Sydney Opera House, January 31. Death is ever-present in Hofesh Shechter’s deeply moving Grand Finale, and so is an unquenchable lust for life. The two conditions are irrevocably twinned. We are born and we die, of that much we can be certain. As anyone who has seen earlier Shechter works will know, the Israeli-born choreographer is…
Author: Deborah
Colossus, Stephanie Lake Company
Carriageworks, Sydney Festival, January 16 The short Sydney Festival season of Stephanie Lake’s Colossus has ended but the show is by no means over. Next month it will be seen at the Perth Festival and very likely beyond. Lake has said there are possible international engagements to come. Colossus premiered at the Melbourne Fringe in 2018…
Hansel & Gretel, Royal New Zealand Ballet
Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Auckland, December 5. It is no small thing to make a full-length narrative ballet that wins its place in a company’s repertoire. Many are attempted and many end up as red lines on a balance sheet unless sets and costumes can be sold or repurposed. Most happily, Loughlan Prior’s Hansel &…
New Breed, Sydney Dance Company
Carriageworks, Sydney, December 6 The mysteries of dance and dancemaking are great. What drives the need to watch this person closely and not that one? Why does a work speak to something deep within while another is superficially entertaining? How is it that one is engaged intellectually and emotionally with one piece of dance while…
The Nutcracker, The Australian Ballet
Sydney Opera House, November 30. The Australian Ballet doesn’t have an annual tradition of presenting The Nutcracker, although on present indications it could. The ballet doesn’t have as tight a grip on the public (or companies’ bottom lines) as it does in the United States but this year’s Nutcracker was pretty much sold out before…
Expressions Dance Company becomes Australian Dance Collective
Brisbane’s Expressions Dance Company has a new name to go with its new leadership. Amy Hollingsworth, who became artistic director of EDC at the beginning of 2019, announced at her 2020 season launch that the 35-year-old contemporary company will be known as Australian Dance Collective. Hollingsworth is the third artistic director in the company’s history,…
ALICE (in wonderland), West Australian Ballet
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, November 21. Septime Webre’s ALICE (in wonderland) was made in 2012 for Washington Ballet, where he was artistic director from 1999 to 2016, and shortly after was snapped up by a host of regional American ballet companies. Hong Kong Ballet, which Webre now leads, staged ALICE last year. Now West Australian…
Bespoke, Queensland Ballet
Brisbane Powerhouse, November 9. This year’s Bespoke triple bill could hardly be more diverse. It starts with neo-classicism and finishes with emotions, memories and personalities to the fore. In between the two is a work that insists dancers and audiences go well beyond their comfort zone and deliberately defies easy analysis. That work in the…
Matrix, Expressions Dance Company and Beijing Dance/LTDX
Works by Stephanie Lake and Ma Bo. Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, NSW, November 7. New works by Australia’s Stephanie Lake and China’s Ma Bo make up a double bill where similarities are much more obvious than differences. It’s not that the pieces look particularly alike (apart from an aspect of their endings) or have a…
Sylvia, The Australian Ballet
Sydney Opera House, November 8 The dash for bathrooms and bars was substantially less frantic than usual after the close of Act I of Stanton Welch’s Sylvia. Heads everywhere bowed over their synopsis sheets. What in the name of all the gods in Ancient Greece was going on? How does one show via ballet that Artemis…
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