HIGH UP IN THE TREES

Rebooted.

{With the borrowed costume for a Syrian woman from Cléopâtre for a necktie, designed by Léon Bakst, c 1909–30s, with a giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis).}

re•boot |rēˈboōt|
verb [ trans. ]
boot (a personal and/or computer system) again.

Lest you missed our recent newsletter or the like, in celebration of a corner turned (at last! Hurrah! Three cheers for Louise!), and in appreciation of your love and kindness also expressed concerning our dear old beloved dog, Mr. Percy's deteriorating health, we are having a SALE.

In light of said corner turned, we are calling it our REBOOTED SALE.

Simply enter the code word REBOOTED upon checkout to receive 30%-off your whole order on anything in our online store from now until the 30th of November.

{Within Francesco del Cossa's Portrait of a Young Man, c 1472–74, with a Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus).}




{In the borrowed costume for an Elder from The Rite of Spring, after Nicholas Roerich, c 1913, with a Eurasian pygmy owl (Glaucidium passerinum).}

{In the borrowed costume for the Bluebird from The sleeping princess, designed by Léon Bakst, c 1921, with a black-naped monarch (Hypothymis azurea).}

{Within Jacometto's portrait of Alvise Contarini, c 1485–95, with a hispid hare (Caprolagus hispidus).}

Brighter days, be they ever yours.

Remixed.

re•mix
verb |rēˈmiks; ˈrē-| [ trans. ]
mix (something) again.
• produce a different version of (a library's digital archives) by altering the balance of the separate components.

Because keeping the head and hands busy is the best remedy known (thank-you Rose), a suite of ten collages created as part of the State Library of Victoria's recent open invitation to play in the digital collection. This is our #remixvic ten ways.

And blue was a viola’s arabesque.

{Juliette Barton and Richard Cilli in Les Illuminations (Image credit: Peter Greig)}

A union of sensations, 'syn' (meaning union) and 'aesthesis' (sensation), synaesthesia, or the effect of through metaphor, lets us 'hear' colours and, in the broadest sense, question our perception. And question my perception was exactly what Illuminated did. My response, Britten & Baroque, especially for Fjord Review. (Thanks again Penelope. Always a thrill.)

Illuminated
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Sydney Dance Company

Sunday 25th October 2015
State Theatre, Melbourne
one-night-only

Variation 10
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Music: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op.10 (Composed 1937) by Benjamin Britten

Les Illuminations
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Music: Les Illuminations, Op.18 (Composed 1939) by Benjamin Britten

Project Rameau
Choreographer: Rafael Bonachela
Music: Jean-Philippe Rameau (Sommeil from Dardanus; Air tendre from Les fêtes d’Hébé; Tonnerre from Hippolyte et Aricie; Overture and Chaconne, Air de Triomphe from Naïs; Contredanse en rondeau, Première contradanse from Les Boréades; Danse des Sauvages from Les Indes Galantes), Antonio Vivaldi (Presto from ‘Summer’ from The Four Seasons), Johann Sebastian Bach (Sarabande from Partita No.1 in B minor)

For Matisse, who 'carved' into colour, blue was the sound of a gong. For Kandinsky, blue was instead evoked by the sound of the cello, which he played. For the poet Arthur Rimbaud, blue was the vowel 'O', and it was a "sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds." Arranged in a line, Rimbaud’s Vowels (1871), from 'A' to 'O' in colour read: black, white, red, blue, green. On Sunday night, Sydney Dance Company became a body of sound to the Australian Chamber Orchestra's sounding body. For one night only in Melbourne, a soundscape became a landscape! And blue was a viola’s arabesque.

Building upon an earlier collaboration, which stemmed from a shared love of the melodic dance work of Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, the artistic director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Richard Tognetti, and the artistic director of Sydney Dance Company, Rafael Bonachela, have created Illuminated. Three ballets, one from an earlier full-length work re-worked, Project Rameau (which premiered in 2012), and two new pieces inspired by the changing colours and directness of composer Benjamin Britten. Before taking Illuminated to Hong Kong, and further adding to the unexpected glow of a gala performance, neither Project Rameau (in either full or reworked guise) nor the two works which enable Britten's sound to be 'seen' have been performed in Melbourne before. The intrinsic relationship between music and dance, making one where there are two, is in line with Stravinsky and Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham. "If the word and the note are one thing, not two,"[i]—the same can be said of Illuminated's splendid fare.

In silvered-grey costumes, designed by Toni Maticevski, the dancers appeared in the cool foreground before the elevated orchestra. Seen simultaneously, the warmth of the moving background comprised of violins and cellos in flight visually advanced and became a part of the dance. Negative space to inform the figures in the foreground this was not! This was Variation 10, and it never let the eyes nor the ears settle, as it threw light upon both music and dance. Presented so, my perception was inevitably altered and gloriously unsettled. A harmonious synthesis, in which the music enhanced the dance and the dance enriched the music, the transferral between the two provided the sought-after "mutual illumination"[ii] Tognetti referred to in the programme notes. Referencing dance scholar, Rachel Duerden’s paper, 'Dancing in the imagined space of music,' for Tognetti are the very ideas that course through Illuminated and describe his collaboration with Bonachela. Upon closer inspection, the apparent harmony between music and dance “reveal[ed] subtle divergences which offer[ed] a glimpse into another world, a parallel universe.”[iii]

Where the two converged, "sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant," pleasure was found though a "process of suggestion .... Musical notes can 'move' much faster than the human body. Physical movement, perceived visually, is much more sluggish than movement in sound can be; this is a spatial issue, of course—a human body has to get from here to there by passing through all the space between; it cannot simply be 'here' and then be 'there'."[iv] As a way around this, knots of dancers in notes of three or four appear to perform the same sequence simultaneously. Bonachela’s responsive choreography suggesting that with an ensemble of dancers you can show 'super human' movement; he has found a way around the impossible 'movement per note.' Splitting one section of dancers from another would surely have delighted Britten.

Composed in ten days in 1937, Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op.10, presents a series of character sketches (of his teacher, the composer Bridge, who inspired him to be true to himself[v]). From the dark Adagio punctuated by violin burst of Bridges' 'integrity' to a quick March ('his energy') and the absolute beauty of Romance ('his charm'), we gallop through 'his wit,' hear a little of the Baroque in 'his tradition,' delight in the burst of the playful 'enthusiasm' before falling into the haunting lament of Variation's Funeral march and the otherworldly 'chant' that leads us to the marvellous triumph of the Fugue and finale. Dancers marched in unison only to splinter into free form, peel off, and re-bundle anew. With their upper bodies swaying languidly one moment, upright and forceful the next, it is, as Bonachela enthuses, "as if this music were made to be danced."[vi] Britten created what few could ever dream of coming close to, and now I have 'seen' what it is to move in the manner of Romance.

Laid back gestures tipped into the formal, athletic into sensual, furious into delicate: the pleasing juxtapositions and intimate connections of Variations 10 extended into Les Illuminations. With darkness undercutting the apparent charm of Britten’s 1939 sound-picture, Les Illuminations, significance was given to the expressive gestures of the hands that at times appeared to mark out a choreographic sequence like a dancer in class. Drawing upon the poems of Rimbaud, the quartet of dancers were "endowed with [the] frightening voices" of the poet’s desperate underworld Parade. "A cruel swagger of faded finery" best observed from the position of outsider/artist, Britten’s key to Rimbaud’s poetry seems also that of this work ("I alone have the key to this savage parade").

Accompanied by Opera Australia soprano, Taryn Fiebig, the dancers revelled in "their magnetic stagecraft. Eyes inflamed .... Their raillery and their terror last[ed] a moment, or months entire" (Illuminations IV: Parade). Under “canopies of night” (Illuminations XVI: Ornières) the dancers "move[d] on invisible rails and pulleys" (Illuminations XVII: Villes), later circling "their feet in the waterfalls and briars,” they represented "the dream [that] cools." (Illuminations XX: Veillées). "Chords chime[d]" in their arms, as they "gently mov[ed] that thigh, that other thigh and that left leg" (Illuminations V: Antique). As the music soared in love’s declaration: "Oh, our bones are clothed with a new amorous body!" (Illuminations VI: Being Beauteous).

Juliette Barton and Charmene Yap gave us the "thunder and lightning rise and roll" (of Illuminations I: Après le Déluge) in their duet with lifting, which played in contrast to the tender duet between Cass Mortimer Eipper and Richard Cilli. The relentless 'savage parade' that is life was sung, played, and danced, exclaimed, murmured, and offered forth as a prayer for peace.

