv] Scott, “Becoming Odette”.
[v] Stephen Baynes, “Choreographer’s Note”, The Australian Ballet’s Swan Lake programme, 2012.
[vi] Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, 160.

Cast for the 8th performance of Swan Lake:
Prince Siegfried
Ty King-Wall

Odette
Lucinda Dunn

Baron von Rothbart
Rudy Hawkes

The Queen
Lisa Bolte*

The Lord Chancellor
Tristan Message*

Child Siegfried
Zachary Piccirillo*

Siegfried’s nurse
Terese Power*

Nurse’s husband
Colin Peasley*

Ladies in waiting
Joanne Michel*
Christine Howard*

Benno
Andrew Wright

The Dutchess
Juliet Burnett

The Countess
Amy Harris

Foreign princesses
Robyn Hendricks, Karen Nanasca, Sharni Spencer, Natasha Kusen

Lead swans
Miwako Kubota, Ako Kondo

Cygnets
Brooke Lockett, Halaina Hills, Karen Nanasca, Heidi Martin

Spanish dancers
Dana Stephensen, Vivienne Wong, Brett Simon, Benjamin Stuart-Carberry

Russian Princess
Valerie Tereshenko

Cossacks
Chengwu Guo, Jack Hersee, Charles Thompson, Christopher Rodgers-Wilson

Officers and ladies of the court, Ambassadors, Swan maidens, Guards, Serving women
Artists of The Australian Ballet

*Guest artist

+ An earlier post for Fjord Review, Always in the Dark, Nederlands Dans Theater's Move to Move
+ Fjord Review

"A ziggurat of balls of porcelain clay to my left..."

{Collage for The World of Interiors.}

A recent commission is now in print and the feeling is glorious and surreal tied up together with ribbon yellow chuffed. Though I have yet to lay my mitts upon a printed copy, I have perused the online version on my iPhone. There, upon the last page it is!
 
In the current November issue of The Word of Interiors, you can see my collage made especially to accompany a written piece by Edmund de Waal. (Time on His Hands, Journal of a Ceramic Artist, p. 200)
 
Many, many thanks Mark. To work on a collage for your good self is always a terrific challenge to relish.

+ A look at two earlier Journal of a... collages: The Genuine Article (2009) and Greeks Bearing Gifts (2008)


{The current edition of The World of Interiors, November 2012. (Cover image details)}

To arrive at this collage took many turns. Here is a little look at (some of) the works that led to the final piece.








{All part of the idea process.}
 
+ Revealing volumes — literally, hypothetically — Mark Lazenby shows us his Bookshelf: “This is what I want to do in my work; make the invisible visible and create worlds from the fragments. The internal becoming external in the act of creating an artwork and imbuing pieces of paper with feelings and energy.” (It’s Nice That)

+ Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup! Beau—ootiful Soo—oop!: Views from yesterday's sunny Sunday opening. Louise and I take you with us to see Beautiful Soup, a print exchange folio and exhibition curated by Rona Green. The exhibition at St Heliers Store + Gallery runs until Sunday the 4th of November, 2012.

The glittering variety.

{You're invited to Beautiful Soup. (Please click to enlarge.)}

Am running somewhat late, but my invitation is true. Do come along to see Beautiful Soup, a print folio exhibition of 56 artists curated by Rona Green. The exhibition opens this coming Sunday afternoon. Come along and say hello and join in the souped festivities.

Joe Benke, Matthew Bissett-Johnson, Louise Blyton, Lisa Borg, Michael Cleary, Elizabeth Cole, Annette Cook, Filomena Coppola, Susan Crookes, Glenn Dalton, Sally Darlison, Pip Davey, Jessica Edwards, William Erickson, Bridget Farmer, Michael Fitzgerald, Jason Fujiwara, Kaitlyn Gibson, Jillian Green, Rona Green, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Bonnie Hanlon, Gregory Harrison, Jodi Heffernan, Anita Iacovella, Sheridan Jones, Rachel Joy, Adrian Kellett, Ralf Kempken, Alexi Keywan, Julian Laffan, Andy Lang, Suzie Lockery, Scott Lyon, Melissa Martin, Sheena Mathieson, Clyde McGill, Aaron McLoughlin, Lorelei Medcalf, Richard Morden, Leonie Oakes, Sharron Okines, George Pados, James Pasakos, Jim Pavlidis, Jason Phu, David Rosengrave, John Ryrie, Jakob Schmitt, Victoria Simpson, Glen Smith, Melissa Smith, Georgia Thorpe, Clare Whitney and Joel Wolter

Wednesday 10th of October – Sunday 4th of November, 2012

Opening celebration Sunday 14th of October, 2- 4pm

At St Heliers Street Store + Gallery, The Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford

At dusk it glitters
Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
Four-colour lithographic offset print on Fabriano bright-white 300gsm hot-press paper
Edition of 56, printed by Redwood Prints
2012

(We have several artists' proofs of our work in the soup for sale, should you be interested. Simply wing an email to [email protected] or leave message in the comments.)

