Wubkje Kuindersma’s new echoes of VAN GOGH for West Australian Ballet looks wonderful. The artist’s work is everywhere in Tatyana van Walsum’s designs, almost overwhelmingly so. Intense colours flood the eye as sweeping brush strokes are projected on a wide curved wall, some of Vincent van Gogh’s most famous paintings are reproduced on a grand scale and art works are brought to life by dancers.

From time to time there are extracts from letters written by the artist, shown on small suspended screens that look like picture frames. “I put my heart and soul into my work and I have lost my mind in the process,” Vincent writes. 

In her program note, The Netherlands-based Kuindersma acknowledges the “emotion, energy and movement inside the paintings”, adding that “they are already like dance to me”. And this is possibly why echoes of VAN GOGH is less powerful as dance than it is as visual experience. The clue is in the first part of the title. The reason for being is the paintings. After that it’s all fleeting impressions; echoes that inevitably fade away. And the word echo implies repetition, something Kuindersma does too much of in her choreography. It dilutes the effect of Vincent’s tragedy.

“A great fire burns within me,” Vincent writes at one point. For all its good points, echoes of VAN GOGH falls short of such ignition in the theatre. It is more admirable than exciting. 

Kuindersma traces the arc of Vincent’s life story in scenes overlain with the artist’s increasing sense of anguish. In the first half of echoes of VAN GOGH we see Vincent (Ludovico Di Ubaldo) with his girlfriend and sometime model Sien (Polly Hilton) and his cousin Kee (Kiki Saito), whom he wanted to marry, although audience members unaware of who these women are would get only a general idea of the import. The artist’s fractious relationship with Gaugin (Oscar Valdés) raises the temperature in choreographic terms for a moment and then is gone. A scene in the second act shows Vincent among straitjacketed asylum inmates but falls short in being truly affecting. 

Kuindersma does make something very touching of the absolutely central bond between Vincent, his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo although the movement, particularly for Vincent, relies too greatly on outstretched arms and beseechingly wide-open chest. Nevertheless, Di Ubaldo, a corp de ballet member, was beautifully restrained – delicate, even – as Vincent on opening night in a role that could so easily have been bombastic. Juan Carlos Osma and Alexa Tuzil were the loving, protective Theo and Jo.

Other company members embodied characters from paintings – the evocation of The Potato Eaters is sumptuous – or more abstract ideas as in the striking Act II scene that puts some dancers in swirling sunflower-yellow skirts and others in crow-black garments and beaked headwear. 

A new score by Anthony Fiumara, a Dutch-Italian composer has many touches of brilliance. A keen sense of drama is evident in the orchestration as instrumental voices emerge vividly from the whole and subside. Fiumara’s use of brass and wind sections is particularly effective, as is the other-worldly sound of the celesta near the end, heard in a simple melody above the rest of the orchestra. 

The unease in Vincent’s mind is well conveyed by frequent use of staccato and presumably Fiumara also wants to unsettle with his many sudden interpolations of silence. Well, they do unsettle, but only in the sense that the audience is left not knowing whether to applaud or not (at the first performance it mostly did, sort of).

That apart the score is one that would repay another close hearing. The West Australian Symphony Orchestra did it great justice under the super-alert direction of WAB’s principal conductor Jessica Gethin. 

echoes of VAN GOGH runs at His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, until September 23.