Project Rameau offered a brilliant court dance of a different kind, with the full ensemble of dancers once more returned to the stage. Operating in the same time and yet not, moving through the real and the imagined, the musical gestures of baroque are embedded in the choreography and throw light upon how I engaged with what I heard. Summer’s arrival, a thunderstorm! The backcloth cracked to red! Through the air, a figure flew, tossed. Orchestrated before my eyes, the playful, fast moving musical lines wove in echo of Rimbaud’s earlier "chains of gold from star to star." As dancers sank to the floor interlaced with chords, I was made to work to keep up. In the thoroughly modern court dance, the secret sign language of lovers replete with hand-claps, palms connecting with cheeks, fists, thumbs-up signals, forearm rotations, and bum wiggles. A line of music was pulled as a leg snapped to a close. A dancer was lifted to 'see' a high note from a flute.

I could have listened to the music alone. I could have watched the dancers accompanied only by the sound of their feet as they fell or their hands as they clapped. But put together in this way, I became like Remy in the film Ratatouille (2007). I experienced combined flavour combinations as colour, shape and sound—I become enraptured. If I can greedily have my baroque with dance and my dance with a chamber orchestra on stage, I will. Heightened. Elevated. Glorious. For though this is cerebral, this collaboration, it is also from the heart. It made of me an animated rodent extolling the delights of cheese AND strawberries.

To the movement of music and the music of movement: bon appétit.




{Fiona Jopp, Todd Sutherland, Petros Treklis and Alana Sargent in Variation 10 (Image credit: Peter Greig)}

Notes:
[i] Myfanwy Piper quoted on working in collaboration with Britten on opera libretti, in Philip Rupprecht’s Britten’s Musical language, (U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p 9.
[ii] Rachel Duerden, 'Dancing in the imagined space of music', Dance research: the journal of the Society for Dance Research, Society for Dance Research, Volume 25, No. 1 (Summer 2007), pp 73–83.
[iii] Duerden continues: "In the complementary relationship of dance and music, dance seems to have moved into what Roger Scruton describes as 'the imagined space of music' and, at the same time, to have drawn music into the 'real space' of performance. The relationship is steeped in metaphor as we are invited to perceive one in terms of or in light of the other, and to consider the potential transfer of attributes from one to the other. Dance and music share significant features, such as rhythm, metre, tempo—the fact that they are structured in and through time—but also intrinsic differences, they each ‘mean’ differently...."
[iv] Rachel Duerden, 'Dancing in the imagined space of music', pp 73–83.
[v] Richard Tognetti on Britten: “Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations may be the principal reason people know of composer Bridge. But for Britten, he was an outstanding teacher who instilled in him excellent technique and discipline, including two cardinal rules: 'One was that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other—obviously connected with the first—was his scrupulous attention to good technique, the business of saying clearly what was in one's mind.'" Note, Illuminated Melbourne programme, 2015, p. 6.
[vi] Rafael Bonachela, 'The making of Variation 10', Sydney Dance Company’s YouTube channel, accessed 26^th October, 2015.

Childhood thrills brought on by orchestrated spills.

{Heather Holliday in Limbo at the Spiegeltent, Melbourne Festival 2015 (Image credit: Tony Virgo)}

Travelling the world without leaving my seat, Fire-eater, for Fjord Review. (Thanks Penelope.)

LIMBO
Spiegeltent, Alexandra Gardens
Tuesday 20^th of October, 2015
as part of Melbourne Festival

Coloured fanciful and utterly distorted, the window onto the world, trumpeted the circus of former glory: Let me show you the fantastical, long-necked "cameleopard"[i] of yore; behold “300 dancing girls in entrancing revels"[ii]. The promise of “the marvels of many nations,"[iii] straight to your door, open up, and say yes!

The circus of old had what today with knowledge and awareness it cannot. We now know the cruel price the animal performers[iv] and freak show amusements paid. But the circus today, why, it can still entertain, with contortionists, musicians, and sword swallowers who give the impression that there is no place else they’d rather be than beneath the big top, whip in hand, whipping the audience into a lather (or is that submission?). All the sounds, colours, and smells to sate the senses and evoke childhood thrills brought on by orchestrated spills. The Greatest Show on Earth: with all the aerial tricks and none of sorrow. To tease: plenty of navels on display[v].

With scant costumes, for both male and female performers, for reasons of allure (and practicality too), the audience, then as today, gets what it wants. Had Thomas Mann been seated alongside me in the Spiegeltent tent the other night, I could easily imagine chancing over my shoulder to read, scrawled upon the back of a cardboard coaster, the lines: "[hung] head-down from a trapeze.... She was an inapproachable Amazon of the realm of space beneath the canvas, high above the crowd, whose lust for her was transformed into awe." The thoughts expressed within the unfinished pages of Mann’s 1909 tale, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man as true then as of aerialist Evelyne Allard as an incarnation of Venus swinging from her hoop. 

Roll up, roll up, and watch these muscles flex. With white feathers on his shoulders and a little of Dr. John the Night Tripper beneath his hat, Ringmaster Elyas Kahn has brought his ensemble to town. On the banks of the Yarra River, direct from the U.K., Limbo is here, as part of Melbourne Festival. Unpacked from the chest, the death-defying, hand-balancing, internally-sprung tomfoolery of Danik Abishev; the Chinese pole and beat-boxing smooth stop-and-start controlled hijinks of Mikael Bres; the out-of-this-world fire-breathing, sword-swallowing, gum-chewing sass of Heather Holliday; the magnificent ‘mind-bending’ contortions of the tattooed Tigris (with forearms not unlike Popeye’s, and something of a measured roar); and the heavenly aerial acrobatics of Allard. With Mick Stuart on 'polymba', drums and bass, and Eamon McNelis (of The Band Who Knew Too Much and Flap! fame) on trumpet and sousaphone, bringing a little of the New Orleans brass band sound, the objective is clear: if you’ve a pulse, you will be entertained.

Limbo draws not only on circus stock roots, but also on the titillation of cabaret. With my waist un-synched, I may not quite have been transported back to Le Chat Noir in Montmartre in the late 1880s or Le Lido on the Champs-Élysées in the 1940s, but on a balmy spring eve, it came close, this melange, very close. In the blue smoky haze and dim lighting we all became a little of our own inner Toulouse-Lautrec or Marlene Dietrich.

While it may feature many tantalizing ‘how do they do that?’ back bends to accompanying musical creak-crack score, Limbo, in this case, borrows its name from the free-rule positioning between heaven and hell. Operating on an alternate plane, it is from here that the theatrical play occurs, with its symbolic flames from Lucifer’s domain below and its floaty white feathers falling from the pearly wings of angels above. In a state of limbo, anything is possible: which way will you go?

Flouting rules always holds appeal, especially in the world of cabaret and the burlesque, where it never fails to seduce with its offer of escapism without the consequences. Hailing from the South of France, Bres, in Breton-stripes and red neck kerchief, charmingly plays up his literature and art major credentials as the romantic artist-in-a-garret only later, sans top and atop the sway pole, revelling in shaking his sweat upon the agog audience below. With one swoop, Bres descended upon the crowd and successfully retrieved a woman’s purse from her lap, eliciting excited squeals. Picking pockets by sway pole, making Fagin proud, never has someone so appeared to enjoy being ‘robbed’ as on the night I attended. Holliday, too, as the embodiment of all things Coney Island, pleasured in spraying the peep show crowds as she released her fiery Dragon’s breath. With fire blanket and safety gloves on, the wide-eyed Spiegeltent usher, with a near unbroken focus during her act, added to the sense of sideshow danger I craved. My face hot, my eyebrows singed, or so it felt. To my nostrils: the smell of fuel.

Inverted, with legs in the air, Abishev, who joined the circus at four-years-of-age, single-handedly appeared to hop with relative ease from one hand-balancing post to the next. In a display of extreme composure and focus, topped with a bowler hat, I could not see the beginning of the motion that propelled him so. How is the supporting arm not bent? How can the body balance upside down, not in a vertical line, but with legs askew? Through training, trust, and dedication, the impossible off-centre balance had been achieved, and all dressed up with a few cheekily calculated wobbles to test the nerves of the most seasoned punter. Indeed, perhaps Allard, whose mid-air hoop routine seemed to draw less of a collective gasp from the audience, needs to include a few ‘whoops! almost!’ moments. Unlike the world of ballet, where effort is often hidden to the delight of the crowd, in this arena, the thrills come from perceived corrected teeters; think: Marilyn Monroe’s high-heeled totter.

This sense of playful risk culminated in Abishev, Bres, and Holliday's sequence atop the sway poles. As the pace increased, so did the sense that they might collide in spectacular fashion. Echoing jack-in-the-boxes of the underworld, the three swung back and forth, meeting in the middle, but crash they never did. Abishev was especially masterful at dipping his head to the side and back like a gull, and Bres called upon the brakes he employed earlier with his Chinese pole routine to hover mid-flight.