{Collaborative collages from our series Whose Lights Were Seen Glittering.}

Yesterday's rainy spring day proved perfect for turning a glut of organic apples into an apple crumble of tastiest order, and reading Apple-picking from Clare Leighton’s The Farmer’s Year (Little Toller Books). Today's kitchen adventure, why, it calls, naturally, for soup.

Set to exploring the fantastical and beautiful,
+ Busy is... Alexandra Hedberg
+ The Book Cover Archive
+ I spy, there I am (in a Padsadena Mansions sketchbook study)
+ John-Joseph Merlin's Silver Swan automaton, The Bowes Museum (more)
+ James Cox's Peacock Clock, The State Hermitage Museum (more)

Pots of paint can wonders make.

{As slow to paint as you'd expect.}

Things are not always with paper and scissors and glue made. Sometimes, just sometimes, they involve the lick of paint on lead. To all those who’ve ever wondered who paints little collectible models that in collectibles stores do sell, the answer, some of the time, is Louise and me. We paint little lead figures in stripes or with the cross of St George, or the hammer and sickle of a Russia since past. The French uniform sports no socks. Presumably, this is because most things French have air of certain chicness. We paint the little stars upon the back of the Americans. And in the lounge room lit with bright spotlights it is not unusual to hear Louise cry, ‘this brush has a few too many bristles for this job. Time to thin it out. Pass the scissors please.’ Nor is it unusual to hear a little cussing sailor-worthy as Omar sends the riders still a-drying toppling.
 
Just one of the many and varied jobs that pays for things and proves enjoyable along the way.

+ I think I have found what next I will collect
+ Louise with a finished Scot

Trying hard to resist digesting my bounty of specimens.

{A prize.}

Dear you,
 
Have found myself in Japan. Not in the spiritual sense. In the physical sense. I am in the Japanese wilderness by day, gathering with giant tail swoosh all the coloured blooms mountainside. Come nightfall, you’ll find me documenting my findings in my notebook. I am a collector of nature, trying hard to resist digesting my bounty of specimens. Given that I am uprooting so many plants and leaving a ploughed field in my wake perhaps it is silly to draw the line at not eating my findings. Perhaps I am no different to those shipwrecked sailors, pirates, and whalers who ate their way through several distinct races of Galapagos tortoises after all? You’d better enjoy what you can see of these blooms for shortly they’ll be no more.
 
Yours affectionately and foolishly plundering that which I hold dear,
X

+ You can now purchase the zine in which the above postcard tale features at the MCA Store in Sydney and through their online shop here. Conveyed by the postal system and other companions of the paper variety await your persal.

+ Extract from Eighty Years Ashore and Afloat, or the thrilling adventures of Uncle Jethro: Embracing the remarkable episodes in a life of toil and danger, on land sea by E. C. Cornell concerning the voyage of the ship Apollo of Edgartown, which sailed under Captain Daggett on a whaling voyage to the Pacific in 1816 (quoted in The Galapagos tortoises in their relation to the whaling industry by Charles Haskins Townsend (1859-1944) published by the New York Zoological Society (1925)):

We went hunting them every day for a week, and as they are so clumsy and move so slow, made it an easy matter to capture them. We built a pen to put them in, and while on shore lived on them mostly, and used hard bread from the ship for soups and stews and other ways: the cook dished it out to us. The small ones we caught we carried down to camp on our shoulders, but we had to drag the larger ones. They are perfectly harmless and never known to bite. We caught about a hundred during the time. At the close of the week we took them aboard. Their weights would range from about five pounds to five hundred and over. We put them on deck and between decks, and let them crawl around as they chose. It was all of six months before they were all gone. I never knew one to eat or drink a drop while they were on board, and yet they looked as fat as a ball of butter when they were killed.

Always in the dark.

