Monument, The Four Temperaments, After the Rain pas de deux. The Australian Ballet, Canberra Theatre, May 23.

MANY a distinguished artist has come a cropper when asked to create something to order for a special occasion, whether they be a poet laureate, a painter or, in this case, a choreographer. Being handed weighty, worthy subject matter can have a limiting effect it seems. The work of Garry Stewart, the celebrated artistic director of Australian Dance Theatre, has never looked as tame or confined as it does in Monument.

Monument pays homage to Parliament House as part of the Centenary of Canberra festival (and marks the building’s 25^th anniversary). The idea isn’t as odd as it may at first sound. Choreographers are expert builders. Using dancers as material they make a piece of architecture that, despite its evanescence, exists moment by moment in three-dimensional form. The architecture, however, needs to be animated by some vital force. George Balanchine’s modernist masterpiece The Four Temperaments, which opened this Canberra-only program, is overflowing with spirit. Stewart’s building blocks, although expertly assembled, were beautiful but inert.

Nineteen dancers clad in anonymous, body-hugging white (costumes by Mary Moore) industriously came and went. Angled arms, hands and legs, super-fast supported pirouettes and rippled torsos evoked work, construction, lines, planes and space in a lofty, clean-hands kind of way. No sweaty singlets on this build!

For all its busyness, Monument’s energy level felt surprisingly low. This is partly, I think, because the dancers soon had to compete with projections of ever-more detailed and attention-grabbing 3D computer graphics of Parliament House, created by Paul Lawrence-Jennings. They were fascinating, to be sure, but increasingly over-powering. They gave the feeling of being in a high-end architect’s office where everything is done on computer and there’s no place for emotion.(Yes, I’m sure architects do have emotions, but they didn’t emerge in Monument.)

A set of mirrored actions given to two small groups of dancers gave a hint of parliamentary disputation but the human element was almost entirely missing from here, and elsewhere. When Andrew Killian held Lana Jones’s leg to her ear as she struck a perfect six o’clock position, one imagined we were seeing Parliament House’s flagpole – a highly specific thing rather than something allusive.

But surely the story of Parliament House is what it represents, not the nuts and bolts of how it was built? Or that it was built? Stewart knows this, of course, as his final, simple, eloquent image shows. Those last few seconds were worth more than any of the 25 minutes or so that went before. Until that moment the concept of democracy didn’t enter the picture, except to rear its head in a more metaphorical and sterile way: apart from several duos that gave Jones and Killian the attention, Monument put all its dancers pretty much on the same impersonal footing. Principal artist Daniel Gaudiello kept catching the eye because he is so charismatic but he was criminally underused.

Huey Benjamin’s electronic score for Monument is one I’d like to hear again. It was spacious, rhythmically alert and gave a good sense of the subject matter. But I suspect this is a work unlikely to have a life beyond the occasion for which it was created.

I couldn’t help thinking about two other dance works with building as their driving principle – Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness (2005) and Tanje Liedtke’s Construct (2007). Guerin’s piece took what seemed a terribly difficult subject – the fatal collapse of Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge – and made an eloquent statement about community and grief.

In my 2008 review of Construct for The Australian I wrote:

[Liedtke] took the idea of building and let loose all of the associated meanings. There is the physical reality of making things but also the building and breaking of relationships. A construct can be something material or philosophical. Building implies competence, practicality, strength and creativity. There is a need for balance, ingenuity, problem-solving, co-operation. A structure can be a home or a prison, it can stand or it can fall … you could go on and on, so rich is this apparently basic notion.

The Four Temperaments came to Canberra well-honed from its Sydney outing in the Vanguard program and was in excellent shape. In the way of Christian Dior’s New Look couture – both were launched in the mid-1940s – its sophistications and coolly intellectual approach are timeless. Set to Paul Hindemith’s bracing and endlessly intriguing score, the 4Ts puts frilly ballet to the sword in a series of sleek, dramatic responses to the music and to the ancient Greek humours (the piece isn’t without humour in the conventional sense, either). The cast included seven of the AB’s principal artists, with Kevin Jackson (Melancholic) and Adam Bull (Phlegmatic) both more deeply and satisfyingly immersed in their roles than on opening night in Sydney. But at the Canberra opening the highlight was Lucinda Dunn’s luxurious Sanguinic pas de deux with Ty King-Wall. Dunn’s dancing was full of juice as she filled every phrase fully, at the same time carving the small, fast movements of foot and lower leg with forensic precision. She is a wonder.

The Canberra Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Nicolette Fraillon, played nobly for the 4Ts given the Canberra Theatre’s less than glowing acoustic.

An aside: the AB originally planned to pair Monument with Harald Lander’s Etudes, but happily reconsidered. Apart from its being more sensible to program a piece already tuned up (the 4Ts) rather than spend time honing Etudes, the 4Ts is a far more stimulating work. And there was the bonus of needing another piece to fill out the evening.

The pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain (2008) is a favourite with ballet companies and audiences the world over. As with the 4Ts it has a rigorously stripped-back form but where Balanchine invites a cerebral response, Wheeldon’s piece is all emotion, albeit held chastely in check. The music, Arvo Part’s luminous Spiegel im Spiegel (The mirror in the mirror), is simultaneously transparent and mysterious as it flows up and down the scale, the violin melody floating above repeated triads on the piano. The serene legato of the music is a pillow on which the dancers float, their relationship one of endless, unrevealed possibilities.

Lana Jones’s undertow of erotic abandon was barely veiled while Adam Bull, looking more imposing by the day, partnered with superlative strength and ease. Ten minutes of bliss.

This is an extended version of a review that appeared in The Australian on May 27.