Purgatory never looked so good as when the flames licked the (free-standing) ladder up which Abishev scaled. Runaway to the circus, if you’ve no fear of heights! Josephine Baker, she would have been proud and Ernest Hemingway’s sentiments sill ring true: "The circus is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a happy dream."

Notes:
[i] The "cameleopard" turned out to be a giraffe, as the mysteries of the world moved from the 'discovered' realm of explorers to the big top’s window on the world.
[ii] Ringling Brothers advertisement from 1913, in an essay by Dominique Jando, 'Wonders of the World Await You', The Circus 1870s–1950s, ed. by Noel Daniel, (Germany: Taschen),  p. 111.
[iii] The world map depicted on W. W. Cole’s 1881 circus courier sent a clear message to its readers: The circus will bring them "the marvels of many nations".
[iv] Stefan Moore and Susan Lambert's 2015 documentary, Tyke: Elephant Outlaw, should be compulsory viewing.
[v] In 1943, the two-piece costume of aerialist Ethel Jennier of the Russell Bros. circus "anywhere but the circus or in musical productions.... would have been considered inappropriate." Jano’s essay, 'Venuses of the Age: The Female Performer Emancipated', The Circus 1870s–1950s, p. 167.


{(Today, I am the (burrowing) owl.) In the borrowed costume from Petrouchka, designed by Alexandre Benois, c 1911, with a Burrowing owl (Speotyto cunicularia).}

{In the borrowed costume for a star, designed by Pavel Tchelitchew, c 1928, with a West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus).}


{In the borrowed costume (for a Maiden) from The Rite of Spring, after Nicholas Roerich, 1913, with an Olive colobus (Procolobus verus).}

+ Salvaged Relatives, recently

Motion is steady. Motion is frenetic.

{Last Work performed by Batsheva Dance Company (Image credit: Batsheva Dance Company website)}

In absolute awe. Especially for Fjord Review, Craftwork. (Thank-you, Penelope, I enjoyed taking you in my pocket.)

Orhad Naharin’s Last Work (2015)
Batsheva Dance Company

Performances seen:
Saturday 17^th October
Sunday 18^th October

State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne
Melbourne Festival

Performed by Batsheva Dance Company dancers season 2014/15

"The soul desires to dwell with the body because without the members of the body it can neither act nor feel." —Leonardo da Vinci

Motion builds slowly. In the form of a wave that ripples through the body. Omri Drumlevich moves as if possessed, eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind me. With his left arm outstretched in counter balance and his supporting leg bent, the right side of his body gives over to an undulation of controlled movement. His right hand rests upon his bent suspended right leg, his forearm in direct line with his shin, as if fusing two parts of the body previously independent. The hand now fixed on the knee, the familiar line of the body altered, through Drumlevich's body courses an inward sensation made outwardly visible. As his stirring builds, the pace quickens, and I am mesmerised. Without theatrics and pomp, he appears to have altered the range of movement in the ball and socket workings of his knee joint.

Motion is steady. In the form of a lone dancer on a treadmill, tirelessly running. Dressed in bright blue, the runner remains a constant, adjusting how I perceive time and space. Their pace never alters, their direction never changes, their destination, never reached. The runner remains steadfast as the dancers on the stage before and around them explore an impossible range of motions. The juxtaposition between the runner's enduring pattern and the uncertainty of the dancers, itself a beautiful conversation. Both represent unwavering determination, but both runner and dancers reach it differently. The message I read in Ohad Naharin's Last Work (2015): more things unite us than divide us.

Motion is frenetic. In the form of wild energy unleashed, unmasked, unrobed. It pulsates and shakes to the relentless 4/4 beat of Hysteric’s 'Club Life'. The driving sound of Baltimore rapper, Sagat’s aptly named 'Few Mysteries Solved in a Year of Contact' and the accompanying action on the stage above all reveal to me how hard it is to remain true to your own course as those around you do otherwise. As Oscar Ramos, in low runners’ crouch, moves his head forward and back, forward and back, as if 'eating sound', Zina (Natalya) Zinchenko thrusts her hips side to side as she whips her right hand in-out, in-out, in-out before her face. In a tight knot on the stage, each dancer repeats their own looped, instinctual movement and a machine is made of varying parts: all linked, all different. Converting movement into heat and energy, an engine of dancers appears, with Maayan Sheinfeld, a spark plug, and no shortage of dancers vying for the role of crankshaft, connecting rod, and piston. For though I’m likening this engine to a machine, it is completely animal. Primal impulses, unmistakably, front and centre, an echo of Nijinsky’s erotic Faun.

Motion is carefully measured. In the form of the pas de deux performed by Hsin-Yi Hsiang and Adi Zlatin. Moving as if one body, side by side, the cruelty of this metered tenderness comes from the fact that I cannot truly look at both their expressions at the one time. I leap from face to face, limb to limb, like some frenzied bee in search of nectar, trying to take it all in, again noting more similarities than differences. And while I cannot understand the words of the four Romanian lullabies that feature alongside the likes of Luminox’s high-key tinkling 'Tantrum', I understand their universal meaning, or rather, I feel their meaning. As Naharin explains, lullabies are "sung by horrible parents and wonderful parents, too". And it is this expression of "joy and pain and sadness [living] in the same space; [that] don’t contradict each other"[i] that Last Work drives home for me.

Though we don’t remain in the nursery for long, as William Barry, clad in yellow shorts, relentlessly wields a grogger, a Purim noisemaker, and drowns out the gun-polishing suggestive actions of his fellow dancer, the Haman villain to Purim's story, perhaps.[ii] With momentum causing the board to clack against the gearwheel, Barry has become an instrument. On the heels of the joyous Decadance (one night only at Melbourne Festival), fresh from its Tel-Aviv premiere, Last Work challenges me to work. It demands the audience work at keeping pace. It demands and deserves engagement.






{Last Work performed by Batsheva Dance Company (Image credit: Batsheva Dance Company website)}

In the temporary seats installed in the State Theatre above the filled-in orchestra pit, the audience participation that only the other night I had longed for. In the second row, I feel in the midst of the rapidly shifting convulsions of the eighteen dancers. Bathed in the bright lights, up close, real close, so close as to reach out and touch, the reverberation fells almost forbidden. Privy to every twitch and flex, above my head soars the embodiment of Naharin’s Gaga. "Body builders with soft spine," aware of their "explosive power"[iii]. When Ian Robinson lands crouched at the foot of the stage and appears to look right through me, I fail to return his gaze. Seated up close, the intensity of expression across the faces of all the dancers is fantastically unnerving so as to feel almost voyeuristic.

As Hsiang crouches like a small pebble atop Shamel Pitts, I am reminded of moments within Sadeh21 when one dancer stood atop another in a cat-like pose. As Iyar Elezra in small white tutu vibrates before the convulsing Berry: the familiar tapping into of unconscious, animalistic movement. As Pitts slithers beneath three dancers in bridge pose, the fluidity of their upper bodies, hypnotic. The recurring motifs of balance, sensual connectedness, and the ability to yield, are all in evidence. "Gaga is a lot about developing bigger awareness, so what is delicate becomes more delicate, what is wild becomes more wild, what is quick becomes more quick. It’s about the flow of energy and being available, open. Even if we don’t move, it is a state of mind that you are available — for anything."[iv] Just as there are recurring motifs within the choreography, within Gaga there are recognisable tendues, arabesques, and bourrées alongside jaw-dropping backbends that hover, teasingly, just above the floor from a wide-legged stance (Elezra and Zinchenko: I’m looking at you). The emphasis feels always about expression over an overt display of virtuosity, even though I am frequently left in awe by its energy and power.

As coloured confetti not gunfire rains, a white flag is proudly waved, and Robinson sets to making a structure from packaging tape, radiating from a standing microphone. A cacophony of noise! The screech of tape, that deafening sound! Binding the dancers together, one at a time, with an endless roll (a seamless transitioning between three rolls of tape worn as bracelets), the independent parts become one. Resistance, in this case, literally means tape garrotting your neck. The tape at first seems playful in its futility, but the resulting restrictions read as anything but. Unable to move in the free means previously relished, Last Work draws to dramatic, inevitable close. However, I read a message of hope in the curtain call where the dancers share two pairs of small scissors[v] and cut themselves free. As with Decadance beginning before it started, so too, Last Work does not end, and I cannot wait to see what follows.