{The Unpleasant Dream (I). (Featuring Paul Wegener as King Samlak and Dagny Servaes as Theonis in The Loves of Pharaoh (1922).)}


{The Unpleasant Dream (II). (Featuring scenes from South (1919), and Gary Cooper as Cadet White in Wings (1927).)}


{The Unpleasant Dream (III). (Featuring Pola Negri as the Gypsy fortune teller in The Spanish Dancer (1923), and a scene from The Overcoat (1926), a Soviet film directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, starring Andrei Kostrichkin (Akaki Akakievich).)}

Recently, I was invited by Penelope to contribute to Fjord Review, an online journal of dance criticism and writing. Please, count me in was my reply. So, here we go. A collage of words to describe to you a little of the brilliance that is Move to Move. You can read it below, or skip across to Fjord Review and read it here. Thanks Penelope. I had a lot of fun doing this for Fjord.

Move to Move
Nederlands Dans Theater captured live in HD

Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theatre curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis.
— (One of the great silent film directors) Jean Epstein (1897-1953)

Louise Brooks (1906-1985), Mary Pickford (1892-1979), Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (1885-1955), Lingyu Ruan (1910-1935), Léon Mathot (1886-1968), and Lon Chaney (1883-1930). Those silent film stars, they were amazing.

Buster Keaton (1895-1966), Gina Manès (1893-1989), Lillian Gish (1896-1993), Edmond Van Daële (1884-1960), Max Linder (1883-1925), Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939), and Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926)—The things they could convey but with an expression. Their faces impart an intensely iconographic boldness that can make you uncomfortable. Think of those villains or those in peril with eyes wide, looming large before you; they are almost unreal.

There is a link between silent film and dance: expression. It was "Alfred Hitchcock [who] said that the silent cinema was the purest form of acting," and Nederlands Dans Theater house choreographer Paul Lightfoot agrees. "Everything must be done without words. When you see those old movies now, you can actually understand them as choreography," he explains. The way those actors are capable of acting without words, using only their faces, their expression, their bodies, is just like choreography, like dance. Silent film seems a good way to introduce Move to Move, a film that features four ballets Left Right Left Right, Silent Screen, Secus, and Shine a Light in performance at the Lucent Theatre in Den Haag and shot specifically in high definition for the silver screen.

There are many links that tie these ballets and Hitchcock and silent film together, by way of a child’s nightmares (as explored in Shine a Light), and a look at how we move or could move from one place to the next (in Left Right Left Right). It was this and more which I saw “live” one Sunday at Carlton’s Cinema Nova watching NDT1 (the main company founded in 1959, and under the artistic direction of the aptly named Paul Lightfoot) and the younger company, NDT2 (founded in 1978, and under the artistic direction of Gerald Tibbs).

Whilst a film of a performance is second, some could and do say, to the thrill of live performance, there is still much beauty to immerse oneself in, head first, eyes open. There would be no other way of me seeing this performance if not for film. Films of operas, ballets, and plays, allow you to be transported. While I might prefer to see Franz Marc’s The Large Blue Horses (Die großen blauen Pferde was painted in 1911 and is currently in the collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) in person on the wall, looking at a printed version is better than not at all. This is how I used to feel about ballet shown as film: a good compromise. Compromise tied to an essentially affordable ticket price (though a little more than conventional cinema screenings). But Move to Move is more than that, and, to my mind, it is a film in its own right. It exists for more than this.

With six cameras in place to record every muscle twitch, confrontational gaze, and incredible contortion, seeing a performance in this way really does enable you to see all that normally you could not. Every subtle or otherwise movement is magnified, heightening the emotional intensity. It features behind-the-scenes footage of the stage being prepared and the dancers limbering up. It shows patrons checking in their bulky coats at the cloakroom, too, as the crowd masses and theatre fills. This we see before the lights dim and the dancers take to the stage, and it simulates the pre-show buzz that live theatre embraces and encourages. (Many in the movie house on Sunday took this as a chance not to revel in the delicious anticipation but to talk to one another as they wolfed down popcorn. Perhaps, for them, it was too inviting a chance to pass up and they conversed freely as you’d expect were we actually in the theatre. Perhaps they just fancied themselves important.) Front of house and behind the curtain, we are privy to all areas, almost, and this makes for intoxicating fly-on-the-wall stuff. It reminds me of an “elephant-or tiger-cam” in a David Attenborough nature documentary. (Or 2009’s La Danse directed by Frederick Wiseman, which follows the production of seven ballets by the Paris Opera Ballet.) It offers a new entry point, this technique. We get to view the theatre fill, from the position of outsider, before being whisked back stage to view proceedings from a more intimate standing, as an insider. Choreographers and dancers introduce each piece to us, and us alone, it feels. This is no ordinary recording of a performance.

Of the ballets performed, I have been lucky enough to see Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s Silent Screen live when the company visited Melbourne in July 2011. It was the third ballet they presented, alongside Jiří Kylián’s Double You and Crystal Pite’s The Second Person, each unlike anything before I had witnessed. A new word they’ve added to the lexicon. To be able to see Silent Screen once more, and this time know a little of what was in store only added to my excitement. The evocative, and instantly recognisable Philip Glass score (Glassworks (1982), and The Hours soundtrack (2002)) makes this abstract journey an emotional one. As with the great silent films of Jean Epstein, an abstract tale may reject narrative, but this does not mean that the story that unfolds is one lacking drama and emotion. Think of those black-and-white films you have seen, of the body language the actors expressed through eyes and movement, and the optical illusion, that beautiful eye-deception of trompe-l’œil that lets you think there are more dancers on the stage than actually are. It is this, this drama and tragedy by way of Hitchcock, which you can see in Silent Screen, and the playing-with-the-audience film shown within a film. (It is interesting to note that the small child who features in the film shown projected behind the dancers is actually the choreographer’s own daughter.)

Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s most recent work, Shine a Light, came together in a two and a half week period, they tell us during intermission. Step Lightly, Solitaire, Susto, Start to Finish, Shoot the Moon, Sleight of Hand, Swan Song: as with their previous ballets, the letter S serves as a playful and familiar signpost. Shine a Light is based on the nightmares of a little girl and the sounds that dreams have when we recall them upon waking. Fears, are the inspiration and it is truly a dark and fearful work, with its dancers who creep and prowl and draw ever closer to you. Sol León remarked that she likes how the title implies a nightlight left on for a sleeping child. The costumes of the four male dancers have diagonal braces that slash across their chests and look, at first, like deep gashes that reveal a black or blank cavity where a body ought to be. Or like ink drawn. But, just like a dream or a nightmare, a closer look and we see something different. The costumes in this piece illustrate the artist Francis Bacon’s words that echo the work’s intention: "in order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness has to be present." Shine a Light is like a drawing in the sense of the balance of light and shade, or chiaroscuro, the clear and bright held in perfect balance by the dark and obscure.

Alexander Ekman’s Left Right Left Right has brilliant energy and it makes one think not of running away to join a circus but to join NDT2. This playful piece stays with me as I think about how we travel through our day. As one of the dancers states, it really would be more fun to see people walking like a crab, or leaping, scuttling or rolling to work. As with the other ballets we see in the film, including Ohad Naharin’s Secus, control, and a carefully held balance of beauty and power is brought to the fore. The use of the repeated motif in Secus creates the impression of all the dancers moving as though part of one giant cohesive body. In the opening of Left Right Left Right the dancers stand side-on with their necks thrust forward and their faces spun round, looking out at the audience. They call to mind a pack of sculpted zombies. This ability to transform from one expression, pose, feeling to another is what makes them and the ballets they perform so beautiful. Movement and expression are everything, and I forget that I am in the cinema watching a film. Film can and does transport.

(Epstein quoted in Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907–1939: Volume 1, 1907-1929, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1988a, pp.235, sourced: Senses of Cinema)

For the film buffs and ballet fans, I present the particulars:
Move to Move, Nederlands Das Theater captured live in HD

Left Right Left Right
NDT2
Choreography Alexander Ekman

Silent Screen
NDT1
Choreography Sol León and Paul Lightfoot

Secus
NDT1
Choreography Ohad Naharin

Shine a Light
NDT1
Choreography Sol León and Paul Lightfoot

Film Producer: Nederlands Dans Theater
Film Production: 3 Minutes West
Film Director: Jeff Tudor
Worldwide distribution: Pathé Live
Presented by: Sharmill Films

The ubiquitous fruit hamper.

{I told you I was fine.}

Dear you,
 
Feeling on the mend and raring to go now that my limbs have been reattached. Remarkable what they can do these days, those doctors. I feel as I did when in the summer of my days. I’ve not shaken my fear of needles though, no matter how frequent the jabbings were. Atop the cupboard, I’d launch myself. Anything to escape those nurses and their shining syringes. Lured down by a handful of grapes (of which in a hospital there are many going spare, what with every visitor to every patient bringing the ubiquitous fruit hamper).
 
Keen never soon to revisit this sterile accommodation, at least not until the winter of my life.
 
Yours in jubilant spirits, or is that the drugs?
X

+ One, two, three. Tiny weekend scenes.