Notes:
[i] Ohad Naharin quoted by Anna Della Subin, ‘Going Gaga of Ohad Naharin’, The New York Times Style Magazine, 19^th September, 2015 (accessed 16th October, 2015).
[ii] Rabbi Shimon Apisdorf, 'Grogger: The Purim Noisemaker', excerpt from The One Hour Purim Primer: Everything a Family Needs to Understand, Celebrate and Enjoy Purim, Leviathan Press, 1995 (accessed 19th October, 2015).
[iii] Naharin on his movement language of Gaga, Batsheva Dance Company website (assessed 19^th October, 2015).
[iv] Naharin quoted by Francesca Horsley, 'Deca Dance, by the Batsheva Dance Company', New Zealand Listener, 9^th January, 2014 (accessed on 16^th October, 2015).
[v] A small aside: as someone who works with collage, I especially delight in seeing scissors being used on the stage. To anyone who has even wrapped multiple packages: you will undoubtedly enjoy the brown packaging tape sequence as you marvel at Robinson’s dexterity. The tape doesn’t split! The end of the roll appears easily found!

{Last Work performed by Batsheva Dance Company, 2015}

{Last Work performed by Batsheva Dance Company, 2015}

Uno. Duo. Under My Skin.

{Decadance performed by Batsheva Dance Company (Image credit: David Harris)}

All things joyous and dark. Wild and Free especially for Fjord Review.

DECADANCE
Batsheva Dance Company
Choreographer and Artistic Director: Ohad Naharin

Thursday 15^th October, 2015
State Theatre, Melbourne
as part of Melbourne Festival

Segments from Ohad Naharin’s creations:
Anaphase (1993), Mabul (1992), Naharin's Virus (2001), Zachacha (1998), Sadeh21 (2011), Telophaza (2006), Three (2005), MAX (2007)

Performed by Batsheva Dance Company dancers season 2014/15

Finding my seat at Ohad Naharin and the Batsheva Dance Company's Decadance, the performance has already begun. In his own private world, on the stage of the State Theatre, Shamel Pitts, in a loose black suit and un-tucked white shirt, is dancing and I am so glad I have arrived with enough time to catch his playful, loose-kneed, liquid groove. To the side-to-side sway of early Samba and late '50s Bossa Nova, his moves call to mind how we might all dance if no one were watching. It is the contented, inward, and liberated dance of getting ready for a party, ironing one's pants to the sounds of Jackie Davis at the console playing the danceable 'Glow Worm Cha Cha Cha', and later changing one's earrings as Peruvian soprano Yma Súmac's pours her allure into the 'Gopher Mambo'. Unhurried, undeterred, pleasurable. The mood is smooth, ripe, and expectant. And as Pitts mimics a wriggly glow worm on the floor, the still-settling audience applauds. With house lights still on, the tone is set.

I am in the hip-swinging, toe-tapping world of Naharin, where movement is transmitted from one to another, from dancer to dancer, from dancer to audience, summoned from within the body to outside of the body. This is what movement looks like when the body does the listening and responds accordingly to its own secret writing at its core. This is freedom. This is unlocked expression. And it is euphoric. It, too, like our crooners earlier, ought be bottled and dispensed on grey-mood days. Watching Pitts, I want to shake like that. Moreover, watching Pitts, I want to be him, the embodiment of The John Buzon Trio's 'It Must Be True'; and so it shall be, if this beginning is as true as it feels.

Originally created to celebrate Naharin’s ten years with Israel’s Bathsheva Dance Company, Decadance brings together several, variable components. For the one-night-only Melbourne performance, as part of Melbourne Festival, the line-up included sections from Anaphase (1993), Mabul (1992), Naharin's Virus (2001), Zachacha (1998), Sadeh21 (2011), Telophaza (2006), Three (2005), and MAX (2007). Naharin has described it "like a game, a playground where we can subtract, add and erase the different sections of the works we have already done and look at what we do from another angle. I take unfinished stories and put them together. The coherence comes from the sense of the whole."[i]

Breaking through the smoothness, the King of the Surf Guitar, Dick Dale’s "let us rejoice" 'Hava Nagila' cuts the scene to black. In the dark theatre, on tenterhooks, though still, inwardly I am ready and waiting to spring. I am fully engaged from the outset. I have a sense of what is to come (thanks to film and the pixelated recordings found on YouTube), but this is the first time I have seen the company perform with my eyes, unfiltered. With my senses on high alert, a curve of black suited dancers stands wide-legged, each before a foldable chair. Against the black backdrop of the stage, this illuminated half-circle reminds me of a serpent or an animals' spine. But equally, with their black hats, they could be Hasidim (“pious ones”). Performed by Naharin and The Tractor's Revenge, the traditional cumulative folksong 'Echad mi Yodea' ("Who Knows One?") follows the musical beat and, by getting under my skin, charges it further. The intensity of both this familiar Passover song coupled with the dancers own heartfelt vocalisation of the words cannot help but make you wish to be up there on the stage rather than seated in the stalls.

The dancers pass the movement from one to another like a bullet ricocheting or a current surging. The last in line: he receives the blow. He falls to the ground. They act in unison, save the one who collapses, and the one who rebels and leaps up to stand on his chair. White-shirted bellies up to the ceiling, arms and legs flung wide, this is automatic, felt movement, infectious as it builds, and fast. Where it not for the seated arc, I doubt I’d be able to pinpoint the source. Movements are repeated, and variations added as first a jacket is removed and tossed into the centre to make a crumpled loose heap. Then boots, shirts, and finally suit pants. In wide plié, some actions call to mind fast-forwarded footage of a cartoon character eating corn or a typewriter returning to a new line. Other universal actions highlight the animal in all humans, recognised or not. And at sensation’s close, as the dancers on their hands and knees scramble to gather up the discarded clothes scenes of the Holocaust, whether intended or not, come to mind. For though Naharin's choreography has no narrative, when you work at conveying feeling, a story is inevitably told. In this piece, and those that followed, I felt free to 'read' the movements as I would an inkblot. This free message echoes the free movements of all the dancers from the company. And so, later, the line of dancers at the foot of the stage became a red-figured Athenian vase. Against the dark cloth, bodies lit, they glowed a continuous line.

The pieces in Decadance are as playful as they are empowering and affecting. Naharin's choreography allows, or rather, encourages opportunities for discovery, and this is true for the dancers and for the audience, and it was certainly true of my own experience. This is what occurs when you work in the space just beyond the familiar. "We can turn the volume on listening…. and very delicate stuff can become wow."[ii] 'Wow' was found in Adi Zlatin’s broken walk in the fields of Sadeh21. With every step, each leg appeared to rotate in a socket five times its size, causing her thigh to roll backwards, upwards, and forwards, replicating a toddler’s waddle. 'Wow' was found in the fluid intimacy of the pas de deux to Vivaldi’s 'Fac ut arbeat', so beautiful in its searching and longing as to make you weep. Balance tested, backs bent, weight shifted, and the exquisite agony of hopping on one leg: knowing when to change the pace and adjust the volume is vital to Decadence’s ecstasy, making it a new work rather than a disconnected 'greatest hits'. Read as a whole, there is light to shade, slow to fast, and being 'unengaged' is not an option.

This sense of engagement is typified by actual, euphoric audience participation, the likes of which I have never seen, to a sped-up, electrified reconstruction of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' (by Harold Arlen and adapted by Marusha). The dancers once more suited and with black hats worn forward, sexy Fedora style, descend the stage in search of new dance partners. Connected, assured, and inviting, this is not cringe-worthy participation but sheer generosity in train. Drawn up on to the stage, colourful audience members in sundresses with '50s swing, a suited man (who I allowed myself to cast as an academic letting their hair down), and a woman in fantastical gold boots; the hot Melbourne carefree night engineered wardrobe perfection, and the resulting thrill this work called forth from deep within is one I will always cherish. To all of those infected audience members who cut loose: I am eternally grateful. To the woman who "sway me smooth, sway me now" hip locked, Dean Martin style with the moustachioed Last Man Standing, in particular: you were marvellous. "Yielding is constant while we are ready to snap.... We explore multi-dimensional movement, we enjoy the burning sensation in our muscles, we are aware of our explosive power and sometimes we use it. We change our movement habits by finding new ones, we can be calm and alert at once. We become available."[iii]

As I wait for tonight's premiere of Naharin’s Last Work (2015), with new eyes, "calm and alert", I work on my own moves to the guttural counting of 'Uno Duo'. One: the body in contrapposto. Two: "a little teapot, short and stout". Three: an open hand above the head like a cockatoo's crest. Four: 'make' like an Egyptian. Created by Naharin, under the pseudonym Maxim Warratt, my one, one-two, one-two-three, one-two-three-four sequence has all the expressive, rapid sensations I can conjure, but sadly none of the grace, balance, and skill of the Batsheva dancers, "wild, and free"[iv].

Notes:
[i] Ohad Naharin in interview, 'A Toolbox for Dancers', TanzRaumBerlin, accessed 15^th October, 2015.
[ii] (Transcribed from audio) Naharin discussing his dance process, 'Batsheva Dance Company: 'It’s about making the body listen'', The Guardian, published 14^th November, 2013, accessed 15^th October, 2015.
[iii] Naharin on GAGA movement, Batsheva Dance Company website, accessed 16^th October, 2015.
[iv] "All good things are wild, and free." —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

{Sadeh21 performed by Batsheva Dance Company}

{Decadance performed by Batsheva Ensemble}


{Decadance performed by Batsheva Ensemble}

{Batsheva Ensemble (2012)}

+ Batsheva Dance Company (YouTube)

Front to back. Back to front.

{From the workstation, piled (pet-proof) high, comes new Salvaged Relatives for October.}

Back to front, and front to back, with a "miniature and portrait painter," or rather, with a sharp pair of scissors, a brush, some glue, and a sharpness of 2B pencils, things end up almost as intended, but not quite. A twist left, a tail right, there's always room for a Russian (Vladimir) doll from the second half of the 18th century's headpiece of glass, pearls, linen, cotton and wood to fall into a new (and more fitting) place. Following September's larger cabinet card mysteries and extinct animals, I present you with a selected sextet of recent Salvaged Relatives cartes de visite from the drawing board, created to the sound of spotted doves a-wooing. With no "negatives kept," but always the possibility of a copy (in the form of a zine), Amelia Berry and friends await your gaze, with the "pause" but not the "leap" of Vaslav Nijinsky.

{Six Salvaged Relatives collages on cartes de visite join the family, and I couldn't be more pleased.}

I consider my studio as a kitchen garden. Here, there are artichokes. There, potatoes. Leaves must be cut so that the fruit can grow. At the right moment, I must prune. I work like a gardener.... Things come slowly.... Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. I must graft. I must water.... Ripening goes on in my mind. So I'm always working at a great many things at the same time.
—Joan Miró, 1959

Beastarium
Until Sunday the 22nd of November
Dubbo Regional Gallery
Western Plains Cultural Centre
76 Wingewarra Street
Dubbo, NSW

2015 Geelong acquisitive print awards
Until Sunday 22nd of November
Geelong Galley
Little Malop Street
Geelong, Victoria

+ The perks of waiting
+ Lenni and me, sometimes, playfully

Pure, unfathomable joy.

{Vitesse | Imogen Chapman (Image credit: Justin Ridler)}

2016, I am ready for you, and your guardian swans. The Forgotten Land, especially for Fjord Review. (Thank-you, as always, Penelope.)

The Australian Ballet 2016 Season

"There are no days more full in childhood than those days that are not lived at all, the days lost in a book. I remember waking out of one such book beside the sewing-machine beneath the window on the river in the barrack living room to find my sisters all around me. They had unlaced and removed one of my shoes and placed a straw hat on my head. Only when they began to move the wooden chair on which I sat away from the window light did I wake out of the book, to their great merriment."[i]

This "strange and complete happiness when all sense of time is lost, of looking up from the pages and thinking it is still nine or ten in the morning, to discover it is well past lunchtime" author John McGahern (1934–2006) describes mirrors my own "pure, unfathomable joy"[ii] when adrift within a ballet performance. For my pleasure’s own sake, it feels, the structure of time is turned on its head. A close solidarity is formed in the theatre and my affection grows with each visit. I have, in the space of a very short time (but, time, what is that?) become a Balletomane (though what to do with that clunky ‘t’?). A devotee of ballet, it requires less self-discipline than a dancer, and all of the gratification. And like McGahern, the verb ‘wake’ here is fitting[iii]. I often ‘wake’ from the theatre as if in a delirious dream-state that by a pin could be pricked — it is perhaps for this reason that I am chiefly silent when I leave a performance, preferring to slowly come to the surface and stay longer in my bubble. In the sanctum of the theatre, ballet awakens dreams, courts escapism and affords guaranteed transformation. Where I a gambler, it’d be a sure bet.

Transformation is the theme behind The Australian Ballet’s 2016 season, launched late September, during David McAllister’s The Sleeping Beauty’s Melbourne debut. The ability to transform in the literal and figurative sense is the thread that runs through next year’s programme, which begins in Brisbane (exclusively) with Alexei Ratmansky’s magically surreal, shape-shifting Cinderella.

Based in Melbourne, I am waiting to commence my year with Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse set to a score by composer Michael Nyman; Jiří Kylián’s Forgotten Land accompanied by the dark, eroding coastline of Benjamin Britten’s score; and William Forsythe’s 1987 work, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated as part of the triple bill, Vitesse. A visceral journey through “lost homelands, .... and lost time,”[iv] promised and eagerly awaited. As a considered classical counterpoint to Vitesse’s sharp-edged bite, a George Balanchine double bill, Symphony in C, will run exclusively in Sydney, accompanied by two new works by dancers and choreographers Alice Topp and Richard House as part of a pared back Bodytorque programme — were that Bodytorque was testing its muscle's might in Melbourne.


{Swan Lake | Amber Scott and Adam Bull (Image credit: Justin Ridler)}


{Coppélia \ Dimity Azoury (Image credit: Justin Ridler)}

Edwardian costume at the ready, I am also keenly anticipating my return to Stephen Baynes' Swan Lake, which I first saw performed as part of the repertoire in 2012. Originally created to mark the company’s 50^th anniversary, this tale of transcendent love, the earth bound and the other-worldly, the white of Odette to the black of Odile, like calling in on the masterpieces in the collection of the National Gallery is sure to uncloak something new.

With romance, tragedy, swordplay and sorcery continues the 2016 season, with Houston Ballet's Romeo and Juliet choreographed by Stanton Welch (and exclusive to the Melbourne season), and Dr Coppelius' mechanical doll, Coppélia, brought to life and staged in the charm of the 1920s former-picture-house-cum-theatre, St Kilda’s Palais Theatre[v].

The body’s ability to renew, revolutionise, and stimulate is at the very real heart of the season’s centrepiece with the Australian premiere of John Neumeier’s bouquet to the brilliance of Nijinsky, the man, choreographer, and dancer. A non-linear "biography of the soul, .... of feelings and sensations"[vi], on the heels of the recent World Ballet Day[vii], that I have to wait until September of next year is sure to prove a great cruelty.

From the company class warm-up with Steven Heathcote to Graeme Murphy’s cygnets and guardian swans from Act II being polished by 'flock master' Eve Lawson, the behind-the-scenes look at five-hours within a day in the company illustrates the power of transformation. From pirouettes en dedans and en dehors seen earlier in class to a rehearsal of Act III’s wedding celebration of Aurora and her Prince, it dawns on me that I am privy to one the greatest magical transfigurations possible within the world of ballet, within all art. In the studio, coryphée, Valerie Tereshchenko, performs the Lilac Fairy’s solo, but on stage, in costume, she becomes the Lilac Fairy. Everyday metamorphosis for pleasure’s own sake: roll on, 2016, roll on.


{Symphony in C | Valerie Tereshchenko (Image credit: Justin Ridler)}

Notes:
[i] John McGahern, All Will Be Well: A Memoir, (London: Faber & Faber, 2006) p. 237.
[ii] McGahern, p.237–238.
[iii] Bookworm Anne Fadiman refers to McGahern’s description of to “wake out of a book” in the preface to Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. ix.
[iv] Jiří Kylián's Forgotten Land, as part of Vitesse: Ballet without Borders, is described as a "harrowing picture of lost homelands, lost lovers, and lost time" in The Australian Ballet 2016 Media Kit, 2015, p.5.
[v] The Australian Ballet first performed at the Palais Theatre in 1964.
[vi] John Neumeier, production notes on Nijinsky, Hamburg Ballet, accessed 24^th of September, 2015.
[vii] World Ballet Day 2015 featured The Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada, and San Francisco Ballet live for 23 hours on October the 1^st, 2015. All five hours of The Australian Ballet live stream is on YouTube until the 1^st of November, 2015.

Pins in spin.

{A shared affinity with a Giant hummingbird (Patagona gigas).}


{....but then again. We'll have to wait and see.}

Because lately I can't fathom where the Time has gone. In cahoots with Days, though I've the map, I've been given the slip. Months spin fast like a whirligig. Truth Cats wear sunglasses, and pose before coloured velour and satin backcloths (Show cats, I through XI, you exquisite beauties, how I adore you). Baron's court Princesses, when not flying on canon balls. Artists' books are made in part from everyday garments (Art of the Cuff). Feathers fly, and inky mishaps occur. Waxworks become fantastically real. And while the cat's away, the dog, as they say, will try his paw at directing.

Spinning in the middle of all this activity, World Ballet Day, a fluttering celebration for my carefree pins. (Two collages of moving parts created for my own amusement and your enjoyment.)

 

A video posted by Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison (@gracialouise) on Sep 30, 2015 at 8:05pm PDT

{Happy #WorldBalletDay, dear @ausballet. #PowerToTransform}

 

A video posted by Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison (@gracialouise) on Oct 6, 2015 at 1:07am PDT

{Footloose and fancy-free.}

{The gentlest of owls. the Laughing owl (Sceloglaux albifacies). Last recorded sighting July, 1914. "It could always be brought from its lurking place in the rocks, after dusk, by the strains of an accordion....the bird would silently flit over the face of the performer and finally take up its station in the vicinity, and remain within easy hearing till [the music] had ceased." —Sir Walter Buller, New Zealand ornithologist}


{In accord with an animal who has black currants for eyes. (The central Australian Desert Rat-kangaroo (Caloprymnus campestris) was last seen in 1935.)}


{In harmony with the Seychelles parakeet (Psittacula wardi). (The last recorded sighting of the Seychelles parakeet was June 1870. Little is known of its habits, save for a fondness for maize.)}


{Thursday's costume, a dragon with scales of overlapping gold and silver sequins. (Designed by Travis Banton for actress Anna May Wong in her role as Tu Tuan, a nightclub entertainer in the 1934 film, Limehouse Blues.)}


{Florence Hunter's felt a connection with the Guadalupe caracara (Polyborus lutosus). Now extinct, the last recorded sighting of the Guadalupe caracara was on the 1st December 1900 by collector Rollo Beck. Upon visiting the Guadalupe Island, off Baja, California, he saw eleven birds fly overhead, and shot nine of them.}

Donna Maree Haby
28.07.1966 – 22.09.2015
♡

An 'irregular pearl' collected for my Every Embellishment memory theatre.

As was the intention of the last ballet of the 2015 Melbourne season, I fell for the dazzling visual effect of Beauty: Don your golden headpiece worthy of a Sun King, I'm taking you to palace. The Belle of the Ball, for Fjord Review. (Thank-you Penelope.)

The Australian Ballet

The Sleeping Beauty (2015)
Choreography: Marius Petipa
Production and additional choreography: David McAllister
Music: Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Costume and set design: Gabriela Tylesova
Design Associate: Kat Chan
Dramaturge: Lucas Jervies
Lighting design: Jon Buswell

Music Director and Chief Conductor Nicolette Fraillon with Orchestra Victoria

Thursday 17th September
Aurora: Natasha Kusch
Prince: Daniel Gaudiello
Lilac: Miwako Kubota
Florine: Jessica Fyfe
Bluebird: Marcus Morelli 

Tuesday 22nd September
Aurora: Ako Kondo
Prince: Chengwu Guo
Lilac: Amy Harris 
Florine: Benedicte Bemet
Bluebird: Marcus Morelli 

The 3^rd and 8^th performances of David McAllister’s The Sleeping Beauty

In his own cabinet of natural curiosities, the Amsterdam-based pharmacist, Albertus Seba (1665–1736), placed exotic plants and corals, birds and butterflies, and slithering snakes alongside shells in fantastical fanned formations to delight the eye. In the Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director, David McAllister’s first full-length production and choreographic debut with a staging of Petipa and Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, it is not hard to surmise that as a long-term former dancer with the company and now at the helm as director for his fifteenth year[i], McAllister himself has constructed something of his own golden ‘wunderkammer’ with this work. A production replete with gold sprinkling from the ceiling, twinkling chandeliers, round like jellyfish, and greened nymphs that weave in and out like a serpentine vine; a true baroque 'irregular pearl' of a ballet, years in the making, and legacy building.

In McAllister’s 2015 The Sleeping Beauty, treasure is plentiful and I, too, as wily collector, set to furnishing my growing collection of ballet keepsakes and highlights. With their raggedy rat-tails and long white noses that call to mind Seba-worthy conical shells, I will add Carabosse’s quintet of mischief-makers to my wonder chamber. Though I very much doubt guest artist and former principal, the fabulously vengeful, Lynette Wills, as the wronged Carabosse, will spare them without a fight. So, too, the ornate shell-like columns, designed by Gabriela Tylesova, which appear en pointe. Resting on tiny tips, eight columns that in architectural reality could not support a ceiling, but in the transformative world of the theatre (where belief, amongst other things, is defied), twirl upwards with aplomb. This is nature, but with the emphasis on it polished, made fanciful, and presented as a fairy tale. The objective: to unashamedly delight.

And delight it did. I was fortunate to see this new production twice. Once up high in the balcony, and one week after opening night, in the stalls, up so close as to hear the costumes swish and the baubles clack. To memory’s treasure box, both views I’ll add and together make a whole.





Visible only from up high, the Lilac Fairy’s purple floral swirl projected upon the stage, and the hand of dramaturge Lucas Jervies evident. From within my grasp, the magnetic Bluebird and Princess Florine, whose pas de deux allure rendered me a cat set to pounce. Marcus Morelli’s clarinet wings inspired flute-light flight in both Jessica Fyfe (Thursday) and Benedicte Bemet (Tuesday). And as my collection is limitless and broad in its scope, I’ll pop by their feathered sides, the light-of-step fairies: Grace, Joy, Generosity, Temperament, Musicality, and the wisdom of Lilac. Next up, the four suitors: the princes Spanish, Hungarian, English, and Swedish. With their swords aloft, and moustaches waxed, they’ll make a shining, heart-a-fluttering addition. And all before interval! In McAllister’s Beauty, Act I concludes as Aurora and the kingdom fall into enchanted slumber, leaving Acts II and III (also separated by an interval) as two shorter-length gallops. With opulence's running time whittled back, this Beauty, happily feels anything but restrained.

To my centrepiece of gold, silver, sapphire and diamond, I’m adding both castings of Aurora and her bookworm Prince Désiré. Though there is only one Fabergé-inspired glass egg between them, into my Every Embellishment memory theatre, I’m placing the graceful light of Natasha Kusch and the longing-through-every-extension of Daniel Gaudiello, alongside the exquisitely regal Ako Kondo and the capable-of-altering-speed-in-mid-flight glory of Chengwu Guo. All four, the embodiment of the Baroques’ gilded illusion and light! Complemented by Lisa Bolte’s compassionate Queen Florestan, a former Aurora-cum-kindly-monarch, the balance between light and (Carabosse’s) shade shall be held. The Queen, given the respect denied to Carabosse (presented as the quite rightly aggrieved — who wouldn’t invite the God Mother to the christening?), an allegory on beauty herself.

To Petipa’s purity-of-line alchemy, McAllister has formed a bouquet around the young Aurora (in the first act based on a flower motif), before having her emerge as a future stately queen, reflecting Tchaikovsky’s score for his transitioning Little Briar Rose. The corps de ballet, too, have been freed from warm prop 'goblet patrol' with additions made to the garland dance. The Rose Adagio shares the partnering between the four unsuccessful suitors, and lines of forest-dwelling nymphs now thread like green tendrils. [ii]

The storybook curiosities of Little Red Riding Hood and her Wolf-in-pursuit, Cinderella and her Prince Charming, Puss in Boots and the coquettish White Cat, have also been clipped for brevity’s sake. With Little Red Riding Hood carrying the picnic basket and Cinderella cleaning up, they now appear as character traits in Prince Désiré’s friends, in Act II's hunting party, and again in masquerade at the Palace wedding of Act III. [iii] And as I’ve rats to swoon over, and fairies with wigged hair like candy confection (from the sapient mauve of Miwako Kubota's Lilac to Dimity Azoury’s endless Joy), I am more than fine with this. I’ll take more of the grandiloquent celebration of baroque glory in (the character of) Little Red's place any day.





Underpinning all Beauty, fearlessness. A confident, well-placed fearlessness as exemplified by principal artist, and opening night’s Aurora, Lana Jones: "The ballet requires a lot of strength and sustained control and determination. When you’re out there performing and it’s so quiet, and you realise all eyes are on you .... any tiny little stumble feels so exaggerated, so you put that pressure on yourself that it has to be immaculate and perfect. But at the same time .... David definitely wants it to look spontaneous, like you’ve just made it up in that instant. He wants his Aurora to be very free. And that’s hard, because the technique is so dignified and structured — to look like you’re just floating away with it will, I think, be my biggest challenge, and it’s also what I’m most looking forward to bringing to the role...."[iv]

In a palace evocative of the Château de Versailles, Molière, Lully and Racine could well have been playing parlour games just out of sight. A glittering court for the long-awaited stately formality of the grand pas de deux, typified by Kondo and Guo, makes my collection near complete. Though separated by one hundred and more years, but true to the fantasy, I can only parrot and not better, fellow devotee, Léon Bakst, who said upon leaving the theatre: "I lived in a magic dream for three hours, intoxicated by fairies and princesses, by splendid palaces flowing with gold, by the enchantment of the old tale.”[v]

Notes:
[i] "David McAllister danced for the final time in Giselle on 24 March 2001 at the Sydney Opera House and became Artistic Director of The Australian Ballet in July 2001."
Artistic Staff company bio for David McAllister AM, accessed Wednesday 23^rd September, 2015.
[ii] David McAllister in Conversation with Virginia Trioli, State Theatre, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Saturday 19^th September, 2015, 5 pm–6 pm.
[iii] "Tylesova had the idea to make their Act II costumes subtly prefigure their Act III storybook guises and McAllister made their behavior follow suit: in act II the ‘bluebirds' spat with the ‘cats’, ‘Red Riding Hood’ carries the picnic basket, ‘Cinderella’ is always clearing things up."
Rose Mulready, 'Blossom Time', The Australian Ballet 2015 The Sleeping Beauty programme, page 15.
[iv] Principal artist, Lana Jones, on dancing Aurora, 'Lana Jones on dancing Aurora', Rose Mulready, Behind Ballet, 7^th September, 2015.
[v] Ismene Brown, ‘The Seed of Beauty', The Sleeping Beauty programme, page 11.

(All photographs of David McAllister's The Sleeping Beauty by Jeff Busby and Kate Longley, 2015.)

+ Theatre Tails in a Fairy Tale. For your amusement. (John S. Goodhall's Theatre: The Sleeping Beauty, New York: Atheneum, 1980; scanned illustrations from Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves, 2009; with Tchaikovsky snippet from The Sleeping Beauty)

+ Onwards! To 2016! A rosebud blush!

Costumed.

{In the Tigress Evening Ensemble by Gilbert Adrian, 1949, an affinity with the tiger (Panthera tigris) felt.} (Hey! That's my silhouette!)}

As new work is planned, paper is scored, marks are made, and measurements are thrice checked (thank-you Olive), Louise and I are chuffed that several of our (finished) collaborative works are soon-to-be or currently on display. Three group exhibitions, which we delighted in making new work for, are presented here today by a suite of Salvaged Relatives (on cabinet cards). Here's to inked, cuffed, and beastly contributions!

Opening tonight, Tuesday the 15th of September, an exhibition of modified French cuffs, including our unique state artists' book, Beneath my suit, I am..., at Lord Coconut.

Art of the Cuff
As part of Melbourne Fringe Festival
Until Saturday 3rd of October, 2015
Lord Coconut
Level 4 Carlow House
289 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

And opening on Friday the 26th of September at the Dubbo Regional Gallery, one red box of printed beasts, including our silvered lions and tigers, curated by Rona Green.

Beastarium
Saturday 19th of September to Sunday 22nd of November, 2015
Dubbo Regional Gallery
Western Plains Cultural Centre
76 Wingewarra Street
Dubbo, NSW

Finally, our artists' book, A Deck of Salvaged Relatives, is one of forty-two works currently being exhibited as part the 2015 Geelong acquisitive print awards.

2015 Geelong acquisitive print awards
Until Sunday 22nd of November, 2015
Geelong Galley
Little Malop Street
Geelong, Victoria




{John Hunter felt a kinship with the extinct Short-tailed Hopping-mouse (Notomys amplus) from Central Australia in the company of Leonardo's ermine. (With tail in paw, right over left.)}




{Spring riot in an Arnold Scaasi 1983 evening ensemble of pink silk organza poppies, accompanied by a critically endangered Golden arrow-poison frog (Atelopus zeteki).}




{With Darwin's rice-rat (Nesoryzomys darwini), last seen in January, 1929 on Indefatigable Island (I mean, on the working table).}




{With a nectar-loving Small Mauritian flying-fox (Pteropus subniger) last seen in the early 1800s and a Bornean Smooth-tailed Treeshrew (Dendrogale melanura) at the crown, tonight's nocturnal #SalvagedRelatives collage.}




{A new feathered collage of a Seychelles parakeet (Psittacula wardi). The last recorded sighting of this parakeet was June 1870, in the Seychelles. The reverse side of this cabinet card reads: "For Mother, 26th July 1887, Sandhurst". (Don't I know you?)}

+ Royal antelope (proof) meets Royal antelope (woodblock)

Found! Perpetual Motion.

{Andrew Killian and Vivenne Wong in Filigree and Shadow. (Image credit: Jeff Busby)}


{Brett Chynoweth, Jade Wood, Jill Ogai and Calvin Hannaford in In The Upper Room. (Image credit: Kate Longley)}

Perpetual Motion, my response to The Australian Ballet's recent triple bill, 20:21, especially for Fjord Review. (Thanks Penelope. At the other end of the spectrum, I now keenly await The Sleeping Beauty. What a September!)

The Australian Ballet’s 20:21

Symphony in Three Movements (1972)
Choreography: George Balanchine
Repetiteur: Eve Lawson
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Original lighting design: Ronald Bates
Reproduced by Graham Silver

Filigree and Shadow (2015)
Choreography: Tim Harbour
Music: 48nord (Ulrich Müller and Siegfried Rössert)
Commissioned by The Australian Ballet for Filigree and Shadow
Costume concept: Tim Harbour
Set design: Kelvin Ho
Lighting design: Benjamin Cisterne

In the Upper Room (1986)
Choreography: Twyla Tharp
Music: Philip Glass In The Upper Room
Staged by: Shelley Washington
Guest repetiteur: Danilo Radojevic
Costume design: Norma Kamali
Original lighting design: Jennifer Tipton
Reproduced by Graham Silver

Performances seen
Tuesday 1st September 2015
Wednesday 2^nd September 2015

Perpetual motion, states the first and second laws of thermodynamics, is believed impossible to produce, yet I unwittingly found it nesting within 20:21, The Australian Ballet’s recent triple bill. The continuous motion within George Balanchine's Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Tim Harbour's new work Filigree and Shadow (2015) and Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room (1986) circumvents such laws. Physicists, I’ll hear no more about it; you’ve been looking in the wrong places. There is a device that can make motion unstoppable and it can be found at the core of these three ballets.

Propelled by Igor Stravinsky’s score, continuous energy courses through Symphony in Three Movements as the dancers, explained Balanchine, "try to catch the music and do not, I hope, lean on it, using it instead for support and time frame."[i] Energy flexes its feet, and with outstretched arms, it flexes its hands too. Sometimes with palms visible and other times with fingers tipped upward as if emulating an aeroplane. Off-centred or with legs turned inward, it proudly alters the lines of the classical body. In choreography that is as transparent with its complexity-of-step and precision-required as it is bold, the feeling conveyed to me was one of an endless force. Though the curtain to my view came down and the dancers changed, somewhere, in some alternate world, it continued, unimpeded and unfading, a conversation between Balanchine and Stravinsky, between harp and piano, a great sweaty, unfailing machine. If you listen closely, you can hear the swish of a dancer's long ponytail as it comes unstuck from her dampened brow.

It is little wonder that performing within such a whirlpool of physicality, as Ty King-Wall explained, "is hard, and confusing! I’ve never been much of a 'counter' when I dance, I prefer to listen to the melody and take my cues from the highlights I hear in that. For this ballet, that’s impossible: we do a lot of dancing together, or in canon, so you need to be really precise! For example, there is a section in the third movement, the Fugue, where the three principal men dance together. We count it in tens, but the first four counts of the first two tens are in silence! All three of us then do the same piece of choreography, but in a two-count canon, and all facing a different direction!"[ii]

Stravinsky’s score, which premiered in 1946, is as indivisible from Balanchine's choreography, which premiered in 1972 in honour of the composer, as "the myriad influences that .... suffuse Symphony in Three Movements. There are references to the 1940s musical movies of Busby Berkeley and Esther Williams, embodied by Balanchine’s opening patterns of sexy, leggy, pony-tailed women; to the jazz era, which Balanchine evokes through syncopation and brisk athletic steps; to jitterbug and swing; and to the Asian culture that so captivated Stravinsky in the 1940s .... There is a combative element and relentless drive...."[iii]  And yet within this controlled intensity there is also calmness, as exemplified by the graceful and angular-shaped pas de deux performed by Rudy Hawkes and Amber Scott in the second movement[iv]. Playfully, tenderly, hands touched, but didn’t, and one body enfolded around another like a sigh. With assured, slow strokes, they momentarily appeared to swim across a lake, each in complete awareness of the other, and of each part of their own bodies, connected by movements that saw one yield as the other surfaced, and by what appeared as a shared space of concentration.

From the 20^th century, the program sparked to the present day with Harbour's Filigree and Shadow in raw sound electronic conversation with Siegfried Rössert and Ulrich Müller of 48nord. The orchestra having gone home, their pit now darkened, the movement set in motion by Symphony in Three Movements was supercharged, accelerated.

The movement, in this ballet, is weighted and earthbound, and primal in its directness. Rooted to and of the present, the movement is in a language I can easily read. It is familiar, this shadowed tension, but not expected. Above all, there is freedom of movement, of expression, of difference. Though the twelve dancers — eight male, four female — were all dressed alike and at times loomed like a pack of hunters as they carved through the space, to me, they were primarily individual, real, known. Jill Ogai had shed the satin greasepaint and costumed fleshiness of Cinderella’s Dumpy Stepsister — though perhaps her confident swagger laid bare something altogether more sinister. Perhaps behind the curved wall within an angled cell, designed by Kelvin Ho, there lay a disposed-of Dumpy. Silhouette altered: hair that was formally up high in a Balanchine ponytail was now worn in a loose bob that at times shielded the face or scraped back in a low ponytail, or a small man-bun, as befitted the sounds of "astringent horns recur[ing] like distant alarms, strings vibrat[ing] with laboratory precision, and underneath it all .... a propulsive industrial hum: a machine that’s never turned off."[v]

Charged with "being aggressively present,"[vi] forged from the landscape and appearing to glory in it, Tuesday’s stalking cast — Andrew Killian, Rudy Hawkes, Calvin Hannaford, Luke Marchant, Cameron Hunter, Shaun Andrews, Charles Thompson, Christopher Rogers-Wilson, Dimity Azoury, Vivienne Wong, Alice Topp, and Ogai. Wong and Killian, together, like metal conducting heat — are their cores aluminium, iron, or silver? Azoury, with blackened eyes, direct and powerful, from a plough-like pose, raised one leg skyward, and, with Hawkes’ aid, all but pulled herself upright to a standing-split. In choreography so furious-and assured-of-pace — I did see that, didn’t I? "A lot of the movement sits in the upper body, and the articulation you can get just from using your wrists, fingers, elbows and shoulders."[vii] Whether hawking above the shallows or with shoulders and backs rounded to simulate a cartoon villain walking high up on their toes, throughout the performance I’d know idea what was next nor where to look as the intensity built. This sensation reminded me of Marlon Brando's own acted-upon advice to never pause for too long in an open doorway, more or less telling the audience you’d not done speaking. Instead, Brando favoured keeping an audience 'on their toes', and this too, seems Harbour’s intent.

In part prompted by the innate survival techniques employed by birds in cyclone, Filigree and Shadow draws more on a sense of inner strength than one of menace. The dancers echoed birds fired like a slingshot from a storm’s nucleus. Buffeted by high winds, they correct their course, or with a passerines 'locked down' wings they ‘rode out’ the elements. With every muscle (or wing) wrung out like a wet towel, to me, this highly emotional work feels like it is about how we respond to a challenge. Instability and migratory marathons are best faced with fervency. I am rendered envious of the dancers’ cathartic liberation and this perhaps would almost be cruel — such expression, free-prowling whilst I sit immobile in the theatre, caught literally in Benjamin Cisterne's industrial headlights — where it not for the buoyancy and inclusiveness of Tharp's In the Upper Room, which feels on the threshold of a dream-state and waking.

Through the haze, my eyes tried to bring the forms in focus as they advanced and receded. Where it began and where it ended, I could not tell, and the effect: magical. Having held my breath earlier in Harbour’s shadows, I was again caught off guard, swept up by the playful, hypnotic nonchalance of the 'stompers' in their runners and ‘bomb squad’ in their red pointe shoes. Once more, Azoury and Wong (as 'stompers' on the Wednesday night performance) completely inhabited their roles with such joyful drive. And in the darkened void, Natasha Kusch, Ako Kondo, and Miwako Kubota (as the 'bomb squad'), as one friend described, materialised as Paul Klee’s Dance of the Red Skirts (1924). Nicola Curry’s open embrace saw her meet every head-waggle from left to right in a demanding work (to perform) that brings together quick reflections of boxing, tap, and yoga[viii]. Brett Simon, Callum Linnane, and Richard House dug into the stage’s foundations, but really to single out the few belies the brilliant strength of all six casts I saw perform on both nights I attended.

Layered, repeated and varied movement, chased by Philip Glass’ persistently melodic Dances I through IX, In the Upper Room typifies Tharp’s belief that dance allows for thoughts (and emotion) in movement. With a score that "hints at things, but .... Leave[s] a lot of space for the dance to happen.... [allowing] the dancers [to] complete it, fill it in,"[ix] I defy anyone to wish that this performance would end. But then it doesn't, does it, for I've discovered the source of perpetual motion and its euphoric energy is down right infectious.

*cue choral singers (Dance IX)*

Notes:
[i] Notes for Symphony in Three Movements, The George Balanchine Trust.
[ii] 'Ty King-Wall on Symphony in Three Movements', Behind Ballet, 3^rd September, 2015.
[iii] Jane Albert, 'The Big Bang', The Australian Ballet 20:21 programme, p. 9.
[iv] Where the first movement was intended for a documentary on China, and the third movement was created in response to newsreel footage of German soldiers, the lyrical second movement was originally composed for Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette, though a full film score was never completed.
[v] Kate Scott, ‘Permanent Acceleration’, The Australian Ballet 20:21 programme, p. 23.
[vi] Tim Harbour’s 'Filigree and Shadow: First Glimpse', The Australian Ballet YouTube.
[vii] Tim Harbour as quoted by Rose Mulready, ‘The Heart of the Storm’, The Australian Ballet 20:21 programme, p. 13.
[viii] Nicola Curry, 'My life as a stomper', Behind Ballet, 26^th August, 2015.
[ix] Philip Glass, quoted in the synopsis of Twyla Tharp’s In the Upper Room.

Pressed Wings.

{At @museumvictoria, where Albertus Seba's collection momentarily appears to spill off the page as a tangle of cords and Harriet Scott's venomous Brown-banded snake (Hoplocephalus Curtus) performs the Dance of the Corkscrew on the page.}

Research for Pressed Wings, a collaborative artists’ book of Australian avialae, with lepidosauria, lepidoptera and marsupialia sightings, is underway, sparked in no small part by yesterday's appointment at the Melbourne Museum to see an assortment of delicate owls, Gould's velveteen bilbies and round-rumped, rust-hued marsupials, and the putrid and lurid, green-toed possums stretched splendid and proud across the pages of Seba.

Though it will be a little while before we've fruit to show for what we saw (I mean, sowed) and later intend (to harvest), I can tell you that this new work will brim with Australian birds of great beaked and taloned variety, alongside the occasional reptile, insect and marsupial. One part homage to Gould, Cotton, Dampier, the Scott sisters and their ilk, to one part play (with the scientific facts), we hope to highlight those marvellous, awe-inspiring souls as perhaps being not so very different from ourselves. (The shelter we seek, the lives we lead, the sustenance we need, the patterns we form, the knowledge we hold: are not we all more similar than not?)

The first natural history book printed in Australia by John Lewin; John Gould's ornithological accounts alongside Elizabeth Gould’s illustrations; the sketches of John Cotton (specific to the Port Phillip district); the hand-coloured lithograph plates of Sylvester Diggles; the chromolithograph plates of Gracius Broinowski; the hand-coloured plates of Gregory Mathews: ornithological illustrations! You beauties! You curious natural productions! Alf Malherbe and your incredible Woodpecker compositions (Monographie des picidées, 1861–62). Perhaps awe is too short a word after all.And were that I could draw fine antenna so. Harriet and Helena Scott, with your Australian Lepidosauria, Lepidoptera, and Marsupialia, we've not forgotten you either. Louise, the challenge for you to accept.

As with all plans for a new work and our own proven working pattern, at some point we anticipate that the narrative trail will inform the direction of the illustrational expedition and visa-versa. The length of the work is undecided. But it has wings! As the project takes shape, we may decide to include more than one species on the page. We may include extinct species, and we may include now-threatened species (in light of habitat loss and changing conditions) as we become our own library-bound, head-spinning, amateur twitchers. Pencils and scissors at the ready!

Melbourne Museum, you made us a sponge. And all shaped by what we saw first-hand yesterday. Thank-you.




























{Thank-you @museumvictoria for showing us your tiny birds with 'shoulders' like coral (Histoire naturelle des Oiseaux-Mouches by René Primevère Lesson); the lurid splendour of The Birds of Australia, comprising three hundred full-page illustrations, with a descriptive account of the life and characteristic habits of over seven hundred species, by Gracius J. Broinowski, volume III; Gould's Satin bower-birds (Ptilonorhynchus holosericeus), known for their "loud liquid call"; the noble Red Wallaroo (Osphranter antilopinus) of the Coburg Peninsula and other handsome delights. It was a magical thrill.}